What does it take for trendy videos that are extremely popular with young and old? A cool hairstyle with blue hair, quick cuts or rap singing and youth language? Kai Schmidt from the Grafschaft Bentheim in Lower Saxony takes a squared sheet of paper, a ballpoint pen or a felt-tip pen and explains fractions, percentages or the pq formula. So he has this year in the “Top Creator of the Year” category Filmed in the top 3 of the YouTube charts – behind well-known names like Rezo and Hungriger Hugo. Schmidt alias Lehrerschmidt has a good 1.2 million subscribers on the video channel.
His career as a Youtube-Star started involuntarily, says the 42-year-old, who heads a secondary school in Uelsen on the German-Dutch border. About seven years ago he had a final mathematics class at a secondary school: “That was a great class. The problem was that a lot of the basic skills I wanted to use thematically were missing. ”So he came up with the idea of making this basic knowledge available in videos so that he could get to the actual topics in class.
Insider tip on Whatsapp
The first videos were on the school server. There was soon a lack of storage space. Students advised him to post them on Youtube. The videos should really only be seen by his students. “To my astonishment I saw that the number of clicks was far higher than the number of my students,” says the teacher. The young people had passed the links on via Whatsapp groups. At some point he had the idea to make the videos public immediately. “Nobody looks anyway,” says Schmidt and laughs.
In the meantime, not only are students looking, but also parents, grandparents – and teachers. In his videos, Schmidt proceeds in a very structured way, always explaining patiently, never agitated or hectic, calculating sample tasks, explaining possible solutions, drawing breaks with the set square, writing each digit in a box and underlining the end result twice.
“I have a certain sympathy for this simplicity,” says the Osnabrück professor for mathematics didactics, Alexander Salle. The twelve-year-old Mikael from Hanover explains that he is a big fan of Lehrerschmidt. “I think it’s so cool about him that he explains everything so nicely, explains everything so well and slowly.” The fact that Schmidt uses the same pens as the students is also well received, says Mikael. “He explains very slowly and doesn’t just write down an example. He always does it in a funny and nice way, speaks very clearly and just does it really well. “
Lack of flexibility
Learning videos like the one from Lehrerschmidt can be watched over and over again, says teaching expert Salle. “The format therefore has individualizing options.” The fact that the tasks correspond to those they know from school, right down to the down-to-earth representation with pen and set square, ensures familiarity among the students. And, very important: the videos convey “procedural knowledge”: if you want to add fractions or calculate percentage points, you have to master the steps and the tools – which is exactly what Lehrerschmidt practices.
As a didactician, he sees a weak point of such videos in the fact that when concentrating on pure arithmetic procedures, flexibility falls by the wayside to be able to apply the underlying mathematical structures and terms to other areas. It is important to have a tool like the one practiced in the videos. “But as a didactic specialist, I would like to have additional training in ideas and relevant terms for the respective operations,” says Salle.
Cooler than 7.50 a.m.
Kai Schmidt sees his videos as a tool to repeat things from math lessons. He is also happy to receive criticism, for example from colleagues. As Lehrerschmidt he does nothing better than all of his math teacher colleagues. That is a purely subjective perception of the students. “My video has the huge advantage that it is available when the student is intrinsically motivated to do maths now. And that’s just a lot cooler than at 7:50 am. “
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