Well technology has taken it’s next leap with the launch of ChatGPT Open access AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s currently a research release to gain feedback on AI’s ability to ‘benefit all humanity’. I’m not here to make any political or controversial statements about AI, but I was super intrigued about what it could potentially offer.…
I’ve been wondering recently about how to help students make connections between concepts and to their prior knowledge in the classroom. We know that mathematical ideas are connected and often build on each other, so how to ensure students ‘see’ these links? I think we have been moving in a good ‘direction of understanding’ in…
How do I create a lesson sequence? This is a question I get asked a lot, both by pre-service and in-service primary teachers. You may feel you are great at designing single lesson ideas that are related or whole programs, but maybe the flow could be better – more conceptually than topically related. For example,…
‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ is the classic adage interpreted to mean that multiple ideas or concepts can be expressed often by a single image. Or that an image may be a better way of explaining or expressing a complex idea than using words (verbally). For me, a picture is worth a thousand…
A few weeks ago I shared a tweet about arrays after discovering a great website (sineofthetimes.org) by Daniel Scher (@dpscher). I really appreciated the dynamic application he had created using Web Sketchpad to make and explore arrays. It’s quite simple in its design but I think that’s the beauty of it – no additional distractions…
The count down is on! Students will be back to school in NSW over the next few weeks. Our teachers have done a phenomenal job juggling preparing classes for both online and for returning to school. For many it will be like starting the year again, assessing and gauging where our students are at -…
This week’s blog highlights some of the great messages and ideas shared at MANSW’s online conference Different By Design that took place on Saturday. Although we would have loved to have experienced the conference in person, the online event in its place this year was still a way to bring together teachers and educators and…
With school holidays approaching in many parts of Australia, I thought it was timely to recommend some holiday reading for primary teachers of mathematics. Last year I wrote a blog titled Keeping up with the current that focused on three mathematics education research articles for teachers to explore. The current blog provides a few recent…
This week’s blog is inspired by research that James Russo, Toby Russo, and Leicha Bragg have recently conducted (and will present at the upcoming MERGA online conference) about factors that influence the mathematical games teachers’ choose. They propose a number of factor themes related to why teachers choose specific games – I will utilise these themes to share a…
This week’s blog is a continuation of my reflections on MANSW’s PreK-8 conference held in March 2021. The first blog Noticing the mathematics: Making the connections Part 1 shared insights and lessons learnt from the two Friday masterclasses. Part 2 will share some of the ideas gathered from Saturday workshops I attended and the morning…