May 28 2015

Looking for Resources

Pondering a question on Twitter I realised that I always have a few sites I rely on where I know I can always find something. So I thought I’d pick a random example to illustrate.

A3 Constructions
So – constructions, for demonstrations I always use John Page’s Math Open Reference, his demonstrations are so clear and can be shown step by step; students can also be given the website so they can access them themselves. I found this many years ago when I wanted some demonstrations for constructions – a Google search returned it as the first entry!

$bisect angle Math Open Ref$

Math Open Ref – Bisecting an Angle

So obviously we need some questions / activities. Where to look – our textbooks are fine – plenty of questions there, but what else is available?

On Nrich, try a search by topic facility to find all the resources for a particular topic; searching on constructions there are several resources returned.

Nrich – triangle construction

CIMT – I don’t think CIMT have ever failed me! One can actually do a Google search such as CIMT constructions to very quickly find resources. It is worth being familiar with the site so you know what is where; I would always check the Year 7, 8 and 9 material and also the GCSE course. In this case, the Year 9 resources include Unit 12 on Constructions and loci. As well as the text we have all the supplementary teacher resources. Note that for some Teacher Resources you will need the CIMT password.

I often find Nrich and CIMT more than sufficient and

I want to spend time planning my lesson and thinking about my students’ learning and how I’m going to help them understand and make it stick.

And how will I know what they know?

So of course quality resources are key but I don’t want to spend too much time looking for them if it stops me spending sufficient time on the above. I believe it is very worthwhile to have a few key sources so you can find something efficiently and quickly.

Having said that, since this post is on finding resources I’ll mention a few more!

The old Exemplification examples for Key Stage 3 have some very useful example. In this case use the Geometry and Measures document and do a search for constructions.

Teachit Maths though a subscription site offers its entire collection of activities as pdfs free. A search on constructions returns a small number of resources including a good card sort.

I’ll finish with Craig Barton’s and Simon Woodhead’s wonderful Diagnostic questions site. (Select this link for all posts on Diagnostic Questions, these include some instructions for use and other resources for rich questions.) Start typing construction into the search box and various choices will be returned.

Christmas 2014

See Christmas Resources for the always updated Christmas collection.

Oct 11 2014

Mathematics Loop Activities

Reviewing some TES resources I was reminded that Loop cards can make a great starter or plenary. This rather attractively presented resource on Significant Figures by Natasha Keyes is a Word file so could easily be adapted for short question types.

Before you create your own though, try this TES collection! See this great set of Trigonometry Loop Cards from Interactive Maths for example or a Quadratics Treasure Hunt by Nicole Cozens or perhaps some Inequalities from James Lockhart. Note you can narrow the search by Key Stage and then by topic. (There are Loop Card activities available for many subjects, not just Mathematics).

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The wonderful Tarsia software has Follow Me cards as one of the output types so this could be a good way to create any new sets, the maximum size for a single set is 24.

MATHSLOOPS

The more sophisticated versions of loop activities like treasure hunts, can make an excellent main lesson activity. MATHSLOOPS from the creator of MathsBox shows how sophisticated loop cards can be; there are three free sample sets available, questions aimed at (current!) GCSE grades A, C and G.

Of course Treasure Hunts are very similar in that the answer to a question leads to the next question. I have found Treasure Hunts make a real change in that we are all moving round the room; I find this a good opportunity to also wander round the room and talk to lots of students. With Year 9 this week a Trigonometry treasure hunt worked really well and I learned from them that a witty colleague of mine had hidden one of the questions on the inside of the cupboard door when doing a treasure hunt with them! Returning to MathsBox again there are several free samples available. (To see the collection of free samples, see this page then choose Samples and choose a resource type from the menu on the left.) There are many Treasure Hunts on TES resources – they seem to turn up in the Loop Card search, but you can also search for Treasure Hunts.

The simple short answer type loop cards (also sometimes called ‘I have you, who has..’) make ideal starters or plenaries as a whole class activity, each student could have a card each, alternatively perhaps a group of students could have a set of cards for the group.

Sep 13 2014

This week…

…such a busy one – so I’ll be brief (but can’t break that new year resolution of January 2011, the only one I have ever kept, to write a post each week!)

So this week – I have been using my name cards – I’m learning names fast! My classes all know that I think WolframAlpha and Desmos are rather useful and we have had some great discussions on the learning behaviours I’ll be noting about them all on ClassCharts.

I must recommend the free samples from Bring On the Maths, the Core 3 activity – Logarithmic equations worked really well with my Year 13 class and next week I’ll use the C4 Binomial Expansion resource when we are talking about the validity of a given expansion. I have used the Trigonometric Ratios resource before – and will again; there are several other great resources in that list of samples – explore!

Now to hand over to a master (and his son), I love this TED talk from Hans and Ola Rosling. Can you do better than the chimps? Why we are all so statistically ignorant! (More on The Ignorance Project)

Aug 24 2014

Resources for Students

One of my personal resolutions for the coming year is to carry on with my practice of using resources that students can then refer to or use at home if they wish. Mathematics notes and calculators are a good example of such resources.

To consider an example, early this term with the Further Mathematicians I will be studying matrices and I will let them know the sources of any resources I use in lessons. I use a blog to provide the details of my students’ homework so I can simply add the links to their homework page. Sometimes where there are several useful resources I think maybe of interest to a wider audience I also add a post to Mathematics for Students, see for example, Polar Coordinates. In fact I think I will do that more this year.

To return to matrices, some useful resources include the following:

On the AQA website the Teaching and learning resources page for A Level Further Maths includes three online textbooks under the Resources for students heading. For example if I want a worked example of finding the inverse of a 3×3 matrix then we can look at Chapter 5 of AQA’s Further Pure 4 text. This also has an exercise with the answers at the back if they want additional examples.

$The Math Centre$

The Math Centre

More sources of notes and examples include Chapter 9 on Matrices and Transformations from the CIMT Further Pure Mathematics A Level material, Just the Maths, the Math Centre and The HELM Project. If you have not come across the HELM Project before, the project was designed to support the mathematical education of engineering students and includes an extensive collection of notes which include clear worked examples. You can see on the list that a very small number of titles (that you are unlikely to want A Level) are ‘not ready yet’; for the sake of completeness I discovered the complete set hosted by the Open University. To access the Open University resources you will need to create an account (easy and free), this will also give you access to the numerous free online courses.

Obviously we need to keep an eye on the specification when looking at alternative sources of examples but surely that can only be a good thing, particularly for our students who will be off to university in the near future.

Matrices is an example of a topic where it can be very useful to check work with WolframAlpha; I have created a new slideshow of Matrix Examples to add to the WolframAlpha slideshow series so we can easily check any work.
The series is on Mathematics for Students also and a post including the matrices resources discussed here has been added also.