Tuesday 8 June 2010

Meeting Tuesday 6th July 2010

The last meeting of this academic year will take place from 4:30 - 6pm on Tuesday 6th July and will be hosted by Fran Wilson at the Coleridge Campus of the Parkside Federation:

Coleridge Campus
Radegund Road
Cambridge
CB1 3RJ

Everyone with an interest in using an IWB in teaching and learning of maths is welcome to attend.

Friday 4 June 2010

IWB Network Meeting - 11th May 2010

Here are the notes of the IWB Network Meeting held on 11th May 2010 at Parkside Federation (Coleridge Campus), with thanks to Fran for hosting.

Present: Fran Wilson (Parkside Fed), Nick Wong, Kate Bell (Longsands), Ewen Chamberlain (Manor), Mark Dawes (Comberton), Sam Taylor, Lisa O’Hora, Richard Hunt (City of Ely), Simon Palmer (King Ed VI, Bury St Eds), Chris Gratten (Netherhall), Rachel Clarke (Cottenham)

Apologies: Cecilia Freer, Sarah Pattison (Swavesey), Mike Furness (Soham)

1 Apologies

Amongst the apologies was a message from Cecilia, which was shared:

Please accept my apologies as unfortunately I can’t make this or the next meeting. I really enjoyed the last one and have been using some of the ‘reveal’ tips regularly.

2 Promethean/Activ

Fran has been trying out a new board and software that allows 2 pens to be used at the same time on a Promethean board.

Rachel asked how to use the magnifier on Promethean:

- press and hold to zoom

- zoom in on a protractor

Simon likes to customise the toolstore to include the tools he uses most often. You can also change the settings for the magnifier function:

studio settings à Tools à Page zoom speed …

If you click & hold right-hand button then it will zoom out slowly.

Simon sometimes sets up his slides with other things off the screen and brings them on using the zoom function.

We are not sure if this is possible in SMART …

3 Prezi

Tom showed us the website www.prezi.com , which does a similar job.

The user sets up the material they want to include and arranges it so it can be zoomed, rotated, etc. This gives some of the functionality of PowerPoint but has the advantage of not being linear, so people viewing it can go to particular parts of the presentation.

It was felt that there was considerable scope to use this with pupils, who could make their own revision materials, etc.

Using it online gives this its full functionality but it can also be downloaded.

4 VLE

Sam shared the ways she makes SMARTnotebook materials available for pupils to use at home. Pupils can download the student edition of SMART. The drawback of this that there is reduced functionality.

At City of Ely they have the full SMARTnotebook on the VLE for pupils to log into. They can open files but can also make their own and can save work directly onto the VLE. The students can type answers and finish diagrams, etc, or create their own files from scratch. These can be projected in class.

Pupils are able to use ICT at home and the lack of ICT access in maths lessons is less of an issue.

5 Websites

Richard showed us the National Learning Grid for Wales (which is available in English!). Either search for NGFL Cymru, or go to www.NGFL-Cymru.org.uk

  • e-Chalk – Richard showed us rotations. It will show the construction lines too, if wanted.
  • There is a nice protractor.
  • Lisa likes the enlargements on NGfL Cymru. When using the negative scale factor the pupils respond particularly well.
  • There is also some particularly nice material on Physics and Humanities that might be useful for maths lessons.

Mark showed www.colmanweb.com

  • This includes a presentation of the investigation Frogs.
  • Following on from last meeting (and the travel graphs), there are graphs showing how footballers run. These are accessed via the ‘geometry’ link.

Mark also showed the NCETM Mathemapedia entry called “Board Desk Head”. www.ncetm.org.uk/mathemapedia/BoardDeskHead

This includes Fran’s picture and links to lots of the Keele materials we have looked at in previous meetings. This was felt to be an important article.

6 Ways of using the board

Mark’s pupils have been learning how to use the functionality of the IWB, such as cloning. From an initial file that consisted of 9 pages of axes, the pupil were asked what happened to the equation of a straight line if the line was reflected in each axis, reflected in the line y = x, or rotated about the origin by 90°, 180° or 270°.

The pupils wrote up their ideas and cloned lines which they then reflected or rotated to back up their arguments.

This puts the pupils in control of the lesson.

Fran pointed out that the key thing – as with BoardDeskHead – is the maths that is going on. Sam shared data from her Masters work, where pupils remembered much more when the IWB was used.

Fran suggested that while “whizzy” is nice, the thing that helps the learning is the good use of the board to support mathematical learning.

We also discussed the idea that the dynamism/movement is what makes the use of an IWB so powerful. Moving something on the computer is different from moving it up at the board. There is more involvement if the board is being used.

Fran has the whole class working on the same task up at the whiteboard, solving one problem collaboratively. The pupils pass the pen between them and the teacher isn’t involved.

Sam does “pass the pen” with her SMARTboard, even though a pen is not required (because pupils could write on it with their fingers!).

7 GeoGebra

Nick showed a GeoGebra file to demonstrate expanding quadratics. The brackets are shown geometrically (like the grid method for multiplication) and when a point is dragged up at the board the algebra and the diagram change together.

Nick was worried that this might be too ‘busy’ and the group discussed ideas about simplifying it and whether having a particular numerical value for x was useful or not.

It was agreed that the interactive nature of the file was particularly nice.