MathsClass

I've updated the electronic dice on MathsStarters. Includes ready to go Multo and Addo cards.
Variations of dice include two six-sided dice, two ten-sided dice or two custom dice (0 to 20) - the dice can show multiplication or addition and answers.

I've added an additional game under the Fractions category on MathsStarters Bingo:

Converting fractions, decimals and percentages

For a recent session with teachers about whole school numeracy, I created a couple of animations demonstrating:

The Mathematics General (Stage 6, Years 11 and 12) syllabus in NSW includes numerous content points, considerations and suggest applications involving spreadsheets. But, I suspect, many teachers are not using spreadsheets in their lessons mainly because you get through the course without using them. Yet using a spreadsheet to complete some of the mathematical heavy lifting, can allow for the use of real-life data and the investigation of scenarios.

Monday (17/08/15) was a Pythagorean Day (17² = 8² + 15²).

Just added to MathsStarters: Number of the Day (junior) is for Stage 2/3 students (Years 3 to 6) covering:

•  represent numbers of up to four digits using objects, words, numerals and digital displays

•  identify the number before and after a given two-, three- or four-digit number

•  count forwards and backwards by tens and hundreds on and off the decade

•  arrange numbers of up to four digits in ascending and descending order

•  use place value to partition numbers of up to four digits

•  round numbers to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand

[MA2-4NA; ACMNA052, ACMNA053. Reference: NSW Syllabus for the Australian Curriculum, Mathematics K-10 Syllabus]

Today I had the fun of 20 Year 5 students in my classroom. I used the Magic Vs problem from NRICH. NRICH have lots of good leading questions, solution discussions and videos. There was lots of great thinking and discussion.

I made a SMART Notebook file to aid the discussions, available on MathsFaculty.

On MathsLinks there is a new feature to create Lists. Lists are, like they sound, similar to a wishlist or shopping cart - you can create a list of links chosen from MathsLinks.

Many teachers are now using Google Classroom to connect with their students. Recently Google added the ability for external sites to share to your classroom. I have added this functionality to MathsLinks.

I've had Make bingo for trig exact with radians on my To Do list for a while.

Probability is one of those topics where it's best to "see it".

As a serial organiser, a brain cell explodes when I read on a social network involving teachers, "where can I find?" or "has anyone got?".

A resource I put together for practising rounding using significant figures.

Here's a self-checking, simple questions, as you get the answers correct the tree lights up.

Nothing fancy. Just needed something for a computer lab tomorrow.

Recently, I have been considering how to see more fruit in my classroom. As I mentioned previously, the effort factor is significant. The modern idea that students will (or should?) only engage in activities of interest to them goes against everything they will come up against in the future.

One of the challenges I had this week when students were constructing rectangles and squares using a ruler and set square (drafting triangle) was checking the accuracy of the measurements (sides and angles). I walked around with a ruler and set square checking their drawings.

I found this design on a photocopied worksheet from an old textbook, but I don't know which, so cannot credit.
(If you know the source, please let me know)

I am presenting twice in September about how I use technology to engage, enhance and extend in my teaching.

You can now sign in to MathsLinks with an Edmodo account.

This saves you from remembering another username and password.

MathsLinks also allows you to sign in with a Facebook, Twitter, Google or LinkedIn account.

[If you already have an account on MathsLinks, go to your profile page and you can add the ability to sign in with Edmodo.]

For my HSC Mathematics General 1 class, we are currently completing the Focus Study FSPe1CEC Water usage and collection.

In this topic, students interpret information, make comparisons, and perform a range of calculations in relation to personal water usage.

These are resources I developed for a Year 9 5.1* class.

(What is not shown in these resources is not all of the conceptual steps I took with this class.)

I want to start writing more regularly to highlight some of the resources on MathsLinks and MathsFaculty, and putting them in the context of my teaching.

If we can determine the altitude of a plane in front of the moon, why not try the altitude of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in front of the Sun?

Back in 2011, Nordin Zuber posted this found image on MathsLinks.

I have made a resolution to write more regularly on this blog. Pretty sure everyone with a blog has said that at least once, I've probably said it... oh... wait.

