Robert Jones\’s Interactive Maths

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.