teacher5adaysketch

#teacher5adaysketch – Use a tablet or computer

The Storeroom Blog, Thoughts and Ideas /

Today’s prompt got me thinking about use of technology and continuing advantages of pencil and paper methods, even with the leaps and bounds in computing. I like to think of myself as being fairly computer-literate, but I found the sketch today a real challenge – I did it on my tablet, using the Bamboo Paper app. It’s supposed to be a self-portrait from my Twitter picture, but I’ll hold my hands up now and say it’s really not the best thing I’ve ever done. I think my limited skills are somewhat better when drawing on actual paper than trying to do the same thing virtually.

Technology is great in the classroom – a few examples I can think of include my mini-webcam, which I use to photograph and display pupils’ work, my interactive whiteboard and the maths tools on Promethean Studio, which are great for demonstrating constructions, and the growth of excellent revision sites like Hegarty Maths and YouTube tutorials, which mean that pupils can access a teacher’s help outside of lessons. Then there’s the fact that I can communicate with and get teaching ideas from the community of maths teachers on Twitter, via Staffrm and the TES resources section – it’s much easier to share resources now that I imagine it was twenty years ago.

Despite all this, I still use the “normal” whiteboard in my classroom every day. I tend to create a PowerPoint/Flipchart for most lessons I teach, but these are very basic and used to scaffold the sequence of activities for the lesson. While there are some beautifully designed electronic resources out there, I steer away from anything that’s very step-by-step, because I feel like it interrupts the flow of the lesson – it becomes more about me delivering a lecture than responding to what pupils are saying or thinking. Most of the time, I pre-write any examples I’m going to use, so I can choose them carefully to sequence what I want pupils to discover, but I don’t pre-write solutions – that’s done by hand, either annotating on top of an electronic resource or on the standard whiteboard I have by my electronic version.

I’m the same with books – a couple of years ago, a friend gave me his old Kindle with over a hundred books already loaded on. I’ve picked it up once and really didn’t get on with it – I found the experience of not being able to turn the pages of the book really offputting. Since then, I must have bought and read another thirty-odd paper books, all of which require storage space (see small selection in header photo!). The advantages of electronic books are apparent, but I still can’t quite take that part of my life completely online either.
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It’ll be interesting to see how technology and education develop together in the future, but I’m still convinced that some learning has to stay rooted in a physical environment.

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#teacher5adaysketch – Film or book

The Storeroom Blog /

I apologise in advance for this – I’ve just done it in the only half-hour I have spare all day. All morning and most of the afternoon was spent in the garden, painting the outside of the house and both front and back doors, and husband and I are off to games night at a friend’s in about 40 minutes.I admit, I’m slightly scared of what I’ve drawn – husband’s reaction was “you’ll upset people if you put that on Twitter” – so as a result it’s only going on here. The film I picked was Donnie Darko, as it was my favourite film as a teenager and I still think it’s flipping brilliant. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know the obvious thing to pick is a picture of Frank. Unfortunately I’d drawn half the face before I realised the ears weren’t going to fit, and I really didn’t have time to start again! If you haven’t seen it, this zombie bunny rabbit mask will mean very little to you – but it is honestly worth a watch.

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#teacher5adaysketch – Choose a piece of art

Enrichment and history, The Storeroom Blog /

Today’s prompt was “choose a piece of art with one idea of you might use it in the classroom”. As a maths teacher, I’ve predictably picked my favourite piece of artwork by M.C. Escher – when I was little, someone bought me a postcard book of his work, and I still have the postcards in my display folder. 

​A few years ago, I got a jigsaw puzzle of this monstrosity:

It is hands-down the most difficult jigsaw I’ve ever done – and I’m including the (incorrectly titled) “Worlds Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle – Frogs” in that list. I smashed the frog puzzle in the time between Christmas and New Year; the Escher one took nearly three months and had two cups of tea split over it before it was finished (jigsaw pieces go weirdly thin when they’ve been dunked in tea!).
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My favourite Escher picture, though, is Reptiles (which, incidentally, also comes in puzzle form) – I’m pretty bad at analysing art and whatever, so I can’t really explain why I like it so much – I just do!

If we’re spotting the maths in this, though, there’s a couple of things I can talk about:

1. The obvious link to tessellation with the lizards on the page. So many of Escher’s pictures use tessellation very cleverly, and they really enrich a lesson on tessellation and angles – in fact, I enjoy teaching it so much that I’m going to carry on doing so, even though tessellation is no longer technically examined at GCSE.
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2. The paperweight is a dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids and (using my geeky gamer-type knowledge here) one of only five possible fair dice shapes. If you’re going to extend work on tessellation in 2D, what better way than to talk about why there are only five possible completely regular three-dimensional shapes, and I love how this picture ties them together so well.

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