Tag Archives: teaching

SSAT National Conference 2010 #NC10 – Initial Thoughts

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The SSAT National Conference took place last week at the ICC in Birmingham (a venue rightly compared to Escher’s Relativity!).  I was fortunate to be able to attend as a punter on the Wednesday and as a presenter on the Thursday as we launched the SSAT National Digital Leaders programme!

The theme of the conference was ‘Excellence for All’, and I have to say that the SSAT delivered , each aspect of the conference itself was excellent.

Wednesday started for me with Dylan Wiliam extolling the importance of assessment being the key to good teaching.  He was as inspiring a speaker as ever, as those of you who watched his recent TV program would know.  In particular I was impressed with Dylan’s ability to demonstrate his techniques within a ‘classroom’ of 400 educators, and also his incredible use of research evidence to support his teachings.

Wednesday Keynotes came from David Hemery, former 400m Hurdles Gold medal winning Olympian, he was telling his story and promoting www.21stcenturylegacy.com , part of London 2012′s legacy programme for schools.  He was followed by Sugata Mitra, telling his engaging tale of children teaching themselves using the Internet, from his hole-in-the-wall Mumbai slums experiment to his recent work in Gateshead.  This was an engaging tale that at first seemed to question the need for teachers at all!  As with all the speakers, more to follow in a future blog-post.  I would add that I was fortunate enough to chat to Sugata over coffee following his talk, a charming man. Continue reading →

Air Sketch – iPad to Projector – Wirelessly

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I’ve been trying to use my iPad in the classroom as much as possible, as a device for use in schools it is close to being perfect.  One of the drawbacks has been working out how to get what’s on the iPad to be projected onto my classroom wall.  You can connect it with the iPad VGA connector to a computer and project that way, but only a handful of apps support this.  This can apparently be expanded somewhat by jail-breaking , but I don’t really want to go there.

Then last week Wes Frier alerted me to an App called Air Sketch.  Air Sketch is a fairly simple drawing application with a killer feature, it will broadcast whatever is on the screen across your network to a webpage.  If you open that webpage in a HTML 5 browser from any machine attached to the same network you will see the iPad screen.  Any updates made on the iPad appear almost instantly on your PC or Mac.  Air Sketch was £1.79 but there is also a free option to try.

Continue reading →

Facebook Groups in School?

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Facebook recently updated their Groups feature.  Allowing finer control over groups which you set up, who can join, who can post, who can share etc..   Their are also improvements to how you are notified about group updates and a new feature called ‘docs’ that provides a Google Docs-esque shared notepad / document. Group chat is also built in allowing you to talk to everyone in that group at once. For a demonstration head over to Mashable or watch this video:

So, the million dollar question… Could this be used in education? Could it be part of a VLEesque home-school link? Continue reading →

Google Love Stories

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Google released their Parisian Love Story advert for the Superbowl earlier in the year – watch it, it’s ever so clever:

You can now make you own stories with 7 simple search terms.  It couldn’t be easier, you just type in up to 7 search terms and then choose whether the video will show it as a normal search, image search, map search etc.  Try it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories

I knocked one up very quickly – took about 5 minutes, you’ll have to excuse the cheese factor of it!

Could be a great tool for pupils telling stories new or old, explaining topics, making revision tips, any other suggestions?

Enjoy :)

No More Year Zero

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I was surprised and honoured to receive an email on Friday inviting me to the House of Commons for the Progressive Education Network Spring Reception this Monday afternoon.

I’m bitterly disappointed that the short notice means I will not be able to attend. :(

I came across the PEN via a tweet last month.  Chaired by Mike Gibbons and supported by The Co-operative Group the PEN’s aims are:

Progressive Education Network aims to engage with and challenge policy makers of every political hue by bringing the voice of experience and the wisdom of leading education professionals and school leaders to the debate. How do we best build on what’s working now to develop the education system that maximises the opportunities for the success of every child? Continue reading →

Twitter in the classroom rocks!

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Following yesterday’s use of Twitter in the classroom, I was walking to Period 5 (same class as yesterday) after lunch, when inspiration struck.  I remembered this post from @tombarrett .

Go and read it.

Go on!

I threw my lesson plan out of the window and did exactly what Tom did, here are the replies: (click through for them all)

This caused great excitement and interest in the topic, and really helped us look in to the language and mathematics of describing chance.

This class have really been inspired with the idea of my network, I had to stop them spending the rest of the lesson bombarding you all with further questions!  Bringing global connections into the classroom is a real attention grabber, and like it or not we are entertainers!

Nothing more to say – thanks Tom –  a great idea, and thanks to everyone who contributed to the lesson.

