The Storeroom Blog

Pick of Twitter 18/04/15

18/4/2015

@missradders ~ Link to a blog post from Disappointed Idealist about the issues with SATs resits; a very thought-provoking piece from a parent/teacher. Given that a significant number of pupils get to secondary school in Year 7 with real confidence issues with maths, I can't see that getting them to resit a standardised test is really going to improve that problem.

@Kris_Boulton ~ Link to Tom Bennett's article on the TES about evidence based education research and the inherent issues with this. I found this really interesting to read on the back of last Wednesday's #mathschat "How to bring research mathematics and other research into the classroom?".

@srcav ~ Blog post about using incorrect examples of prisms and the problems this can cause. I admit, this had me checking some of my resources this morning! His posts about incorrect teaching of BIDMAS and rounding are also really good.

@aap03102 ~ Interesting facts about Pythagorean triples, which reminded me that I need to do this similar investigation again at some point this year.

Chris Smith on Twitter

Finally, this cute little comic from @spikedmath made me giggle a lot. I wonder if this could be the key to getting A Level pupils to stop mixing up sine and cosine graphs...

Spiked Math on Twitter

I've been teaching trigonometry from scratch with Year 10 this week, so thought it would be a good opportunity to blog about the way I introduce sine, cosine and tangent. This is another sequence of lessons I love teaching, because it's one of my tried and tested approaches and seems to work well each year.

We started the lesson with a few quick questions on Pythagoras' theorem (I used these ones). I taught them Pythagoras' theorem way back in November, but most of them remembered how to solve the problems with a bit of prompting. I was aiming to refresh identification and use of the word "hypotenuse" and also provide a link from something they'd previously learned about right-angled triangles. After we'd done this, it was on to the first bit of the trigonometry introduction!

Pick of Twitter 11/04/15

11/4/2015

Only a few goodies this week, mostly because I've been neglecting Twitter in favour of enjoying the second week of my Easter holidays; normal service resuming next week!

@MrChalal01 ~ Link to "What can we learn from Dylan Wiliam and AfL" via Pragmatic Reform. A great blog post looking at what happens when educational research gets hijacked.
@DrBennison ~ Link to "Maths Matters" from IMA; some fantastic resources for bringing current maths research into the classroom.
@chalkdustmag ~ First issue of a great new project from some students at UCL. I really enjoyed the article on Intersteller, gravity and black holes. (I know this was published two weeks ago, but I'm somewhat behind the times!)
@BetterMaths ~ Link to the Goldacre report on research in education. Made for interesting reading as part of this week's #mathschat on bringing educational research to the classroom.

Fermat's Last Theorem

9/4/2015

This lesson began as a starter activity to work with square numbers; I was after some history of maths enrichment stuff, and decided that Fermat's Last Theorem was a great way of getting pupils to practise working with them. This starter quickly snowballed into an entire lesson, and I've used it loads since then. I decided to write about it today because it also links really nicely into one of the things I've been thinking and blogging about, namely sizes of infinity.

Twitter Card tutorial for Weebly sites

9/4/2015

I've been seeing more and more beautifully presented links popping up in my Twitter feed recently, so decided to research further. I do struggle with the limitations of Weebly's blogging features occasionally, but I managed to get this working well so thought I'd post in case there are any other Weebly users in a similar position.

A bit of quick digging around on Google revealed that these links are called Twitter Cards, and there's a full tutorial from the developers on that page. As usual, it's written for people who can access and edit the HTML for their page, but the fiddle to make this work for Weebly was surprisingly easy.

How Big is Infinity (or how I learned to stop worrying and love set theory)

9/4/2015

I'm currently a few chapters into Tony Crilly's book "How Big is Infinity"; I picked this up during a shopping trip on Easter Saturday, following an instruction from a shopping buddy that we should all "treat ourselves to something lovely" - I think she had smellies or clothes in mind; she seemed quite nonplussed that my treat was a book about maths. I'm really enjoying it so far - it's easy to dip in and out of, the chapters are quite short and it's written in real layman's terms, so it doesn't involve too many headaches or looking things up elsewhere.

Sun + Book + Coffee = Happy Maths Teacher

Pick of Twitter 04/04/15

4/4/2015

Got a whole fortnight's worth of stuff to fit into this post as Easter holidays mean I've had a little break from frequent Twitter checking! Here are my picks from the last two weeks:

Pick of Twitter 18/04/15

Teaching trigonometry (1)

Pick of Twitter 11/04/15

Fermat's Last Theorem

Twitter Card tutorial for Weebly sites

How Big is Infinity (or how I learned to stop worrying and love set theory)

Pick of Twitter 04/04/15

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