maths4edinburgh

a capital resource for maths teachers

Christmas is coming…

December 1, 2011 by · No Comments · resources

You can’t deny it – December is here, and before you know it certain subjects will be dusting down the Christmas CDs and pressing play on yet another  “Shrek” DVD. But not in mathsland, oh no.

However, lest we win Scrooge of the Year award, there’s always the very exciting advent calendar from those lovely people at nRich. A free puzzle behind every door!

Admittedly this is not quite as exciting as the advent calendar pictured – how can you compete with chocolate daleks and cybermen, I ask you? – but you get the general idea.

Statistics to make you think

November 24, 2011 by · No Comments · curriculum for excellence, finance, news, numeracy, reports, Uncategorized

There’s a lot out there just now…

This link takes you to the blurb regarding the High Pay Commission’s recent report on – well, go on, guess. From there you can download the report itself, and marvel at all manner of exciting graphs, charts and tables. You could get pupils to interpret and discuss the data, or they could generate graphs of their own.

Meanwhile, The Guardian’s wonderful Datablog site continues to impress and excite. Amongst recent goodies is an interactive graph, er, thingy showing different salaries for different jobs, as well as showing – very graphically – the gender gap in pay for each. This makes for interesting viewing and discussion – or, as one of my (male) Higher pupils said when I showed the graph in the last few minutes of a lesson: “you mean women get paid less than men?”

And so does the penny begin to drop. Every little helps!

Another good blog

November 21, 2011 by · No Comments · Int 1, Int 2, resources, standard grade

There’s a lot of good stuff out there. Over the weekend I found myself looking through some maths-teacher-type tweets on Twitter (a new level of sadness, I know) and this led to some very good blogs.  Best of the lot was Great Maths Teaching Ideas, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

This post has a great idea for teaching vectors and/or trig within the context of planes landing in crosswinds – even more exciting if you spruce it up with some youtube clips of scary landings in high winds (the youtube link on the page is, sadly, now defunct). Alternatively, try this post which has a lovely idea for “Top Trumps” cards on polygons. You’ll need a google account to view and download the documents though.

Assessment Resources

November 8, 2011 by · No Comments · assessment, resources

The “Raising Standards in Mathematics” CEC conference was held last Friday at Currie High School and I’ve been pointed in the direction of a rather useful assessment resource mentioned at one of the workshops. This link takes you to the “Bowland Assessment” pages and you may well find them a good source of ideas etc. The language used is that of the English curriculum but hey, we can work with this easily enough.

Bonus points to them for including sample pupil scripts – a very neat touch.

What a bargain…?

November 7, 2011 by · No Comments · curriculum for excellence, numeracy, resources

Bless those wonderful people at The Guardian, who have just published a delicious online gallery of some of the daftest supermarket deals you are ever likely to find. (Apparently this sort of stuff is going on a lot these days, and it’s a moot point whether this is down to sheer stupidity on the part of the stores, or whether they’re being really clever in taking advantage of OUR dumb-assedness in falling for “special offers” without looking carefully at the details. It’s a tough call to make…)

Anyway, whatever else Curriculum for Excellence might be in anyone esle’s book, in mine it’s surely high time we took the opportunity to better educate kids in making sense of all this stuff. Call it “mathematical literacy” if you like – though if you do, remember you read it here first!

You’ll probably like this…

October 31, 2011 by · No Comments · mathsy, statistics

Those awfully nice people at the +plus magazine have a great article in their latest online issue, all about understanding uncertainty and the role played (helpful or otherwise) by visualisations. Fascinating stuff!

Teachers Media

October 5, 2011 by · No Comments · resources

 

You may have heard the sad news that Teachers’  TV is no longer broadcasting, but the resources therein have  now been repackaged and rebranded as Teachers Media and you’ll find them here. Well worth a look at their section on mathematics, which is the featured section this month.

But I can’t forgive them for dropping that apostrophe…

SQA draft documents – have your say

October 2, 2011 by · No Comments · curriculum for excellence, news, reports

Stop me if you’ve heard this already but the SQA have published more detail for their draft course outline thingies for the new qualifications under Curriculum for Excellence. (Not the best-written sentence ever in the history of blogging, but you get the idea.) This page, for example, takes you to the Course Specification for Higher Mathematics, which incorporates the previously published Course Rationale and Summary. There are similar pages for National 4 and 5. It’s worth taking the time to dig down to the detail, such as there is. You won’t find a full syllabus or anything like it but even the headings are enough to offer some tantalising clues as to what may lie ahead. If I may be so bold as to offer some headlines, it seems we can look at some statistics coming into the Higher, some vector work coming down into National 5, and perhaps also some more of the Higher straight line into National 5 as well. The devil will be in the detail, of course, but I’m afraid that you can’t wait that long: SQA are inviting interested parties (and surely that means YOU) to offer feedback on these by 31 October, using their “have your say” facility.

So if, for example, you feel that SQA should be producing full exemplars of internal assessments for these courses (as they did with NABs under Higher Still), rather than passing this task on to schools, you could let them know, nicely. This is your chance.

Alive and kicking…

September 29, 2011 by · No Comments · curriculum for excellence, mathsy, primary, resources, Uncategorized

OK, reports of our death are greatly exaggerated, or so it would seem. Apologies for the month-long (and then some) hiatus, but hey, these things happen.

To get us started, then, how about this set of resources from Cambrdige University, all about Babylonian mathematics? If I may quote from the blurb about the resource:

What did children learn in maths lessons 4,000 years ago? How does a maths archaeologist work? Can you become a Babylonian mathematician?

4,000 years ago, children in school were learning maths just as they do now. But what maths did they learn and how did they learn it? A free online multimedia resource pack created by the University of Cambridge’s Millennium Mathematics Project for the Key Stage 2/3 transition shows how we can find out about an ancient civilisation through the objects they left behind.

The pack is based around short video clips in which Dr Eleanor Robson (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge) explores mathematical history and archaeology and introduces key concepts in Babylonian mathematics. Each pack includes related investigative activities and worksheets for students, and teacher support notes.

This resource pack is aimed at children aged 10-12. We hope that it will be girl-friendly, without being boy-unfriendly, and that it could be used as a means of bridging the transition between primary school and secondary school, perhaps forming part of a Transition Day, or a topic which could be started in the primary school then completed in the secondary school.

Oh alright then…

August 12, 2011 by · No Comments · mathsy

It’s only right, surely, that I start off the new session with a link to the Beeb’s whizzy mathematics programme The Code, presented by Marcus de Sautoy looking all mean and moody in a big black coat. Way to go, Marcus! And way to go BBC, for showing it on prime time telly (on BBC2, no less, none of your highbrow BBC4 nonsense). The series of three programmes has just finished but if you missed them while you were off somewhere sunny (or dry) then I think you can catch up with them via iPlayer.