Recently, I was asked for some suggestions for good websites to assist students with learning math concepts – both in and out of the classroom.  Math instruction is heavy on “show how to do”, and by the time students get to practice what they learned in the classroom (if they get to practice at all), they have forgotten what they saw.

Here are some sites that help students with demonstrations of math (and other related) concepts with video demos:

1 – Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org/ – Very helpful video demos of math concepts, especially as they relate to science, economics, and other fields.  Khan Academy video files are hosted on YouTube.  If your school or organization blocks YouTube, you won’t be able to use this site.  YouTube gives the added benefit of attempting to add closed captioning to videos that do not already provide it.

2 – Show Me: http://www.showme.com/ – “Crowdsourced” video demos of all sorts of academic subjects.  ShowMe’s are created using the free ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard app for the iPad.  Videos are not captioned unless the producer of the video has supplied captions.

3 – Teachertube: http://www.teachertube.com/ – YouTube-styled video hosting site.  Search for the concept you want to support (e.g., “dividing fractions“) and look through the results, which will range from simple videos of paper-and-pencil demos to professional educators showing off their rapping skills!  Videos are not captioned unless the producer of the video has supplied captions.

4 – Next Vista for Learning: http://www.nextvista.org/ – Created by Rushton Hurley, an educator in California.  NextVista has lots of videos, mostly student-created, on a wide variety of subjects.  Many of the videos have been submitted for contests run by the site, and many of them are excellent quality.  At the time of this writing, there are 186 videos in the Math category.

Use one, use them all!  Any support you can give to your students in having useful demos will help their understanding of important math concepts.  Need some “stretch goals” for your class?  How about challenging them to create a demo video that can be uploaded to one of the sites, or submitted to one of their frequent challenges/contests?