Mr Marcos and his students at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California have developed a lovely set of screencasts to help teach maths. There is a choice of student or teacher created screencasts as well as videos with captions.

Teachers can use Mathtrain.TV in two ways. By using it in the classroom to help reinforce concepts taught (and for students to be able to revisit these topics at home) but by also having your own students create similar screencasts.

By creating these screencasts, students are not only demonstrating that they have learned the concepts behind the particular branch of mathematics, they are showing how they got to the answers. But perhaps more importantly, they are creating a product to share with others.

When creating their screencasts, they need to address:

• Audience. What age level? For students good at maths or those who need extra help?
• Script. They will need to write a script so that students viewing the screencasts find them easy to follow.
• Visibility of sums. Will the audience be able to view the sums easily?
• Layout. Will the audience be able to follow the working out?

They also need to learn how to use a tool such as the free JingProject to record their screencasts.

So students are learning lots of Web 2.0 skills, helping others  as well as reinforcing their own learning. What an excellent idea!