[Taken from our original MediaWiki mathcast wiki]

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July 10, 2006: A French blogger (François Guité) posted a comment to Will Richardson's blog entry about mathcasts and linked to his blog entry here (in French).

The English translation below was created using FreeTranslation.com's service.

Please feel free to edit this machine translation.

(Later edited by François Guité)

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Mathcasts: a wiki of math screencasts

Learning sticks longer when one engages multiple senses. If only, from a teacher's perspective, to answer to the various learning styles. Visualization and kinesis, notably, are often neglected. Hence, the significance of Mathcasts, a wiki of screencasts that focus on math (Will Richardson: Mathcasts.org).. See this example made by a teacher and this other produced by a student.

There are many educational advantages to these screencasts, starting with students and parents being able to access the teacher's explanation and demonstration, online, as often as they wish. Learning would be greater still if students were encouraged to display their screencasts on a school blog, the various learning communities validating or correcting each other's work, all under the watchful eye of the teacher. Suddenly, one sets into motion the pedagogical interplay behind connectivism and guided social learning.

Although I don't know much about teaching math, it appears to me that screencasts integrate the three math competencies of the reformed Quebec curriculum, i.e. to communicate by using mathematical language, to reason using mathematical concepts and processes, and to solve a situational problem.

Finally, screencasts obviously develop advanced computer skills. By integrating multimedia features and the incentive to share, students stand at the forefront of information technology, developing a proper learning mindset in the process.

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Comparison of translations (machine and human):

Thanks to François Guité (the author of the blog post) the original machine translation was improved greatly to the post above. Below is a SnagIt screen capture showing the difference in the translations.  It was created using the "Compare selected versions" feature on the old Mathcasts wiki (a MediaWiki).  See how this was done below the image:

            

How this comparison was done:

1. Click on this link: http://www.mathcasts.org/index.php?title=Guitef%27s_Mathcast_blog_post&diff=2380&oldid=2375 or
2. Click the History tab above and
3. Select the two versions as shown below (#1 and #2) and then click the "Compare selected versions" button (#3)

Image created with TechSmith's SnagIt