MathsClass

I recently received an email from the AAMT:

National Mathematics Day is Friday 18 May and looks at codes and code-breaking — to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing.

Looking around, there are lots of activities for collecting and analysing data using small boxes of Smarties. Here is my version.

I’ve had interest in how I make self-checking worksheets using Excel.

Last term I had Year 9 review and learn index notation and the index laws through some self-directed activities.

I know there are stacks of GeoGebra files available on the Internet, but I’ve started putting my own here on the site.

Having made a Tables Spider this other day, I realised that I made myself a template for creating all sorts of “spiders”.

In 2007, I wrote about a resource, a Number Spider, that I used as a lesson starter.

Tanya Duffy shared a great coordinate geometry activity on a private forum earlier in December.

Each year for the Term 3 SDD (Staff Development Day), the four schools (three 7-10 and one 11-12) in the collegiate I work in get together for a combined program.

This is a resource for skills in working with time.

In 2009, Year 9 got their DER netbooks and now they are in Year 10. This year’s Year 9 does not have their netbooks yet, and so this gives teachers a little time to get their heads around the inclusion of netbooks into the classroom. This year, I’m teaching a 5.2 pathway Year 10 class (and a Year 9 5.2 class).

Teacher’s all have their own way of keeping track of student attendance, and other aspects that are recorded in class. Here’s mine, it might give you some ideas.

A lesson for Year 9 students with DER laptops, or anyone really.

A Digital Education Revolution (DER) laptop in the hands of all Year 9 students changes everything… or does it?

Tomorrow is the last day of term… hurray! Here’s another end of term activity for use with your maths class.

In my IST class, we’re studying Modeling and Simulation, and started to make a model of a dice using Excel.

Thinking about it, the technique involved in making this would also be of interest to Maths teachers.

Last year, I posted the Melbourne Storm Number Plane Logo – and today, exactly one year later, purely by coincidence, I’ve made a Brisbane Broncos Number Place activity.

Here’s a quirky little activity that uses the DER laptops.

This article is not a “how-to” but rather some thinking about using GeoGebra (a discussion starter maybe).

For NSW DET teachers, the Curriculum Support web-site has been updated with resources for the DER, i.e. the laptops being rolled out to Year 9 students.

Teacher’s throughout NSW DET schools are starting to receive their DER netbooks.

Google Sketchup is one of the applications bundled on the DER netbooks being rolled out into NSW Public High Schools in Term 3. But as it’s free, you can download it now for Windows XP/Vista & Mac OS X.

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.

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.

Are you drawing mathematical diagrams in Microsoft Word? You might even be achieving success doing this; once you’ve worked out how to wrangle Microsoft apps to do what you want, they can be powerful. But, for drawing mathematical diagrams there are better options.

FX Draw by Efofex is the application for drawing static diagrams for inclusion in worksheets, assessment tasks etc. The one down-side of this software is that there is no Mac version. (The rest of the Efofex MathPack is worth the money as well)

I need to learn to use GeoGebra because it looks like a fantastic app, it’s free and shortly our students will have their own netbooks, itching to use them. I find the best way to learn new software is to do something with it that you need.

As part of a unit on Trigonometry, we review compass and true bearings before working with bearings in Trigonometry problems.
To start this review lesson, we looked at some images from Google Earth.

As I was putting together a lesson on using conversion graphs, I couldn’t find a nice temperature conversion graph - so I created one.

Creating a maths worksheet in Microsoft Word without using the proper symbols does not present well – I’m sure you’ve seen 2 * 2 = 4 or 2 x 2 = 4 rather than 2 × 2 = 4.  My previous post, Maths symbols in Word is one of the most popular on this site.  In that post, I gave shortcuts for inserting mathematical symbols into Word - the post was specific to the Windows version of Word.  As I’ve been a Mac user for a year, it’s time to make a similar post for Mac users.

Around this time each year, our programs have Year 8 and Year 10 looking at the Number Plane.  For the end of the term, it’s nice timing, because it allows us to draw some pictures on the number plane.  One favourite is the logos of various NRL

teams.

In this second post about using Excel to generate random questions, the first showed how to make a question about money, I show the simple formulae used to generate questions using the 4 basic operations.

Excel, part of Microsoft Office, is great for working with numbers.  For a maths class, Excel can be used for standard applications like working with tables of data and creating graphs.  Other teaching and learning applications that I’ve seen include creating self-marking computer based worksheets, interactive worksheets using sliders and even randomly generating questions for paper worksheets.

Many teachers use Microsoft Word to create worksheets.  It’s not designed for the job, there are better options but Word is the easiest to learn and has the greatest compatibility - making it easy to share documents.  One of the problems I see is that many people don’t know how to insert symbols into their document.  For example, x (the letter) is not a good substitue for × (the multiplication symbol).  This post shows you how to insert symbols like ×, ÷ and π quickly, on most computers (a Windows PC running Microsoft office).