TWO TECHNOLOGY-ENTHUSIASTIC TEACHERS AND TWO VERY DIFFERENT LESSONS

Valeria and Emilia are secondary-school teachers with more than 30 years of teaching experience. Both were enthusiastic about joining our project FlipMath (Andrà, Brunetto & Kontorovich, 2017), which explored the affordances of integrating instructional video clips in school mathematics instruction. The clips were developed as part of the Pre-Calculus Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)–the first Italian MOOC by the Politecnico di Milano [1] in 2014. A typical video clip lasts for two-three minutes, and shows a Presenter who explains the concepts that are central to a mathematical topic, reviews their key properties, and demonstrates characteristic procedures. Our interest in mathematical video clips draws on Niess and Walker (2010), who argue that watching appropriate videos can develop students’ visualization skills, when analyzing the information that clips present provides opportunities for reasoning and communication. Recent pandemic events raise a new wave of interest in transformational spaces that digital technology can open in mathematics education, and specifically with respect to teachers ‘borrowing’ already existing online resources and using them in their teaching.