MAV - Lectures and Support

When they redeveloped Docklands here in Melbourne, they built a beautiful library on a dock. They weren't brilliantly imaginative when they named it, but it doesn't seem to have mattered too much - The Library At The Dock is proving to be a great hub for all sorts of learning communities that can converge on the city.

One of those communities is the Mathematical Association of Victoria. Each year, they host a series of free lectures for anyone interested in Mathematics. Last year, knowing our school was looking into branching into 3D printing as a Design and Technology and Mathematics endeavour, I was looking for professional development to help me work out what direction this might take in my classroom.

MAV came up on a Google search, and I registered for a free lecture on 3D printing and Mathematics as presented by Dr. Burkard Polster and Dr. Marty Ross. It was a great afternoon, with lots of interesting information about the evolution of 3D printing and how 3D printing gets used now. While they were presenting, I was making some connections to curriculum links, and I came out of it with some really interesting ideas and new concepts to chew over.

MAV offers really interesting topics for their lectures. Last year they also offered 'Was Pythagoras Chinese?' and 'The Mathematics of Futurama'. This year, so far they've done 'The Mathematics of the Simpsons' and 'Footy Maths', and they still have 'Calculus In One Easy Lesson' and 'Yin and Yang Maths' coming up.

If you're interested in changing up how you think about maths in the classroom, as well as updating your own mathematical knowledge and understanding, you can register for the remaining lectures here. MAV also offers support to teachers with lesson plans and resources for differentiated instruction under the 'Teach Maths for Understanding' or 'TM4U' package as part of their membership.

Making Maths... More... with Vi Hart

A while ago, while looking for an interesting way to teach students about fractals, I came across this amazing video.

It was made by the very talented Vi Hart, a 'recreational mathemusician' of agnostic gender who has worked for/with the Khan Academy as well as being an academic in her own right. Videos on the Vi Hart channel cover a lot of high school and university maths concepts, but they're built from the basics, and often revolve around easily accessible/visible/constructible more advanced concepts. My students may not understand all the mathematical theory in the videos on the Vihart channel, but they recognise the representations of concepts like hexaflexagons and infinity trees and how they fit (at a very basic level) with what they're learning in primary school.

The video above is still their favourite, though! We had a table filling up pinecones, flowers, weird seedpods and photos of vegetables and fruit from home after watching it.

If you're looking for a way to capture your students' attention (particularly your bright little buttons!) and get them wanting to explore the maths they're learning in class more deeply, or in ways they can see and touch in the world around them, Vi Hart is a phenomenal hook, line and sinker. You can also check out Vi's website here and follow Vi's Twitter feed here.

Improve.edu.au

Our unit leader and I have been trialling combining our classes in Mathematics so that groups who need consolidation get the extra exposure to course material that they need, and those who need stretching can zoom out with lateral extension tasks.In order to give students who need extension extra room to show us what they can do, we've started using Improve as an addendum to the available Mathletics topic pre-tests (Are You Ready?) and post-tests (Test) that we'd been using to group and benchmark students.

Improve is accessible to teachers working for most states and territories using your Scootle username and password. Teachers can set up tests from a question bank, added to and edited by teachers from around the country. You can share your tests with your colleagues if you have their email address, so that if like us you are comparing cohort results you have a common platform from which to do so. The report on results from each test (pre and post) is presented as a graph so you can easily see the average from each test, the improvement each student has made, etc.

Awesome easy-to-interpret graph representation of results

Students sit the pre-test using a password and test PIN, answering the questions and also rating how confident they are about the answer they've given. They then have activities assigned to them based on their results, then take the post test after they've finished them. The activities are pulled from a number of different websites, including the NLVM, and the students love them (especially the jigsaw ones where they have to solve problems to remove pieces of a puzzle to reveal a picture!).

A few small flaws, one of which I have given feedback about already - if a child accidentally presses 'take the test again' (to take the post-test) after finishing the activities and then clicks back, they get zero, and there's no way to just re-set the test for them without erasing the class' data and completed activities and re-setting the whole unit for everyone. In this day and age, with differentiated learning as highly-thought-after as it is, I don't think you can afford not to have this function built in.

It's a good add-on to other online assessment methods, and we'll continue to use it while we are streaming our classes. Another great benefit to having access to Scootle!