Computers are a great way to enhance student learning and there are so many great resources out there there’s really no excuse for not letting the students loose! And there’s no excuse for letting them sit on mymaths for an hour (my pet hate!), so here are NumberLoving’s favourite computer lessons.
Geogebra is a brilliant software package which is totally free and allows students to explore all sorts of mathematical concepts. I have made some ready to go lessons (available here) on a range of topics from circle theorems to adding fractions. There are also hundreds of resources on the geogebra website which are all free to access.
My favourite lesson in geogebra is getting students to create some transformation patterns (instructions here) which they can then manipulate to investigate the effect of transformations on length and angle. You can also use these patterns in the following lesson to get students to identify which transformations were used.
I discovered this website a while ago and it transformed by computer lessons, it is very simple and allows you to produce your own website with instructions, links and downloadable content. This is where I link in everything which I want students to do.
This is a great website which allows students to post virtual sticky notes on a message board, this is one made by my year 10 class whilst investigating straight line graphs in geogebra. You can ask them to post their findings or any questions.
Autograph is a fabulous piece of software which has endless applications in Mathematics teaching, if you want to learn more I would suggest you have a look at the tutorials by Mr Barton – you will be an expert in no time.
Excel
Excel is a great tool for graph drawing but students find this pretty simple so it’s often a good way to get them drawing graphs quickly in order to compare some data. This investigation by Nrich is great, if students want to draw boxplots you can give them this template otherwise it gets a bit tricky.
The national strategies have loads of really good lessons using excel which are really worth a look at. This is a good resource in which students can use trial and improvement to find square and cube roots, and this one where they investigate using trial and improvement to find solutions to an equation.
If you are looking for a little starter for students in the computer room then dwatson802 has shared loads of interactive worksheets on the TES which are really worth a download, they even mark themselves too!
World Maths Day and Sumdog
If you are not signed up for world maths day then do it NOW! Registration is free and students love going on this to compete against other pupils from around the world. They can practice for the next month until the challenge on the 7th of march. If your students like it then Sumdog is a similar website which is free all year round, yay!
My students love xtranormal, it is basically a website where they can make their own cartoon animations. They will not need any instruction on this, it is very intuitive. You could ask them to make a revision cartoon, or act out a distance time graph or loads of other ideas. Sign up yourself but pick a generic login like ‘year9maths’ and then they can all login using this.
If you have a computer lesson you love doing then please leave us a comment below! Get in touch @numberloving and check out our NumberLoving Store for free and premium resources.
Great resources! Thanks 🙂
This is a great post – I’ll definately use the wallwisher site when doing investigations on the computer. It would be a good idea for students to put down general tips and hints for other students. For example, if they figure out how to do something on say geogebra or gapminder.
I’ve done something similar on geogebra with my students and posted some of the results on my blog.