Matthias Ratering has already held several teacher trainings in South Tyrol on the use of MathCityMap and MCM@home. In this interview, he presents his trail to the MCM@home webinar and explains to us what potential he sees in our Digital Classroom feature.
What is your webinar about? How are you using MathCityMap?
Teacher training is one of my areas of work. For that I organized a webinar for teachers to learn about MCM and test the possibility of using it in distance learning. Normally, of course, I prefer to use it outdoors. However, MCM’s digital classroom offers a delightful alternative for distance learning, but not only.
Note: The trail to the webinar can be found here.
Describe one of your assignments. How can it be solved? What can learners (or webinar participants) learn in the process?
The task “Fasching” is about a father who wants to dress up and has several hats and ties to choose from. The children are asked to think about how many possible combinations there are. It is not necessary that the children have studied combinatorics in class. A discovery approach to this subject area is possible.
How can MathCityMap be used for distance learning (MCM@home)? What opportunities and limitations do you see?
The digital classroom is a very practical tool. This tool allows me to have a better overview of each student, who is working on what or who has already done what. In addition, it is often useful because you can communicate with the children in chat and thus support them. The digital classroom also helps me get additional feedback on my students after they have completed the questions.
Any other comments about MCM?
MCM is a tool that is constantly evolving and has a community that is always growing. As such, it would be nice to see more teachers from other subjects join in the future to enrich the design of trails. I believe that there is still a lot of potential here and that great interdisciplinary projects can be realized.
