ShowMe!

I have found a new app that I love using with my students! The app is called ShowMe. It is a free interactive white board that can be used for practically anything. The app allows you to record voice-overs and share them with anyone online. ShowMe allows you to drop images onto the whiteboard, easily switch between drawing and erasing, while also allowing you to pause and play easily. You can also make your videos as long or as short as you please and then share them with whoever you want. ShowMe is perfect for implementing a flipped classroom! It makes it easy to explain a wide variety of topics beyond just educational purposes.

We have been working extremely hard in math these past few weeks with the commutative, distributive, and associative properties. The students have been doing a great deal of activities with the three properties and have seemed to become very comfortable with them. We have been using multiplication with these properties.

I decided to use the ShowMe app as a form of formative assessment. I had each student come to my table one at a time and they would show me each of the three properties. I called a student to the back table and tell them to show me the associative property and give them a problem. I would start the recording and they would start solving the problem. I then had them erase the first problem and then told them to show me the commutative property and gave them a different problem. They then erased that problem and then showed me the distributive property with another problem. All of this was recorded and throughout I would ask students why they were doing certain

steps in order to gauge whether or not they understood WHY they were doing certain things. The conversation I had with each student and them working through each problem was recorded. I was able to stop the recording after each student and save it as the students name. I created a new file for each student.

Once I went through all of the students, I was able to go through all of the videos again and see how well the students understand all three properties. I can see exactly the steps they are taking and pause and rewind the videos as much as I please. I made sure I was taking notes about certain aspects that overall students may not have understood. I also made notes for specific students and what parts I need to still work on with them. The ShowMe app made the formative

assessment aspect extremely easy and the students actually loved coming to the back table and showing and explaining what they know!