Posters

Why would a teacher want to use Twitter?

Because just a few minutes spent on Twitter can be very productive. Take this tweet from Craig Barton on an excellent resource – perfect for my Year 11 students revising for their GCSE module in the summer.

Being very selective in who you follow allows you to connect with teachers and other educators beyond your own institution.

Resources I discovered through my early investigations of Twitter – included Maths posters to download.

I was also interested to see that teachers on Twitter have shared teaching tips and ideas; see the #movemenon book, from Doug Belshaw (the pdf is free to download).

Some further examples: Mathscareers Website, Wolfram Fun Facts and Mathslinks.

For a quick way to find Mathematics related tweets do a search on the hashtag #mathchat.

For learning to use Twitter see Russell Stannard’s training videos and some Twitter bookmarks, note the very clear Twitter Lingo guide from Mashable.

See other posts featuring Twitter and Mathematics Conversations.

So why do I use Twitter (and Diigo and belong to various teaching communities and..)?
For the reasons so well explained by Sacha Chua in her ‘Teacher’s Guide to Web 2.0 at School’.

See this updated post on Posters, with some great new additions.

There are many excellent sources of free Mathematics posters available on various sites.

Jenny Eather’s Maths Charts includes over 200 posters on a wide variety of topics. (Jenny Eather’s dictionary is also excellent).

Nrich have turned many of their excellent problems into attractive posters. Note the link to download a zip file of all the posters.

The Classic Mistake site has a wonderful collection of those classic mistakes that teachers regularly see. These posters can be downloaded in colour or black and white, a podcast explaining the mistake is also available for each poster.
Note all the other downloads available from the same site.

The Mathematical Moments site features many downloadable pdfs, posters which show the role that Mathematics plays in Science, Technology and Human Culture. A short or more detailed version of each poster is available and a search is provided.

Mathematical Moments – Sticking the Landing

On TES Resources Owen has created an excellent set of A4 posters inspired by Ian Stewart’s ‘17 Equations that Changed the World‘.
(You will need to register with TES (free) to download any resources).

You can read more about the 17 equation on The World Economic Forum where for each equation we have the following information:

What does it mean?
History
Importance
Modern use

The equations posters together with this information would make an interesting display.

The excellent Maths Career s site includes many posters to download, scroll down the page to see a great collection. Note also the booklet on Where the Maths you learn is used.

Math Gems from Thinkzone has a collection of free posters described as an assortment of mathematical marvels – these won’t use up your colour inks!

$Math Gems$

Math Gems

From Plus Magazine – a series of posters for display in classrooms.

Plus Magazine Posters

Also, see all these posters from Plus, lots of Maths for your walls!

For making your own vocabulary posters, using a word cloud generator such as Word It Out makes the job easy. Simply enter some text and create your word cloud. You can then share your cloud if you want to. It is also possible to embed it on your blog or website.

Note that you can use the tilde (~) character to keep words together.
A great feature for mathematicians – WordItOut can easily cope with the equals sign, division signs also – see for example this equation. It seems other symbols are possible also.

Various options are available, you can change the colours of your words and the background colour, you can also change the size of the font and the variation in size allowed.

Emma made our Year 7 class a poster of the vocabulary needed for our work on shapes and here is a very simple example on Linear Sequences.

Tagxedo is another possibility, this also allows a choice of shape.

For a collection of Numeracy Across the Curriculum posters, have a look at this collection which includes posters on Numeracy for a variety of subjects.I came across these on Twitter; looking at the address, thank you to Inveralmond Community High School.

….and on a lighter note, my son sent me this from GraphJam.com.

see more Funny Graphs