As a former third grade teacher, I know that place value is a difficult concept for students to grasp. One thing I found effective with my class was to get them to teach each other. And if they could record their teaching as a video that could be watched by other students as needed, it became even more effective. Making educational videos has become very popular, especially with the Khan Academy and the rising popularity of the flipped classroom. So today I showed two third grade classes how to create educational videos about place value using Keynote. First the students came up with a six-digit number. Next they had to choose one of the thousands digits and identify its place value. They did the same thing with one of the ones digits. A cool feature of Keynote is the ability to make animations so I showed the students how to animate their numbers. Finally they recorded a voiceover explaining the place value of the digits. You can see a student sample by clicking here.
