Robert Jones’s Interactive Maths

North Berwick High School is a medium-sized school, with 6 teachers in the maths department. East Lothian Council is a small authority with 6 high schools, and around 50 maths teachers.

Since beginning my secondment (one day per week) I’ve had the opportunity to visit each of the schools in East Lothian and spend time in the maths departments. As I’ve said elsewhere, these visits have been fascinating for me, and I’ve been struck by the professionalism and committment of the teachers I’ve visited. I’ve learnt from and been inspired by my encounters.

At the end of this year, my secondment will come to an end, and I will no longer have the opportunity to meet with colleagues - most maths teachers never have that opportunity.

It seems to me that by establishing an online community we can all, as maths teachers in East Lothian, benefit from enriching encounters with our colleagues. This will be good for everyone, but in particular it will be great for me! I really don’t want to lose contact with the great people I’ve met over the last few weeks. Face-to-face meetings are simply not feasible on a regular basis, but blogs will allow us to keep the conversations alive.

“But why blogs?” - I hear you say. “Why can’t we just email each other?”. There are many reasons, but for me the main one is that communication via blogs is open - anyone is free to join in, and everyone can see what everyone else is talking about.

The new Exc-el blogs are now up and running, thanks to David, so tomorrow I’m going to register every maths teacher in East Lothian as a contributor to a new blog for all maths teachers. My hope is that soon many maths teachers will set up their own blogs, but in the meantime they’ll be able to dip their toes in the water with this collaborative one.

Mathematical Visualisation toolkit - another function plotter, plus lots lots more

MERLOT - a great directory of maths elearning resources.

Ollie’s blog pointed me to this cool site

It could come in handy for little phrases you’d pupils to remember, like

In part 1, we set up the user database to store all your classes. Now it’s time to actually do some voting!

Labelling the devices

Your voting pads will have numbers 1 to 32 on them somewhere. Take the time to write these numbers on the top with indelible marker pen. Trust me, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Setting up a flipchart for voting with a class

• Open your flipchart
• Go to ACTIVote/session
• Click on “Named Mode”
• If the pupils in the list don’t match your class, click on “Users…” then select your class from the dialogue that appears

Classroom routines

Pupils will need to know which device is attached to their name. I would start by having the user database screen showing on the first lesson with ACTIVote. Ask pupils to take the device with the number beside their name, then to make a note of that number in their jotter/planner. In subsequent lessons, establish the routine that if the box is open at the front of the room, they take their device on the way in. This saves a bit of time.

At the end of the lesson, take the time to develop the good routine that the devices go back into the box in the right order, ready for the next class. If I can manage this level of organisation, anyone can!

Running ad-hoc votes the terror-free way

So, we’re finally ready to vote! Electronic voting systems allow every pupil to communicate directly with the teacher simultaneously and confidentially. That’s amazingly powerful, so we need to be careful not to mess it up!

• DON’T EVER DISPLAY RESULTS WITH PUPIL NAMES ON THE WHITEBOARD

If you need convincing of this, read my cautionary tale here.

When it comes to it, the process of running a vote is very simple:

• Take a fresh flipchart page (votes are stored on a one-per-page basis)
• Write up a question on the board
• Ask the class to work out the answer and write it down ( I find this works better than just giving them the choices from the start)
• Once they have answers, write up or reveal your multiple choices and click on the voting pad icon in your toolbar

You’ll now see a banner across the top of the screen with each pupil’s name on it. As the pupils vote, their names turn yellow.

Once everyone has voted, click again on the voting pad icon. If everyone has voted, you’ll be shown the summary screen. If not, you’ll be asked whether or not you want to give the slow turtles a chance to vote.

The summary screen is pretty self explanatory:

Option B is highlighted as correct here because I clicked on it - the system is not that clever! This screen and the right/wrong summary are the only screens you should show your class. Clicking on who answered what brings up the full vote results (different vote - no names here because I’m writing this at home on a machine that does not have my user database on it):

This “who answered what” screen is very useful - view it once you have frozen or switched the board to “no show”!

The picture above shows an example of a couple of pupils voting for F, when options A to D were only given. This will almost certainly happen in every class, but once they realise that you know who voted what, and that you will not allow them to take part in voting unless they take it seriously, they will soon stop.

Pre-prepared votes

Promethean have this excellent pair of flash animations showing how to use question master:

• Question Master Part 1
• Question Master Part 2

Formative Assessment with ACTIVote

This is the most important bit, so I’ll put it into a separate post…..

At my visit to Musselburgh Grammar this morning, I spoke to some of the maths department about using Activote. They were enthusiastic about the potential of the technology, but said something like “it looks easy as you stand there and explain it, but we’ll forget everything you’ve said by the time we next come to use it”.

So…. to provide a bit of backup, here’s a step by step guide to using Activote with your class.

The following assumes that the voting pads have been registered with your PC. If not, chase up IT!

Setting up the User Database

You’ll want your pupil names to be stored in the system, so that their names appear at the top of the screen when you run a vote. Here’s how….