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cre8ate maths

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Cre8ate maths is a fantastic set of rich mathematical activities developed by the Centre for Science Education (CSE) with the mathematics lead from the Mathematics Education Centre (MEC), of Sheffield Hallam University.  They have been created to support schools in Yorkshire & Humberside, and are focussed on the 12 priority industry sectors of the area.  Activities are based around the chemical industry, food production, childcare and many others.

Continue reading →

Sharing Resources

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Like most teachers I have collected masses of resources over the years and created masses more.  Lots of my resources which I believe to be free of copyright are stored online and catalogued with the excellent www.delicious.com.

As I’m sure most readers are aware Delicious.com is a great social bookmarking website.  It’s a place to save all of your bookmarks online, so that they are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection.  If you’re new to Delicious then this Common Craft video sums it up best:

[youtube x66lV7GOcNU]

I have tagged numerous web based resources along with the specific urls of lots of Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Activstudio files.  The files are all stored on the excellent www.getdropbox.com.

Dropbox gives you 2Gb of free online storage space.  Dropbox works best when you install the client on your computer (Windows/Mac/Linux compatible).  The installer creates a ‘My Dropbox’ folder on your computer.  Anything that you store in this folder is automatically replicated on the Web and on any other machine you install Dropbox on.  This makes it great for synchronising files between different machines.

I have stored all of the resources that I want to share in the ‘Public’ Dropbox folder, this one is viewable by all.

To catalogue a file in Delicious, go to the file, click ‘Copy Public url’ and paste this into a new bookmark on Delicious.

Dropbox Copy url

Dropbox Copy url

Delicious.com save new bookmark

Delicious.com save new bookmark

This bookmark is then tagged with as many descriptive words as possible.

These bookmarks include numerous pdf files from the National Strategies site which I have cut up into manageable parts.  I hope that the National Strategies are happy with this educational use of their, at times, excellent resources.  If any person feels I am sharing material to which they own copyright, or who would like full credit given, please contact me and I will amend it to your wishes immediately.

I have included the tag msow in all of my bookmarks.  I did this as I wanted to be able to differentiate these as bookmarks for teaching purposes (msow originally stood for ‘maths scheme of work’ as there are Delicious links at the bottom of each page of my online scheme of work).

If there are other Maths teachers out there with existing Delicious accounts can I suggest we all agree on a  common tag such as this?  It would make searching for resources more focussed.  A search for ‘Data‘ brings up too many links unsuitable for teaching, but one for ‘Data+msow‘ would just bring up ours.

So if you’d like to join my network, follow the link below.  If you’d like to follow the idea of a common tag for Maths teaching resources then please leave a comment.

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MyMaths.co.uk – A Review

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I have introduced a fantastic resource into both of my recent schools over the last 2 years. It continues to impress me to this day and it’s about time I wrote a glowing review of it!

MyMaths.co.uk has been around for a couple of years now and continues to grow. When I originally bought it for my previous school it consisted of a series of excellent lessons with interactive elements for use on the IWB or a pupil’s individual computer.

Sample lesson:

MM Lesson

There are also a wealth of excellent games focussing on all manner of mathematical skills.  These are tremendously popular with pupils and work brilliantly on IWBs.  A particular highlight of these are the leaderboards, showing the highest score of the day and of all time for all users.  It’s a great incentive trying to beat other schools!

Over the last year online homeworks have been introduced.  Each pupil is given an individual login so that their progress can be tracked.  All of your class and pupil details can be uploaded with a simple csv file.  This gives you the ability to set whole classes homework tasks and to monitor their progress online – no marking required!  These combine with the excellent ‘Booster Packs’ designed to move pupils on to KS3 Levels 4 and 6, and GCSE levels C, B & A*.

The Management Console where you can assign tasks etc:

Pupil Feedback:

Overall MyMaths is a comprehensive suite of lessons, games, homeworks and other tools that covers the entire UK National Curriculum for Maths.  The resources are well written and of a much higher standard than alternatives such as SAM Learning, it is also much easier to navigate than many of its competitors.  Our pupils now complete more homework than they used to and have been spotted playing on the games in spare time during other subjects!  A considerable number of pupils come back to the department during their lunchtimes to work through the Boosters.  I must add that this includes a number of pupils who were not greatly engaged with Maths previously and who are now excelling.

At a cost of £400 per year, MyMaths represents excellent value for money.  I am expecting to get much more use out of it now that I have taken delivery of 6 eeePCs for my classroom.  Initial tests show that the site scales well to the size of the screen and I expect pupils will use it in the majority of my lessons.

So a gushing review, but one that is deserved, well done to the team behind it and long may the improvements keep coming.