App round-up

What with all the rain, I've been bored enough to do a quick hunt through iTunes and interweb-land to see if there's anything new in the way of Maths Apps - or rather Math Apps, as they tend to be called. I try to check every now and then - here's an old post on another blog giving a few good 'uns already - as these can be useful for telling kids/parents about. Or, of course, you could use them in class, if you happen to have an iPod and a way of displaying the output. (If you have an iPhone this is easy-peasy, by the way, but for Luddites like me with a wind-up iPod Touch, the best I can manage is to display the output using a visualiser. Don't have a visualiser? Lobby your Headteacher/HoD immediately!)

Anyway, I found a handful of decent enough apps, all free. First up, the good people of Loughborough University, who have developed "Mathscard" apps which give formulae for GCSE and for A/As Level.

Yes, yes, I know this is not much cop for a Scottish curriculum, but a formula is a formula, at the end of the day. And did I mention the free bit?

Next - and very much for the lower end of the market - comes a company calling itself Maths Tappers. Hmm. They have a few free apps to play with but the one that caught my eye is their "equivalents" app, which gets pupils to match fractions and percentages.

In my experience, the more practice pupils get at this sort of stuff, the better. You bet your life I'll be recommending the hell out of this one to all and sundry.

Now, is it still raining...? Yeesh.

A bit of background

Well, summer is almost upon us, and the end of term is approaching just as surely as DVDs of “Braveheart” are showing in History classrooms across Scotland. Not long to go now, folks, yet already the next session begins to intrude. Ah, the joys of the June start to a new timetable, to say nothing of the three-day P7 visit. And just today I took delivery of my new Teacher’s Planner for session 2012-2013. I’m sad to admit I was more than a tad excited by this, and immediately set about colouring in the holidays in the calendar at the front.

But back to this blog… I’m still very much in the setting things up phase, so I may as well give a bit of background, because to a certain extent We Have Been Here Before. It may seem odd to link to some old blogs of mine, but what the heck, if it can bring any form of insight or pleasure then I’m up for it. 

And so, the list of blogs:

The Proof Is Out There
I’m still proud of that title. Yes, here is where it all began, with the Top Ten Mathematics Textbooks of all time (go look, it hasn’t changed much), and hymns of praise to marker pens of a certain brand. Eventually film reviews began to creep their way into TPIOT, which led to the launch of…

Maths Teacher Goes To The Movies
… which does exactly what it says on the tin. And, I might add, was once mentioned in the Times Education Supplement Scotland. However as my movie-going began to wane, so did the blog. Next up then:

maths4edinburgh
I’m still embarrassed by that title. But appropriately enough this was an attempt to run a blog for teachers in and around Edinburgh that would highlight events, resources etc and generally be A Good Thing. It ran for quite a while and had, I like to think, something of a cult following. And no, that’s not a misprint. M4E is hosted on edublogs though, and eventually I got frustrated with the near-constant demands to upgrade to the Pro version (kerching) and the warnings of imminent memory death if I didn’t. And so I vowed to leave, heading off in search of a better life. Not having much in the way of any offers, I decided to head back to good old Blogger, though I do admit it’s taken me a while to get here. I did consider relaunching TPIOT but in the end I decided that a fresh start was called for. And so here we are.

OK, that's enough nostalgia. Onwards! As well as sharing resources, I do hope to take time to ruminate, fulminate and prevaricate over this whole business of education - maths education in particular. But right now, I can head some Maltesers calling...

Traffic

My excitement knows no bounds, though to be fair I am seeing a doctor about it. This is a screengrab from the rather wonderful "Traffic" program, which forms part of the package The Language of Functions and Graphs. You'll find this in a variety of places - it's in the DfE's Standards Unit, for one thing - but it's taken me ages to find the actual program as opposed to the worksheets. Steps forward and take a bow, then, the wonderful people at the STEM resource library hingmy.

I remember this from back in the day, when it was part of the award-winning package called (seriously) The Shell Red Box, by Malcolm Swan. I used the wee computer program with a BBC micro - man, we were cutting edge at Beeslack High School in the 80's, I tell you - but it's good to see the graphics have been spruced up a bit.

My advice to you is just to get in and play, but be warned as you'll have to set up an account with the STEM folk first. Fear not, it's free. I used the first few examples in the program with my S3 class as we continued our journey (see what I did there) with Distance/Speed/Time, and you'll struggle to find a better introduction to Distance/Time graphs. You can play the situation through without the snapshots and graph and invite pupils to work together and agree their version of the graph. Show-me-boards ahoy!

And they're off!

OK, so clearly we have to do a bit of "welcome, welcome" stuff, what with this being a new blog and all. I also have to point in the general direction of my other blogs, just in case anyone still needs to catch up on the world-famous "Maths Teacher Goes To The Movies" blog (as featured in TES, folks!). But stuff that for a game of soldiers and on with the motley. There'll be time for hellos later.

So I'm teaching Distance/Speed/Time to my new S3 class, and I decided to look for some slightly more imaginative starters, as you do. A quick hunt round t'internet brought up Usain Bolt's world record time of  9.58 seconds for the 100m, set in Berlin in 2009. It's a nice enough question to ask the class to work out Bolt's speed in kilometres per hour, but an even better one is: should he have been arrested for speeding? It seems that in residential areas in Germany there's often a speed limit of 30kph.

There's even a clip you can show from youtube (along with annoying adverts, for which apologies):

See what your class think. I won't spoil things by telling you the answer.