I can’t quite describe how elated I am!  Ignoring last years fiasco, these tests have narrowed the curriculum, the teaching opportunities and pupils enthusiasm for the subject for years.  The league tables that accompanied them often narrowed a school’s focus onto just the key Level 5 boundary pupils.

Can all of that really be gone?  Fingers crossed!

CC image from 713 Avenue on flickr

We have just beta released a new free maths games website which is starting to get quite a bit of traction in the UK. It’s free, has no ads, and allows kids to compete head to head but doesn’t allow them to communicate directly. It is really KS1 & 2 focused but we are getting lots of use from secondaries (or we were last week before half term).

We have just added a few new teacher features (class registration, reports etc) and if you have any ideas or queries drop me a line, or if you like it you could put in a link.

I have had a chance to look at the site this weekend and to test it with a low ability class of 11/12 year olds today and I’m delighted with it!

The site allows pupils from around the world to compete against each other at mental maths questions in a completely safe environment, no actual personal details just clever usernames made from colours and animals (I’m bluepig22!).

The competitive element is the clincher, the class I tried it with today are difficult and disaffected but did more Maths today than they have for most of the year.

The site is simply designed and my class enjoyed beating not only each other but pupils from Brazil, Australia, France, Japan……

I’ve not even looked fully into the class reports feature but this could be most useful for identifying weaknesses and future teaching points.

A nice touch is the graduation medal that you get when you have done really well at a certain level, this really encouraged pupils to move onto a more difficult level rather than sticking with the easy questions all day.

An excellent, free resource, well done Richard!  Let me know what you think

On reflection the content which we need to deliver has changed little and so with some tweaking our previous scheme of work will suffice in structure.  This statutory change in the manner in which we deliver the content and offer opportunities to put the Maths in context, develop pupils personal skills and link in with other subjects can only be a good thing in my opinion.

There are a number of fantastic resource banks out there full of ‘rich’ mathematical tasks which we could use:

nRich: Hundreds of puzzles and investigations, updated monthly.
Kangaroo Maths: Particularly Using & Applying and Enrichment sections.
Bowland Maths: New resources designed specifically with the new curriculum in mind.
Defence Dynamics: Interactive resources / lesson plans based on real world scenarios from the MoD.

Of particular interest are the Bowland Maths resources, these have been produced by the Bowland Charitable Trust in conjunction with the NCETM.  To quote their site:

‘Bowland Maths makes maths fun for pupils aged 11-14. The aim is to help change pupils’ views of maths by increasing their motivation and enjoyment, which should help increase their confidence and their competence. A second aim is to help teach maths in a different way.

The Bowland Maths materials look very different from most maths teaching materials. They consist of innovative case study problems, each taking 3-5 lessons, designed to develop thinking, reasoning and problem solving skills – as in the revised Key Stage 3 curriculum. Each case study is different, but all provide pupils and teachers with problems that are fun and engaging, while also being a rich maths experience. The case studies are not remotely like answering questions from a book. For Portraits of the case studies, click here.’

As a department we will be reviewing a number of these resources and planning their integration into our teaching over the coming weeks.  I will add more in the future about any particular highlights.

Have you any other links to quality resources to enrich Maths teaching?  How is your department tackling these changes?

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:

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.

His use of data continues to inspire me and pushes my thoughts on using this software in the classroom. With the abolition of data handling coursework next year more time will be freed up to look at the subject in more novel ways. I am starting to think that pupils could be freed completely from the drudgery of drawing their own scatter graphs (a skill which most do not struggle with) and could be set a project based around the Gapminder tool. The potential for this to be cross-curricular is obvious.

Here’s the video:

For the uninitiated this is a dynamic graphing package populated with a range of data about countries covering the last 30 years. You choose two sets of data to graph and hey presto a lovely scatter graph appears with a slider allowing you to cycle through the years:

Within seconds I had the pupils eagerly shouting out pairs of data sets which they thought would have some kind of correlation accompanied by reasoned arguments explaining their thoughts. Then when they saw that we could highlight individual countries I was swamped with requests from a mass of countries of origin.

All in all a refreshing end to a lesson and one that has got my mind racing.

I think that getting the pupils into a computer room with this running would be great, you could use it as an excellent starting exercise before jumping into a data investigation of their own. The cross-curricular possibilities are also great. I may incorporate this into plans I am hatching for a long term project next year with pupils collecting data from other schools around the web.

EDIT:

There’s a great video from last years TED conference from Hans Rosling who created the software.