Robert Jones\’s Interactive Maths

I went in to see the maths department at Knox today.  It was interesting to see how confidence has grown in the use of the whiteboards, and gratifying to be able to answer some questions about the use of the boards.

Rotation seems to lend itself particularly well to whiteboard work, based on what I saw today! Top technical questions concerned layering and snapping to grid.
Stephen Wren and I tried out the ACTIVote system with his class.  Both he and they seemed impressed, and I’ve agreed to go back to see Stephen and spend some more time working with him on ACTIVote.

I came across this today - the best high school level stats site I’ve seen:

http://exploringdata.cqu.edu.au/

The word on the street is that multiple choice is coming back for higher. With this in mind, I’ve scanned 40 old (I mean very old) higher questions and put them into a flipchart as ACTIVote questions, with the right answer stored for each one. This could definitely be improved, but as a resource to cut-and-paste from I hope it will prove useful.

Higher Multiple Choice Questions Flipchart

It isn’t often that you come across a blog entitled “the beauty of mathematics” so I thought I’d share it

Today I visited North Berwick High School. I had a great day, but only managed to visit half the department. This was partly because I got caught up in Ski trip admin first thing - getting caught up in stuff is always a risk when you are out of classes in your own school. A cheque for over £60,000 will be going off to Interski tomorrow!

Craig, Lorraine and I had an interesting the chat about the difference between those uses of the whiteboards which merely entertain our pupils and those which really enhance their learning. Craig gave a good example of the latter (one for which neither of us claim the credit!):

Take a problem that is solved with a standard technique, say the Cosine Rule for example, and write up the solution in pieces on a flipchart. Then take the pieces and jumble them up in a box below the problem. The task for pupils is to drag the pieces out of the box to reassemble a correct solution to the problem.

Lorraine was a bit sceptical that she would be able to produce such a resource, but after a couple of minutes of guidance from me she shooed me away and emerged 10 minutes later with the completed flipchart.

I also had a chat with Donald before lunch about what constitutes effective use of the board. We agreed that as time goes by we are thinking less about “cool tricks” on the whiteboards, and more about what you might call “effective learning episodes.” To illustrate how effective doesn’t always mean “all singing all dancing” Donald showed me a diagram he had on a flipchart page that looked something like this:

It doesn’t look much does it?  But Donald does something effective with it:  he points at an angle and asks a pupil to name it.  If they get it right, they guess the size of the angle then come up to the board and measure it (using the protractor tool).  If their guess was close enough, they get to point at an angle and ask someone else in the class to name it……..

Now this is pretty basic stuff, but very effective.
After lunch, I observed a lesson with Donald and his S3 top credit class.  I found this particularly interesting as I teach the top credit class in the other half of the year-group.  Donald used the board to start the lesson with a simple, effective activity that involved the pupils in coming up to the board and collectively completing a puzzle about highest common factors.  What particularly impressed me about Donald’s style was the extent to which he gave the class the freedom to explore possibilities, make mistakes and disagree with each other, then trusted them to reach the right solution through discussion.  He never said “yes, that’s right”, but by the end of the task most of the class had agreed that the solution on the board was correct.  None of this has anything to do with an interactive whiteboard really - the whiteboard simply allowed Donald to prepare this activity in advance in a way that would have been awkward with an old roller whiteboard.

This Friday, the maths teachers of East Lothian were guests of the Ross High School maths department. We were treated to a mouth-watering spread of home baking before we began the session - most appreciated, and I’d like to think that a precedent has been set!

John from Promethean kicked off the afternoon with a session on the use of ACTIVote - an electronic voting system that we have in each department. I learnt lots of about how to make up pre-prepared question sets - big thanks and good luck to John, who is returning next week to his native North-East of England.

I was slightly concerned that the emphasis was on pre-prepared questions. I wouldn’t want our teachers to think that one can’t use the ACTIVote pads unless one has spent a long time beforehand preparing questions. I very rarely prepare questions in advance, but use the voting pads regularly on an ad-hoc basis as a formative assessment tool.

