Using CENTURY videos and slides as a teaching tool

CENTURY is an AI-powered online learning platform that personalises learning and provides teachers with actionable insights to support their teaching. Taryn Davison, a former primary teacher now on our Customer Success team, leads training on how best to use the platform. Wanting to see how to better incorporate our data insights, she taught a CENTURY maths lesson weekly for half a term to a Year 4 class at St. John’s C of E Primary School, Abram. Part of Quest Academy Trust, St. John’s has been using CENTURY for the past six years. This blog series shares her findings.

Before my venture back into the classroom, I had thought that an easy way for teachers to use CENTURY would be to display the videos on the board in class. I’ve seen other teachers do this; I watched a fantastic lesson on Romeo and Juliet where students read a scene in class, the teacher played the video from that scene, and they discussed all the literary points the video raised and took notes. I’ve seen a Geography lesson on glacial landscapes where the teacher used the slides to show pictures, maps and diagrams of each feature, using them as the basis for her presentation. However, these were GCSE classes and replicating this with a year 4 class proved to be more difficult.

I would steer away from just projecting the CENTURY video in most cases, but sometimes in maths, showing the CENTURY video can be really helpful to teach concepts which are difficult to demonstrate in real life, for example ‘Decimal Equivalents (Tenths/Hundredths) [PM4.10]. Especially when the teacher is using the video as a tool to aid the teaching.

Decimal Equivalents

The issue with teaching decimal equivalents of tenths and hundredths is that it is an abstract concept. I’ve taught it before, giving students a fraction and getting them to find ‘their’ decimal. It’s a fun lesson but it doesn’t help students understand what they are matching up. 

CENTURY videos contain short animations which explain concepts you cannot accurately show by drawing on a whiteboard. So for this lesson I played sections of the video to complement what I was teaching: 

• What is a tenth represented as a diagram? I played a section of the video and then I moved onto the whiteboard to reinforce the concept. 
• How does a decimal translate onto a number line? We watched the animation and then I pulled out a counting stick to practise the concept. 
• Your Turns in the video are great activities for the students and we fact checked the equivalent decimals on the calculator.
• Because there was such a range of ability in the class, I asked the class as a whole to complete the questions from the nugget on their devices and I selected a group of students who I thought were ready to move onto word problems in this topic, again using the Your Turn in the video as an activity.

Takeaways for using videos and slides in class:

• Teacher subject knowledge/pedagogy: Watch the videos yourself before the lesson to see how the concept can be broken down (or to brush up on your subject knowledge). 
• Use the slides/videos as a tool: Make sure that you are adding to the tool – stop the video and discuss it. Let CENTURY show the concepts which are difficult to demonstrate in real life.
• Use Your Turns: Get students to complete these in pairs or independently as AfL throughout your lesson to aid your understanding of the students’ learning.
• Model with manipulatives: CENTURY provides a visual representation of concepts which the teacher can model (and the students can play) with concrete manipulatives to reinforce concepts.

Tune in next week to hear how Taryn measured progress using CENTURY Benchmarking Data. Click here to book a demo of CENTURY.