FIZZ Algebra
Watch the FIZZ Algebra Music Video
February 14, 2011—As mathematics achievement takes the stage nationally, educational researchers are looking to find ways to teach curriculum while helping students attain academic success. At NC State University, one educational specialist has taken a form of presenting curriculum, FIZZ, and transformed teaching Algebra.
Dr. Lodge McCammon, a curriculum and contemporary media specialist at the Friday Institute for Education Innovation, brings 21st century tools into the classroom to teach standards-based lessons in innovative ways.
“It’s critical that we update our traditional teaching methods in order to deliver more engaging lessons to our students,” said McCammon. “FIZZ is powerful because it uses collaboration and active learning to generate excitement in the classroom.”
What exactly is a lesson of FIZZ Algebra? Well for the student, it’s not sitting in your desk being lectured to and then working alone to figure out the answers to a set list of algebra problems. It’s an up, out of your seat, collaboration using technology, music and publishing. These types of curriculum activities reach a diverse set of learners—particularly ones whose attention can’t be held by the typical classroom lecture.
“Teachers spend most of the class lecturing which doesn’t leave enough time for differentiated and interesting activities,” said Kathryn Gimbar, Eighth grade Algebra I teacher using FIZZ at Durant Road Middle School. “I use the FIZZ lecture strategy to film five to ten minute videos for each topic covered in Algebra 1 so that the students can watch them for homework. Now, I can spend my classroom time engaging students in new and exciting ways.”
Why not have this technology-rich generation of students watch concise lecture videos as homework? Each teacher’s series of FIZZ short lecture videos can be watched multiple times at home; freeing up classroom time for teachers to differentiate instruction using music, technology and online publishing.
Recently, FIZZ Algebra caught the attention of Time Warner News 14, Connect a Million Minds series. See the final video of the Centennial Campus Middle School’s Algebra 1 eighth graders as they demonstrate the understanding of systems of equations with the song, In Common.