We spent the next hour working in groups to share ideas for effective use of the boards. Everyone I spoke to found this session really useful. I suppose that the work I’m doing to promote the use of blogs amongst maths teachers is really an attempt to allow this kind of dialogue to be continuous, rather than just being limited to one or two afternoons per year. As Adrian from Musselburgh suggested, we could also meet up for a pint once a month! I must say that I like this idea a lot - you choose the date and venue for the first meeting Adrian

We had hoped to put notes about our discussions directly onto a wiki, but unfortunately Internet access was down! First time in months - just my luck - so we went for plan B and either wrote them up in Word or wrote them onto the flipcharts prepared by the Ross folk. All this stuff should be available on the East Lothian Maths blog shortly.

My wonderful S3 general maths class have begun blogging. Mhari volunteered to be scribe for yesterday’s lesson, and produced a great first post, on Prime Numbers. She has set the standard high! Her post does contain one little slip - I’m hoping that someone else in the class will spot it and mention it in a comment, as well as giving her some positive feedback on a great post.
Read it here

I popped into Dunbar this morning - and had the good fortune to walk into Wendy’s birthday party.

We discussed the use of blogs in education, and despite my confusing explanation Mags has decided to start a learning blog with one of her classes. Douggie also expressed interest in doing so. I’m delighted about this - I’m sure the pupils will really benefit from it.

On the topic of whiteboards, the Dunbar folk showed me a few new tricks, but I’m sworn to secrecy, as they are going to be revealing them at the in-service session on Friday afternoon. It should be a good session. They also showed me the bounceback package, which works really well on a whiteboard. I think we may have this across the authority - I shall explore this tomorrow.
I managed to help out with a couple of technical issues: using the maths tools and the camera, but as ever I received more good advice than I gave out.

During my demonstration of the exc-el blogging tools, we hit a glitch:  the system won’t allow the uploading of flipcharts!  I’ve figured out how to fix this, and David should have this sorted in a day or two.

I was trying to explain to my advanced higher class why F=>T and F=>F both come out true.  I came across this Web site, that explains it quite nicely in terms of a promise.

In reply to my last post, Robin Strain asked “Can you persuade me the advantages of blogging?” Great question Robin - I think it deserves a fresh post
6 months ago I would have asked exactly the same question. I am involved with an online community of educators and technologists who seek to embrace the opportunities that Open Source software offers education. The official website is Schoolforge but we communicate mainly through google discussion groups. These work well for us, and up until I came across Exc-el, I didn’t really see the point of blogging.

Before I start trying to explain why blogs are fit for purpose here, I should say that you have to blog yourself to really find out why blogging works - it’s a bit like dancing: it looks kind of stupid from the seats at the side, but once you’re on the dance floor it feels great!

I have been involved, over the last few years, in several attempts to establish on-line communities for teachers. None of them have worked, until now. The community that is developing now through blogs is an on-line community established by teachers. That’s why I think it will flourish, and the process of blogging is key to the sense of ownership that the participants have.

Once someone has gone to the effort of setting up a blog, and making it look the way they want (it is vital that bloggers can do this - the blog needs to feel like it is really theirs) they have already put in some effort. Now the world is looking. Once they have made a couple of posts, and people have started to comment on their posts (as will certainly happen to any teacher in East Lothian that starts blogging!), the newbie bloggers starts to feel that they have an audience - “hey - people are actually looking at this!”. Now they have a real incentive to keep their blog alive. If things go quiet, they know that it is because they didn’t write any new posts for while.

Compare this with a bulletin board. On a bulletin board, the contributors haven’t really invested anything. It’s not their bulletin board (unless they made it - that’s why there are often more posts from the administrator of the bulletin board than anyone else!). If things go quiet, as they always have done in the past on educational bulletin boards for Scottish teachers, it doesn’t feel like anyone in particular is responsible.

It’s great if a bulletin board supports a thriving community. I think that creating an educational blogosphere in Scotland stand a better chance of success.

The other great benefits of blogging are that tags are attached to posts, making it easy to find what you are looking for, and that RSS feeds can pull together relevant information from blogs into one place.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface here - oh yes - another big benefit is that blogging is great for pupils and we need teachers to blog if they are going to see the benefit of blogs for their pupils.

If anyone can think of more or better reasons for us to be using blogs to develop an on-line community, please let me know!