Here's a starter activity I have built on MathsStarters: Number of the day.

Happy end of school year (in Australia at least).

The September/October holidays edition...

Last week was the annual MANSW conference, and I posted a couple of summaries.

• MANSW 2013 Day 1

• MANSW 2013 Day 2

• MANSW 2013 Extras

The annual Mathematical Association of NSW (MANSW) conference is this week. I hope to meet some of you there. I will have lots of MathsLinks business cards for you to take back to your colleagues.

Here’s a second foldable for the Preliminary (Year 11) General Mathematics course for the topic DS1 Statistics and society, data collection and sampling.

This second foldable is about classifying data.

I’m trying to make the time to create foldables to use with my Year 11 General Mathematics class. The topic DS1 Statistics and society, data collection and sampling lends itself to foldables.

The first foldable is for the process of statistical inquiry:

posing questions, collecting data, organising data, summarising and displaying data, analysing data and drawing conclusions, and writing a report

TeachMeet AC Maths on Thursday gone was fantastic. Check out the wiki page for the presentations.

Here’s my 2 minute presentation about MathsLinks.

Lots of links added to MathsLinks and and files added to MathsFaculty.

For teachers in Sydney, I hope to see you at the TeachMeet for the Australian Curriculum in Maths – this week, Thursday 1st August 2013.

A new help page on MathsLinks has 6 videos to help you, your staff or colleagues get acquainted with using MathsLinks. The videos total just under 6 minutes and cover signing up, using a link page, sharing from MathsLinks, browsing, submitting a link and getting updates. Ideal for a faculty meeting or staff development day activity.

A reminder about the new feature added this week. You can now leave a comment on any link or resources shared on MathsLinks and MathsFaculty.

The comment might be a teaching idea or a review of the resource.

In January, I wrote “let’s make 2013 the Year of Sharing”. We probably all know that some of the best sharing is not a specific link or a tangible resource, but an idea. Those discussions may happen in the staffroom, over a coffee, on playground duty or on a social network.

Sydney, Australia, based teachers put Thursday 1st August 2013 in your diary for the TeachMeet Australian Curriculum Maths.

This week, MathsLinks hit 700 links all categorised by topics and syllabus.

Lots of additions to the Downloadable Essentials section on MathsKit this week. Including: A page of table of values and coordinate grids, pages of number lines, some more pie charts and trigonometric graphs, blank, degrees and radians.

Downloadable Essentials is a new section on MathsKit.

In meeting the purpose of MathsKit, quick links to resources for Maths teachers, there are free downloads of graph paper and lots of grid images. There are lots of sites offering free graph/grid paper, but not so many providing high quality grid images with the specific purpose of using them in a worksheet or exam create in Word (or other program). Please suggest other files that should be available, I will gradually make and add.

‘Tis the season to be programming.

Teachers in NSW are currently programming for the New NSW K–10 syllabuses for the Australian curriculum in Mathematics. (Of course, teachers in other states have already implemented the Australian Curriculum) As all these teachers are programming and collecting resources, I’ve updated MathsLinks and MathsFaculty with the outcomes from this new syllabus.

For a few years, I’ve noticed that kids not only don’t know/struggle with their times tables, but also general ‘number sense’.

Mathematical Induction, topic 7.4 in the NSW Board of Studies Mathematics Extension 1 Syllabus, is difficult conceptual. I suspect students think there is a bit of smoke and mirrors happening. One introduction that I use, I first saw in a resource by Stuart Palmer. The same story appears in this article online: Mathematical Induction (PDF 92KB), Helen Bush, Reflections August 1992 sourced on NSW HSC Online.

For users of Pinterest, you can now share links on MathsLinks to Pinterest. Click the Share dropdown.
Try it on this link, you get a nice screenshot of the site in Pinterest.

The “automatic simple random number generator” on MathsStarters got a little fix-up today.

Try out the Word Search on MathsStarters. There are only three versions at the moment (although the placement of the letters is different each time you play the game). If you’d like to add a game, just send me a comma-separated list of words and a title for you game. For teachers in NSW, Australia, my current aim is to make a word search for each topic in the NSW General Mathematics syllabus.

