Granted, the presence of mobile phones can be a problem in many classrooms, but the fact that every student has such a powerful piece of equipment in their pocket should be overlooked at your peril!
The app store is a maths teachers dream with all sorts of fantastic little resources such as compasses for when you teach bearings, reaction time testers for ordering decimals and revision quizzes for KS4. Go on and have a look, you will be inspired.
Amongst all the apps one of the greatest has to be the QR code scanner. You see these little codes popping up all over the place. You scan the code using the app and could be sent some text, a picture, or you may be directed to a webpage.
One of the best generators can be found here . It’s free to use, so you just select what you want to happen when it is scanned and hey presto you’ve got a QR code, the colours can be changed too which is a nice touch. So, how can these be used in the classroom? Well the presentation beneath should answer that question!
[slideshare id=8055885&doc=qrcode-110521201458-phpapp02]
Not 100% sure if there are killer Maths reasons as yet though…which one do you like the most in the Math setting?
In my book as long as it engages students then that’s reason enough! However my favourite so far has been using a compass app to do a treasure hunt out in the yard when I studied bearings with my year 11’s, they all remembered what a bearing was a couple of weeks later so I count that as a success. For the QR codes, using the handy maths website to make instant graphs is a great lesson.
When teaching rotational symmetry I’ve took classes out into the car park to take pictures on their phones of wheels on cars with different rotational symmetries then come back to the class to sketch them and write the orders of rotational symmetry for each
That’s a great idea! Homework could then be set to do the same at home/out of school!