In East Lothian, we have a problem - we don’t have write-access to the place on the C drive where the user database is stored! To get around this, we need to copy the default user database to somewhere that is writeable, then tell ACTIVStudio that we’ve done so:

• In ACTIVStudio, go to ACTIVote/user database. You should see this (click image to enlarge):

• Go to File/Save as and save the user database into subjects/maths/staff
• Go to Activote/Settings, and change the ACTIVote User Database to the file you just copied

Importing Pupils into the User Database

Before you can import pupils into your user database, you need to export them from whatever electronic record you currently use. This is relatively easy from either Excel or Filemaker:

• export the following columns to a “CSV” file: first name, surname, register class
• In ACTIVStudio, go back into ACTIVote/user database.
• Go to File/import and choose the CVS file that you just made. This dialogue will appear:

• By clicking on the red headings, you can tell ACTIVote which fields are which, then import

The newly imported pupils appear at the bottom of the left hand side scrolling window.

• Double click on folder to change them to teacher names
• Double click on sub folders to change them to class names
• Drag over the pupils and click on the arrow to move them into the classes

You now have a user database that all staff in the department can access.  Just make sure that everyone changes their ACTIVote settings to point to the new user database.

The importing section of what we just did is covered excellently here at PrometheanPlanet.

Coming in Part Two…..

• Setting up a flipchart to vote with a particular class
• Classroom routines
• Running adhoc votes (my favourite!) the terror-free way
• Creating pre-prepared votes
• Using ACTIVote for formative assessment (the whole point of the exercise!)

This afternoon I made it to Ross High School to visit Tracey and the rest of the department. As ever, I was made to feel very welcome, and was again struck by the skill and professionalism of my maths colleagues.

I chatted to Tracey about the November 3rd meeting of maths teachers at Ross, which is going to be an opportunity to share our experiences using the board in groups. I suggested that groups should post summaries onto a wiki as they went along. So we went ahead and set one up, which you can see
here.

Later I saw Tim Schmitz using Google Maps do introduce work on distances, and then at the end of his lesson playing Tetris ™ on his board with the class (lots of hands on for the pupils) - inspiring stuff! I also popped in to see my old mate Alan Cox for a few minutes, before a brief appearance at the DM.

My brief session at SETT went quite well I think. I spoke about how I’ve been using the Activote pads for formative assessment in my classroom, and gave out the voting pads for the audience to play with. Nothing particularly new about this, but I did emphasise a few points that have helped me to be successful:

• Keep it short and sweet - don’t put your pupils through a set of 20 votes in one go!
• Get their names in the system - pupils take the whole thing more seriously if they no that their votes are being recorded with their own names.
• Don’t EVER show the results with names! The whole point of electronic voting systems is that they avoid exposing the failings of pupils to their classmates.
• Have fun! These things are great fun to use, so don’t be too po-faced about it.

Before going to SETT I asked my S1 class what I should say about the boards and voting pads. They said:

• They make maths more fun, and you learn better when you are having fun
• Some people wouldn’t want to come up and write on an old whiteboard but everyone wants to write on the new boards
• They are good because they let shy people answer questions without being embarassed
• Some people don’t like to ask for help, but with the votes the teacher can find out who needs help

I was flabbergasted by these replies. Go S1!

Tomorrow I’ll be heading off to SETT. I am doing a 30 minute slot in the Education Village Learning Zone B from 15:45, so please take a wander in my direction (if you haven’t already disappeared to check into you hotel by then!). It’s going to be a very “hands on” session, so come along if you fancy giving the whiteboard or the voting pads a shot without being hassled by an annoying salesman in a cheap suit.

As usual, I’ll also be giving out free Open Source CDs. This year, I’ll be giving out a “live CD” distribution of
Edubuntu. You can put this into any Intel/AMD PC or laptop, boot up and get a glimpse of the delights of Linux, without having to mess with your operating system or hard drive at all.

This afternoon I met with Ewan McIntosh then Karen Robertson. I’ve written a bit about my fascinating meeting with Ewan
here.

I chatted with Karen about what I’m going to be up to on Wednesdays this year. We checked up about the ActiVote installation issues that I’ve mentioned before - apparently most schools are still waiting to have the devices installed in all schools. Departments need to put in requests to the IT help desk to hurry this up!

I had the pleasure of visiting the Dunbar Grammar maths department this morning. I was made very welcome, and even given a doughnut!

The whole department had some non-contact time at the start of the day, so we spent my visit discussing the use of the boards, and sharing some tips and tricks. I was particularly keen to show the department how to use ActiVote, so we opened up the case and gave them a whirl. I hope that my demo has given them the confidence to go ahead and use them with classes - although they are apparently only set up for use in one room! Unbelievable!

Thanks to Alice (at least I think it was Alice !) for pointing out to me a better way to draw angles - I had been doing it with 2 lines, whereas Alice pointed out that I could draw it freehand then use the shape recognition tool to straighten it up - much nicer!

I also passed on a CD of
Teachers’ TV maths videos that Paul Goodall had kindly given to me when I was in PL last week.

This afternoon I’m off to Haddington to meet with Ewan McIntosh then Karen Robertson.