Explain this
Maths Connect 1: Interactive Presentations
How the publisher describes it:
“Maths Connect helps teachers deliver interactive lessons, measure pupils' progress with ease and get the very best from students.”
Review by Steve Bishop
In brief:
This provides a useful suit of interactive activities and is adaptable and flexible enough to have a long lifetime in the interactive classroom.
“I would recommend that teachers dare fully expert with the tools before using in the class”
Maths Connect 1 is a suite of interactive presentations for Key Stage 3, suitable for use with an interactive whiteboard or PC and digital projector. It was designed to complement the Maths Connect series of books published by Heinemann, but it could work in conjunction with any maths scheme.
It has two main sections: ‘Teaching Tools’ and ‘Lesson and Lesson Plans’. The tools section has a number of pre-configured tools, for example the ‘Dice’ option provides a range of statistical simulations including the throwing of two dice and the flipping of two coins, the results of which are recorded automatically in a tally and frequency table.
The lessons plans option provides 90 pre-prepared lessons. There are lesson and support plans for the different topics at support, core and extension level.
The Algebra 1 for the core tier has three interactive lessons: sequences; investigating sequences; and function machines. The ‘print’ option enables the tutor to print out reasonably detailed instructions for the activity, including teacher questions and expected pupil answers. I would certainly recommend that teachers do print this out and to make sure they are fully expert with the tools before using in the class, as many of the tools are not intuitive. Pressing the ‘run’ button then leads to the interactive activities. Each of these starts with the objectives and key words in pupil-friendly language and ends with a blank page, where the Maths Connect tools can be used.
I couldn’t find anywhere where the activities were referenced to the National Numeracy Strategy’s Framework.
In short, this provides a useful suit of interactive activities and is adaptable and flexible enough to have a long lifetime in the interactive classroom.
