Making students' mathematical explanations accessible to teachers through the use of digital recorders and iPads

Analyzing students' mathematical explanations can be a powerful tool to enhance teachers' practice, but collecting these explanations can be cumbersome. Here, we describe our quest to find effective tools to make explanations accessible to elementary (K-6th) teachers. First, we describe how digital audio recordings enabled teachers to focus on the processes students used to solve problems and helped teachers to see patterns of development in students' thinking as well as to identify the prevalence of some misconceptions. In addition, we show how considering explanations from various classrooms provided an avenue for teachers to share their teaching practices. Second, we discuss a new tool that provides even better records of students' processing beyond the information gained from the digital recorders. We provide some preliminary data of our use of the ShowMe® screencast application on the Apple® iPad with students to illustrate the potential of this tool for teacher professional development.

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