At Braunton School this year we have been developing the use of video podcasts in our mathematics lessons. We intended to produce mathematics podcasts and make them available to students on our website. As a mathematics specialist school we already had an outreach programme with our feeder primaries. Our intention was to strengthen this link through this project, extending the transfer of resources to KS2 and smoothing the transition into KS3.

We have arranged a series of gifted and talented events, hosted at our school, where each feeder school sends some pupils. We then put these pupils together working in groups to produce podcasts, which they can then use in their primary classroom to teach their classmates. The first of these was successful in terms of quality of end product and feedback from the pupils. We were though disappointed by the uptake of the resources by the primary teachers. They did not want to give up a portion of their lesson to feedback to their pupils the work of the G&T children. To improve the effectiveness of the upcoming event we will better ‘sell’ the idea to our primary teachers and detail how simple the process should be. Without this, we fear the full benefit of this aspect of our scheme will be lost.

To gauge the relative success of the project we undertook a survey of pupils’ attitudes to mathematics. This will be repeated at its summation and hopefully show an improvement in pupils positivity to learning mathematics and their enjoyment of the subject. When producing and using the videos in school with our own classes we see great engagement and enthusiasm from the pupils. No child is happy producing a poor video and then showing it to their peers. Pupils show eagerness to get involved and produce something impressive and clever. By seeing other year groups tackle a topic successfully and enjoy what they are doing inject a real positivity at the start of what might be a generally daunting topic.

Linking different year groups and ability ranges is a great benefit of this tool and we feel we are now able to produce videos that fit our needs well. At the start of the project, our videos were pretty dull and scratchy. Pupils were given a broad brief and save the odd exception, most videos were not up to scratch. By giving pupils examples and frameworks to think about and apply, we have greatly improved the quality and usefulness of the videos.

Learning how to fit the video making /viewing process into a successful lesson has been our steepest learning curve. Now, with their experience of video making, pupils are now much more able to produce videos with less input from us. This tells us they are improving their teamwork skills. As a school we are developing the use of Personal Learning Thinking Skills (PLTS) across the curriculum and making this explicit in our lessons. Podcast lessons meet all of these;Team workers, Reflective Learners, Self Managers, Effective Participators, Creative thinkers, Independent Enquirers.

David Howells

Braunton School and Community College

David Howells

We are looking to enrich Maths at KS2 through the use of video and interactive learning materials. These resources will be produced by our students and accessible 24hrs a day through our Moodle VLE.

One aim is to link the resources to real world applications of Maths to which the children can relate. We are completing an attitudinal survey at the start of the project and at the end to see if we have improved attitudes towards studying maths.

We are also looking to raise Maths achievement at KS2 through improved partnership and positive attitudes.

The learning resources will also be made available to partner secondary schools as useful intervention materials.