Carola Hobohm

During our ongoing research into the use of mathematics screencasts at university, we have seen an increased utilization of mobile technologies both for teaching and learning. The ubiquity of mobile devices has allowed students and lecturers to create, curate and view screencasts far more easily than ever before. Whilst creating screencasts with such ease is deemed beneficial, one needs to caution that the quality of screencasts and inherent accuracy remains central to learning and teaching. As a result, our research has led us to the development of a tool for teachers and students to evaluate their own and others' screencasts. This chapter describes a case study of the use of mobile devices and screencasting in mathematics teaching, combined with the utilization of the evaluative tool in developing pre-service teachers' understanding of mathematics and how to teach it. It concludes with future directions in using mobile technologies to assist mathematical understanding and pedagogical content knowledge.

This study is situated in a course designed for both on-campus and online pre-service and in-service teachers, where student-created mathscasts provide a way for university lecturers to assess students' quality of teaching, and understanding of mathematics. Teachers and pre-service teachers, in a university course with 90% online enrolment, were asked to create mathscasts to explain mathematics concepts at middle school level. This paper describes the process of developing and refining a tool for the creation and evaluation of quality student-produced mathscasts. The study then investigates the usefulness of the tool within the context of pedagogy and mathematical understanding. Despite an abundance of mathscasts already available on the web, there is merit in creating mathscasts, not only as a tool for teaching, but also as a means of learning by doing. The premise for creating student-produced mathscasts was to capture the creators' mathematical understanding and pedagogical approach to teaching a mathematical concept, which were then peer-assessed and graded. The analysis included surveys, practice mathscasts with peer- and self-reviews, and students' final assessed mathscasts. The results indicate that the use of the evaluative tool resulted in an improvement in quality of student-created mathscasts and critiques thereof. The paper concludes with a discussion on future directions of student-produced mathscasts.

Recorded lectures have become one of the most popular methods of delivery in a blended learning environment (Greenberg & Nilssen, 2009). While there are many advantages to using recorded lectures they are limited in their ability to capture the interactive atmosphere experienced by students in the face-to-face environment. This paper examines how the use of audience response systems (ARS) and digital inking, when incorporated into live lecture recordings, can be used to facilitate asynchronous interaction of recorded lectures in bioscience lectures for nursing students. Key findings show that the three most valuable improvements that ARS and digital ink made to face-to-face lectures and recorded lectures relate to the ability to see other students‟ responses, immediate feedback and reinforcing material covered in class. Students who used recorded lectures more frequently particularly valued the ability to pause recorded lectures to consider the questions and then view collective results with immediate feedback. Moreover, students who viewed recorded lectures more frequently performed equally well with those students who did not.

Tablet technology has been shown to support learner-centred mathematics education when this technology is available to both the lecturer and the students. However, cost is often the barrier to students' use of tablet PCs for their university studies. This article argues that more affordable netbook PCs with tablet capabilities can be viable alternatives to full-sized tablet PCs to enhance active and collaborative learning in mathematics and statistics. For a whole teaching semester, netbook tablet PCs were given to volunteer students from two different cohorts. Students were enrolled in nursing mathematics or introductory statistics in non-mathematics majors at an Australian university. The aims were to gauge the suitability of this technology and to identify what active and collaborative learning emerged in these first-year classes. While the netbook tablet PCs were actively promoted in their tutorials, of additional interest was students' use of the technology for any aspect of their studies both inside and outside the classroom. The outcome of this study was to inform a university decision to provide inexpensive tablet technology to larger cohorts of students. The results highlight different approaches required in the mathematics and statistics classes to achieve collaborative and active learning facilitated through the technology. Environmental variables such as the tutor, student, learning space, availability of other technologies and subject content had an impact on the nature of learning. While learner-centred education can be facilitated by inexpensive netbook tablet PCs, we caution that the savings may come at the expense of computing power.

It has been argued that self-assessment deepens student learning. This study examined that proposition through online assessment of an assignment in a first year course, with a large percentage (85%) of students enrolled in a distance mode. The aim of the study was to examine the effectiveness of self-assessment in student learning. One hundred and fifty-two students completed a self-assessment of their assignment using assessment guidelines, a marking rubric and model answers. The learning effectiveness of self-assessment was appraised through content analyses of student comments in the self-assessment, and in a survey. In this study, self-assessment of the assignment was found to be effective in enhancing student self-awareness and engaging students in metacognitive processes. Most survey respondents agreed that self-assessment helps students identify the strengths and the weaknesses of assignment answers and highlights areas where performance could be improved. Overall, self-assessment of the assignment was shown to be effective in positively influencing student learning in this learning environment.