MathsClass

From The Australian, Technology lesson one: teach the teachers comes this:

… “This isn’t just about teaching teachers to use the technology,” Professor Stoney said.
“It’s about teaching them to use it for learning. How do students learn with technology?

I recently contributed some comments to the executive at my school about the DET roll-out expected to be happening soon. A slightly editted version is below. I’m really not sure where the executive are at with this roll-out, I haven’t heard much except from the computer coordinator – it’s a shame, or more accurately, it makes me nervous, because there is the potential for a lot of problems to arise from this roll-out if we’re not prepared. I’m republishing my comments because they might help you in engaging with your school about planning and preparation.

Still on capacity. With Australia having been in a drought since 2003 another interesting way to engage with the topic of capacity is to look at the water storage levels.

My previous post on having an IWB in my classroom was written about three weeks after it’s installation. Tomorrow, we’ve got an IWB consultant/trainer/type-person-thingy coming to school, and I was asked to share what I’ve been doing with the IWB. So I wrote a quick list.

The DER, as it is unfortunately named, is about to hit NSW schools.

What else could you do with capacity? As I was getting a glass of juice to have with my breakfast, I was thinking that I could use this image as a quick question at the start of a lesson.

With laptops rolling out shortly and projectors appearing in some classrooms, we should be thinking about collecting digital media for use as stimulus or investigation material. So, the other day when filling up my young daughter’s bottles, I took some pictures.

For a while I’ve been collecting and saving to a web-site maths objects to use with my classes. By objects I mean single activities, rather than a web-site of maths activities. I’ve been trying to take some of the many things I find and save to delicious and put a purpose to them – deciding that it’s something I could use with one of my classes.

I wanted to play a multiplication bingo type game with a class the other day, so I grabbed two 10 sided dice (apparently you don’t need to call a single dice a “die” anymore) out of the cupboard. Then I thought… hey I have a projector and a laptop.

If you missed it in the comments to an earlier post. There are two new wikis you might want to keep an eye on as a NSW DET teacher (or any Maths teacher really).

The NSW DET will shortly equip Year 9 students with a Lenovo S10e netbook as part of a program called “Laptops for Learning” (L4L). To me, if we are going to do this – then it’s time to include some good software on these machines and help out schools who cannot afford some of the more exciting applications.