DreamTeachers, not a Dream School

Jamie Oliver's Dream School caused quite a stir last week. I didn't watch it, but I didn't feel the need to - there were enough tweets about it to get a general feel. Many comments were along the line of "Why don;t they get good teachers, not celebs".

Then I got this email...

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Hello Chris Smy,

Did you see Jamie's Dream School on Channel 4? Did it leave you seething or surprised by the celebrity experts’ approach to teaching? To allow teachers to have their say Jamie Oliver and You Tube have launched a parallel campaign, Britain’s Dream Teachers. Their aim is to promote real teachers who are doing it right in the classroom rather than celebrity experts doing it for the TV.

Britain's Dream Teachers is looking for teachers to video and upload their best approaches to teaching tough GCSE and Standard Grade topics. There will be seven 'Dream Teachers' judged by a panel of past National Teaching Awards winners and the seven teachers will win £3k for themselves and £7k for their school.

The Maths topics teachers are being asked to tackle are:

· How do I rearrange complex algebraic formulae?

· What is Pythagoras’ theorem and where does it apply?

· What are vectors and how do I work them out?

Have a look at http://www.youtube.com/dreamteachers and for tips on creating a short film and to upload your entry. Do also encourage your colleagues from other subjects to get involved, there are topics to be answered in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Geography, History and English Lit.

The deadline for entries is 5 April.

Thanks

Nicola

Nicola Hern

Hern Communications

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My only worry is that it turns into #xteacher. Lets just say I won't be applying.

Square of Area 10

This is another one from my PGCE; all those years ago now, but continues to be a favourite little investigation. I take no originality credit! I'm posting in response to @mathsatschool comment on #mathchat that students don't accept that "diamond"s are squares.

I say little, it can be anything from 1 lesson to a week or fortnight's worth.

Resources: Square spotty paper and lots of it.

1. Draw a square of area 1. Easy enough to start. I get peculiar looks at this stage...
2. Draw a sqaure of area 4. Have a look around, you get some 16's at this stage.
3. Draw a square of area 9. They are starting to think either "This is going to be easy" or "He's up to something" depending on how well they know me.
4. Draw a sqaure of ares ... wait for it (they'll be storming ahead with 16 if they're anything like my usual lot).... draw a square of area 10.

At this point you tend to get the stunned silence, followed by some frantic scribbling. Some clever so and so will root 10, and try to do that. "Exactly 10" usually stops them.

It's worth a play, but here's my offering - and indeed I usually have to show them the answer...

I find I need to show them the 'proof' of its area. My usual method is the Big Square around the outside, take away the triangles....

A = 16 - 4 * (0.5 * 3 * 1) = 10.

I find having a notation for labeling squares handy. This one I'd call 3_1. (To move long an edge you go along 3, down 1, etc).

So - what squares can you draw? Area 20? Area 14? Are there any you cannot do?

Whats great is that you can check their answers really quickly. You'll either see the answer really instantly, or you'll do the algebra with square x_y, and go "Oh - yeah".

Enjoy. Good for Shape / Area work, and for Algebra.

Homework & blogging

As many of you know I set up a school departmental blog last week (thanks to everyone who helped give me dots all over my globe). Kids response has been broadly positive, but I still want them to write more and me to write less.

Ukedchat last week was about homework, and I also went on our County Maths Subject Leaders day. All of that conspired to set up the activity below...

I used the new Bowland PD module (The new resources look brilliant) about sharing, setting up the activity in a very similar way to the teacher on the video (but I had 30 children, not 14!).

Here's the activity...I then set the homework bearing in mind some of the comments from Thursday's UKEdchat.


(We use www.plannerlive.com for all our homeworks).

Here are the results...



I'm reasonably happy with the results. If you want to comment on my pedagogy, feel free to comment here.
If you want to comment on their results, Y9 would be so chuffed. That blog is at www.jbsmaths.blogspot.com

Teachmeet Bath Spa

My first teachmeet was such buzz.

There's too much going on in my head to properly blog it all, but what a lot of ideas!

It was great to meet so many people that I feel I know but had never met (Sally, Nicky, Emma, Donna, Clare, & bet I've missed someone here). It was great to see colleagues I had persuaded to come along to see ideas, and I'm looking forward to talking about how to use all these fab resources.

I also presented - twice. I think it went down reasonably well, I talked about how fab twitter is, and in a separate demo showed how to use a webcam as an effective visualiser.

Would I go again? Definitely. Would I present again? Absolutely.

I will struggle to get too far afield, with school and family commitments, but will keep my eyes open.

For a much better summary of the content, I'd suggest Emma Asprey's blog from the evening.
http://mustardlearning.com/2011/02/07/teachmeet-bath-spa-university/

For those interested, here is my prez...

Twitter @ School

I presented (albeit 5minutes) at our eLearning group tonight. My brief was to talk about how I use twitter. At the end of my bit (I had to shoot off - an 8 year old's birthday - more than my lifes worth to be late) I promised to send some links around about what I'd said.

I've now decided to send one link - this blog - with all my ideas in it. This is primarily for school people, but may be of interest to others.