Also, I’ve added the search functionality back on this blog.

Today, MathsStarters Quick Quiz got an update with several additional quizzes. Bingo got a new game, ‘Writing Rates’.

The provider for screenshots on MathsLinks has been updating meaning that all sites now have a nice, slightly larger preview image. For YouTube videos, I’m getting a screenshot straight from the video.

Any link on MathsLinks can be “liked”. If you find a link useful, like it… just click the thumbs up. This lets teachers quickly judge if others have found a link useful.

As always, your feedback is welcome.

Oh, and MathsSearch is back and working properly. MathsSearch uses a custom Google search to search over 150 maths related sites.

Here, the new school year begins on Tuesday. Can you make 2013 a year of sharing?

Now that we have a National Curriculum in Australia, let’s make 2013 the Year of Sharing.

This week…

The first for 2013.

For the new year, the sites have a new look and functionality, feedback is welcomed.

If you haven’t visited the site recently, there is a new look across MathsLinks, MathsFaculty, MathsKit and MathsClass.

The redesign is still a work in progress, and the main aim is to make it easier to use MathsLinks and MathsFaculty.

Feedback is welcome.

Some seasonal links this week, enjoy the break. Merry Christmas.

Keep an eye out for new look sites soon.

This is part 2 of my electronic worksheets for Consumer Arithmetic. Part 2 focuses on Spending Money, in particular: profit and loss, discounts, purchasing, best buys and buying on terms (hire purchase). (Part 1 focused on earning money)

Just one lonely link this week… a Christmas tree logic puzzle. Year 8 stuck with it, some of them getting a better score than me on their first go.

Nearing the end of the year, I’ve updated a previous MathsClass blog post from 2008 with additional supporting material to make this nice design. Files available on MathsFaculty.

There are other end of term activities on MathsClass and design activities on MathsFaculty.

MathsLinks has reached 599 links!

Thank-you to the people who completed the short survey last week, looks like this weekly summary is helpful, so I’ll continue to produce it.

Since May, I have been posting a weekly summary of the links and resources added to my other sites, MathsLinks and MathsFaculty, calling it “MathsClass This Week”. A quick poll: (viewing via an RSS feed or email, you probably need to visit the site to complete the poll)

This week on MathsLinks

A small update this week as we get to the end of the Spring holidays.

Please help me by completing this survey to get some ideas about improving the MathsLinks interface.

A lot of links and files this week…

Did you go to the 2012 MANSW Conference? If you don’t have a blog, consider leaving your reflections as a comment here.

This week’s highlight, check out the GeoGebra HowTos from Nordin Zuber on MathsFaculty.

This looks interesting… the GeoGebra for the iPad project is looking for funding on Kickstarter. Currently only 25% funded.

Thanks for the comments on last week’s post Being too helpful?.

First up, here on MathsClass, I’ve raised a question about being too helpful. Do you have any comments? Nordin’s comment is a good read.

A foldable for reviewing the Rules of Differentiation. Click the preview to see the full version.

Year 11 Mathematics have one of their three periods a week, last period on Fridays. Of course, they’re not highly motivated at that time.

The other week, we folded parabolas, I called it “Arts and Craft Friday”.

The next week, they surprised me by asking what we were doing for “Arts and Craft Friday”... I had nothing!

I suspect that as you find great resources on the net, many time, like me, you still have a need to scaffold an activity around that resource… maybe resulting in the creation of supplementary material.

This week, along with many colleagues, I heard Dan Meyer present “How can we design the ideal learning experience for students?” Great inspiration as we head into the second half of the year. Were you there? What did you learn/think?

School holidays… it’s been quiet.

Looking forward to seeing Dan Meyer present in Sydney this week, looks like there are still places at the afternoon session.

Most teachers have a USB stick full of their teaching resources… similarly most schools have a file server with a Mathematics folder chocked full of stuff that has been randomly downloaded, scanned or created.

