Home > Make your own mathcasts  > DLC Mathcasts Project   

The DLC (Digital Learning Commons) is a non-profit organization funded by the State of Washington OSPI and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Over the past 2 years the DLC funded the creation of mathcasts for 4th,  7th, and  10th grade.  Most of the latest set for 4th grade were created by a team in a special way as follows:

1. Angie Fassl and Amanda Boerboom, exemplary 4th grade teachers from Winnequah School (Monona Grove School District, Wisconsin, USA) solved problems using Livescribe Pulse Smartpens and shared them as pencasts privately with each other (for review) and with Tim Fahlberg using their Livescribe online accounts.  Most of the pencasts had both writing and voice explanations but some were only audio which tells you just how important voice explanations are to problem solutions (and yet when students typically do homework or take tests there is no voice explanation accompanying written work).  Examples of these will come soon.
2. Tim, who has never taught 4th grade, viewed each pencast, took a screen capture of what was written, transcribed Angie's and Amanda's voice explanations, and then tried to re-create, record, and produce problem solutions faithfully using SMART Notebook software, TechSmith Camtasia Studio, and a graphics tablet.  An example of a SMART Notebook will come soon.
3. Amanda, Angie, and Tim's Australian math colleague Graeme (see Graeme's site) then reviewed Tim's problem solutions which were re-done as needed until they were judged as acceptable.
4. Dr. Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska, Tim's math professor sister in Macedonia (see her popular GeoGebra and Scratch contributions), added metadata (alignment to Washington State's newest standards, keywords, etc) for all problems.
5. The set of mathcasts along with metadata was then forwarded to the Digital Learning Commons which has made them available publicly here: http://digitallearning.k12.wa.us/resources/teaching/mathcasts.php

   Special note: The set of collaborative mathcasts is #138 - #175  http://mathcasts.learningcommons.org/view/138  -  http://mathcasts.learningcommons.org/view/175

   Compare these to the non-collaborative set: #109 - #137: http://mathcasts.learningcommons.org/view/109   -   http://mathcasts.learningcommons.org/view/123

   Later this fall (2009) Tim will add a set of screencasts which more clearly tell the story of how the collaboration worked.