East Lothian Maths

Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill in the questionnaires. Here are the updated results after the late arrival of another set of responses:

Additional comments were:

“I no longer hate my board, but I still haven’t learned to love it.”

“Provide ACTIVote and slate for each classroom”

“What about the ‘East Lothian Event’ promised by Promethean?”

“Other depts now want iwbs”

“My projector broke and the after sales service was excellent.”

“As a department, we are thinking and reflecting more about our teaching.”

“Although I enjoy using the iwb, every lesson does take much longer to prepare. I do find myself more organised for my lessons, but this is perhaps to the detriment of my evenings and weekends.”

“We have had issues getting IT to install the slate and we are still having some issues with this.”

“ACTIVote pads are fantastic”

” [I would like] more East Lothian courses according to ability of teacher”

“I have enjoyed using ACTIVote with S2 Access 3 class. Can see use for this to do pupil evaluations of courses”

“Many of the pens are inconsistent in terms of the iwbs they work with - many pens do not work at all”

“Staff need to be given more spare time to familiarise with software and more opportunities to share and discuss resources.”

Most of what’s in this post was created during the recording of the screencast below. You can find more details of the equation syntax here.

View the screencast

Simon Smith ran this session on Friday.  He has kindly allowed me to post the presentation here.Whiteboards for beginners

Thanks to David, we now have the plugins installed to put graphs and equations into our posts and comments.

Go to plugins and activate mathsfilter and mimetex plugins, then you’ll find that typing [ graph ]y=1/x[ / graph] without any spaces produces:

and that typing [ tex ] m=\frac{y _2-y _1}{x _2-x _1}[ /tex] without the spaces in the square brackets produces:

The graphing one is pretty obvious - to see examples of the LaTeX codes you can use, visit equationsheet.com which gives you the LaTeX code for loads of cool equations like:

Across East Lothian something interesting is happening. Pupils are volunteering to spend time at home writing blog posts about what they learnt in maths, and these posts are receiving global attention. Darren Kuropatwa is one of the guys that dreamt up the whole scribe post idea as far as I can tell, so who better than him to explain what it means and why it’s worth doing:

http://adifference.blogspot.com/2006/11/distributed-teaching-and-learning_21.html

We now have several maths class blogs in East Lothian:

http://edubuzz.org/blogs/s3scribeposts

http://edubuzz.org/blogs/cstebbing

http://edubuzz.org/blogs/pls5maths

http://edubuzz.org/blogs/nbhs3×1

Some of these are scribe post blogs, and some are being used for homework and discussion. Take a look, then email me if you’d like to try something similar with one of your classes. David Gilmour and I can help you to set one up - ask Paul Goodall how painless it was.

Inevitably some of these blogs will flourish and some will wither away, but that’s no reason not to give it a bash

This flipchart contains a range of different pages for use in traffic-lighting type votes.

Use these pages to involve the children in assessment of their learning. There are a range of different visual tools for use with or without Activote pods.

Some of these images have been sourced from other shared resources such as the ‘Southampton Visionary Science Project’.

AifL Tools Flipchart

This blog is a collaborative production, produced by all the maths teachers in East Lothian.  It’s a place for us to share good practice and resources, and to talk to each other.  Already several maths teachers in East Lothian have their own blogs - there is a feed of all the posts from these blogs in the left sidebar.