But, what about web-sites? I’ve seen many Word docs named “websites.doc” and shake my head. At a professional development course I went to, the presenter had addresses for web-sites he used in a text file, I suggested he use MathsLinks, but his reasoning was sound – he had the links with him with other resources for a lesson. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard (my recommendation, here are my maths bookmarks) are great, but I found categorising on MathsLinks suited me even better, then I made it public.

Now I’m adding some features to MathsLinks which are a little bit old-school, but will hopefully make it more useful when programming and sharing links with colleagues:

Save link to your computer – this will download a “url” file to your computer, a shortcut to the web-site. Double click it on your machine and you will be taken to the site. (Mac users, it will open Safari, no option)
Print to PDF – downloads a PDF with the essentials about the web-site with links to the site on MathsLinks as well as direct to the site.

Try it on these links…

MathsStarters

Yesterday, I announced that I added a Maths Bingo game to MathsStarters. Since then, I’ve added Expansion (algebraic) and Unit conversion games.

Elsewhere…

I reckon Maths Bingo is a great starter, ender or in-betweener…

First up, a visual refresh to MathsKit. I hope it’s easier to find the best resources in each category. A more obvious menu and each category is initially limited to 5 links with a click to show more. What gets in the top five depends on “recommends” a link has received.

On MathsLinks, I tweaked the NSW K-10 Mathematics Syllabus page to include Early Stage 1 and Stage 1 outcomes. I’ve also brought all the outcomes onto that page in hopefully a easy to use way.

Nothing to do with MathsClass, this week saw the addition of Emma to our family.

Four maths teachers kindly shared their work on MathsFaculty for others to use.

Recently my online focus has shifted to my network of sites. This network is about making the essentials for maths teaching easier to find and more accessible.

MathsKit is a page of all those everyday resources.
MathsLinks now has over 500 online activites for maths, all categorised.
My new site, MathsFaculty is for maths teachers to share. I suspect that everyday, teachers waste time searching for, and if they don’t find, creating resources. Let’s fix that by sharing.

Each week, I’m going to use this blog to summarise what has been added across these sites.

* “This Week” is more like “recently” for this first review.

I’ve updated the Quick Quiz app on MathsStarters.

I recently spent some time improving MathsLinks and adding some new features.

On MathsStarters, I have added a Frequency Distribution Table tool. The tool lets you have 3 to 10 scores, you tally as you go and the frequency and total are calculated.

You could use this on a projector/IWB (the buttons for incrementing the tally are sized for an IWB). Or, students could use this to record data on their own laptop as they collect it – paperless!

Here are some resources for the new year…

Four years ago today, the first post on this blog was published.

I’ve added a nice little feature to the MathsLinks site – Favourites.

Welcome to the new look MathsClass site.

After the recent redesign of MathsKit, the next site I have redesigned, or really launched is MathsLinks.

For a while, I’ve been developing a new look for this site and working out how to better connect my maths sites.

Polite names of course!

A 2 question poll about the name used to refer to the mathematics staff at your school.

I suspect most readers of this blog would agree that online networking with other teachers is now the key form of professional development. Yet, we would all know many teachers who are not engaging online in discussions with colleagues.

I have turned off the automatic inclusion of my Delicious “maths” links in the update feed/email for this site.

I recently created a site called MathsKit. Whilst I added some links to it on this site, I haven’t actually mentioned it yet.

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.

There are a couple of previously published resources on this site that might help you out as you prepare for the new school year.

Today I finished moving MathsClass.  You’ll hopefully notice no difference, but it changes some things for me and allows me to expand this site a little in the next couple of weeks.  As a result, if you subscribe to this site via the feed or by email, you may have seen old entries reposted as new – sorry about that.  They’re obviously not new, but in the moving process were “updated”, hence they’ve reappeared in the feed and email updates.

Merry Christmas, and if you’re looking for something to do this break, check out the properties of your favourite numbers on the Number Dictionary (unfortunate URL, but a good site).

MathClass has sort of become a blog of resources, rather than a more general conversation about teaching.  I’m not sure whether that’s necessarily a bad thing, so I’d like to know what my readers think.

There are two search boxes in the right-hand column of this site.  The first just searches this site.  The second is much more interesting.