My personal use of twitter.

1, Why I tweet. An early blog post of mine. It's at http://chrismaths.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-i-tweet.html

2, How to set up a PLN (Personal Learning Network). Also on this blog. http://chrismaths.blogspot.com/p/how-to-set-up-your-pln.html

3, #Ukedchat (see http://ianaddison.net/?p=288 or http://ukedchat.wikispaces.com/ for details

4, Networking. I'm the only timetabler in school, so where do i go to talk to other timetablers. It's also a place to talk to teachers from other phases - primary, tertiary, etc..

School Use.

1, I've got a school twitter account. It's at http://twitter.com/JBSMaths It's the one I share with students.

2, I have strict (but positive) guidelines on how it is used. All of this can be found by going to my new dept blog - http://jbsmaths.blogspot.com/p/twitter.htmltml

Hootsuite lets me see what students write, when and only when they @mention my acc. So far this has been a very successful technique. Below is an exmaple of what I see on hootsuite...

Whilst I could read all their tweets, i really have no desire to!

Anything I need to add?

My favourite Maths Android Apps.

I recently got an android smartphone - I didn't get what I really wanted - an HTC7, or Desire, but went for the cheaper San Francisco from Orange - apparently the same as the ZTE Blade (or so I'm told).

It's camera isn't stunning, and it has a slightly irritating tendency to drop its wireless at the drop of a hat, but it does the job. I can make and recieve calls, and texts, and it can run everything i've downloaded from the Android App market.

Once I got the games I wanted sorted (Angry Birds is maths / physics based - honest) I've started to think about how I can use it as a classroom tool - for me, and how students can use their phones (at home more than at school) to help check their work. As you can tell from the fact that I balked at paying for a better phone, I don't really want to shell out more than I need to, so most of these will be free apps.

Here are a few of my thoughts.

1. Quickmark. A nice straightforward QR reader. Will also create them (All the codes on this page were created with it) and store the history of searches. Nice simple interface, and easy to use. I do realise there is an irony in the adding of a QR code link to a QR reader... I'm still slightly unconvinced about QR Codes, above and beyond gimmick value. I'm going to continue to use them and develop their use in school. Our Head of Transition and I are working on a QR trail for open evening this year, to enrich the whole process. That'll be a seperate blog.
2. Algeo. I've only recently discovered this particular gem. I was trying to demonstrate non linear simultaneous equations, and why they have more than one pair of solutions. Usually I use Autograph or Omnigraph on my laptop and Smart board, but I was not near it. Algeo is a graph plotter - up to three graphs at once, with zoom. It's only y=f(x), so circles etc an issue, but trig graphs work (and it defaults to radians). You can zoom, pan, and even trace. It won't work out intersections, so you'll need to zoom close enough to have a look properly, but it illustrates things nicely, and will help students with double checking their curve sketching.
3. Integration and Differentiation. This really is a student app. It's a self assessment app that puts a few questions on the screen, and students differentiate or integrate them. Click on the question, and it gives the answer. From a quick play it seems to cover a fair bit of the A level maths specs as they currently are.
4. RealCalc. A scientific Calcultaor. Better than the built in calculator, but still not what I really want. It is oldfashioned in that you do "70 sin" instead of "sin 70", and there is no fraction button. I guess what I am after is something more like the casio that most students seem to have these days. If anyone finds one, drop me a line!
5. Solver. Solve's quadratics equations. Does what it says on the tin. Even copes admirably with complex solutions.
6.Triangle Solver. Solves traingles. Put in the three bits of info you know (combinations of sides and angles) and it tells you the other three (and even produces a nice little sketch). Only needs a combination of Sine and Cosine rule, but again, useful for checking answers (for me and them!)
No discussion of maths apps would be complete without a discussion of Wolfram|Alpha. When the iphone app was first produced at an astronomical price tag (£50 rings a bell, but I'm not 100% on that) I couldn't imagine needing it - the mobile web version is still free and simple (ish) to use. Then I bought it in a sale (79p) for my ipod touch. It is brilliant, as you get a much richer keyboard, for symbols integrals etc. The price is currently about £1.20 on android, and so far I've resisted. I suspect its only a matter of time though.

What Apps have I missed. What should I (or my students) not be without to make our mathematical lives simpler?

QR Codes - phase 4.

We had our Year 11 into Year 12 evening last night. An opportunity for year 11 to really find out about the choices they can make going into our sixth form.

It was an opportunity for me too. I've given up on pictures on display boards - I'll leave that to Art, and the other visual subjects. I've taken to using my big wide screen monitor on a shelf, and a flyer. We're always a popular subject - the maths sells itself.

Here's my slide show(I must get more into Prezi - this could look so good in there )...



The QR code just links to our VLE, where there is another copy of the presentation.
As you can see there is a little code in the corner of each page. We also produced a flyer with similar information on it for students to take away with them - this too had the same QR code, and (potentially controversially) the address of my school Twitter Account.


As you can see so far the QR code has had 7 hits - not a landslide response, but on the other hand, it may be 7 people accessing information that would not otherwise have done so.