More tips from Jo Morgan
Video transcript
right joe tip number three please right this is very much a maths tip okay so this is use calculators from the earliest opportunity so day one of year seven get your students using calculators and i’ll tell you what let’s broaden this out a bit right as science will be loving this as well right you know and yeah geography they’ve not ruled it out yeah and it’s interesting in science because um it’s you know i feel like the math department takes responsibility for calculators in the school we’re the ones who make sure in my school perhaps not in all we’re the ones who make sure that every student has a calculator um and there are that that’s very different ways of doing that depending on what kind of context your score’s in um but we we make sure everyone has a calculator um we make sure they bring it every day and then science kind of piggyback off that don’t they because they’re using them quite a lot um but you know we really and we really have to ensure that calculated usage becomes really fluent because what you end up with and i think we’ve all seen that if you’ve if you’ve got some experience in teaching math you’ve seen that quite sometimes they get to their gcse exam and they’ve got two calculated papers one non-calculator so we have majority calculated work going on and they’ll have a question like fine uh or increase 210 pounds by 35 percent or something and you’ll see them do like a build up method finding that 35 and they got calculated in front of them and they could do it in a second because they know how to use a multiplier and they’ve got a calculator but they’re they’re not reaching for their calculator because they’re not it’s not they haven’t got the habit of doing that in schools where it’s not been built up as a habit since year seven and actually it’s something i really i really work hard on so in my school every student is constantly using their calculator and occasionally we’ll have a lesson where i’ll say look we’re doing fractions today the calculators away because this will normally be on the non-calculated paper i need to know how to do this without a calculator so i won’t say calculate the way i’ll just say you’re not using a calculator today but other than that like 95 of lessons they’ve got the calculator on the desk and they’re just using it fluently they’re picking it up to check things they’re picking it up when they need it um and it’s and it’s just um it’s i just think it’s my students i’m hoping when they get to their year 11 exams will not forget they can use their calculator because they’re so used to using it um and obviously there are they don’t use it at primary school anymore that changed on the on the national curriculum so now um calculators come in in year seven it’s massively engaging to get them using them they love using calculators um and i get that there are really good reasons why schools can’t do or think they can’t do it you know there are um you’ve got uh people lots of people premium students and you’re saying that they you know they can’t afford calculators in which case there’s you know the head of mass needs to be going to srt and say i need a big chunk of that people premium budget that has been assigned to those students exactly for this sort of thing so i can buy a calculator a set of calculators for every class and they can use them in the lessons if not at home i think it’s really important that that we are head to maths are making sure that that people premium budget is being used appropriately and buying calculators is a brilliant use of that budget um and there’ll be some schools where it’s not so much they can’t afford them but the behavior is not good enough or they’re just there isn’t a system in place to make sure they bring them and in which case you just need to tackle these problems rather than ignore them like you just need to find a way of making sure um that every student has a calculator in every lesson lovely joe are five things to say about this before i’m fine just been scribbling them down so the first is um i’ve done if you found this i find it’s the lowest achieving students who are the worst at using their calculator and they’re the ones who need it most so to use your example there of finding 35 percent of 200 you’ll get a student who mentally that’s going to be a real challenge for them to do kind of on paper and stuff but they’re the ones who’ll do it on paper whereas they’re the ones who benefit most from using their calculator and it always just made it when you mark a non-calculator like foundation paper the um sorry a calculator foundation paper the amount of mental methods of the news written methods should have been used it’s just mind-blowing yeah i mean sometimes you’ll see in a calculator paper they’ve done like long multiplication at the sides it’s crazy got it wrong and you think why are you doing that you know i’m like i’m rude i use a calculator but you know it’s like there’s um people i think some people are a little bit precious about yeah well no if they use a calculator too much they’re not going to get they’re not going to practice their arithmetic yeah but there’s plenty of opportunities for them to practice arithmetic and they and they do a lot of arithmetic practice at primary school um and there’s been some research recently that does show that using calculated secondary school um um can really assist um the the broad range of math skills so it’s not hindering them in any way i think there’s a and there’s a little bit of a it’s almost like people think that students can’t become overreliant on calculators because then they’ll stop using their brain but absolutely not like the calculator helps them to oh no it doesn’t help them it um it opens up a whole new load of maths to them so they get to actually do the important math and not be bogged down in all this arithmetic that’s you know we it gets into focus on the right things if they got a calculator to hand that’s good right so that’s point one uh point two again just a very quick one obviously it’s important the kids use the same calculator right we’ve also we’ve all seen this kids coming in with bizarre models of calculator that the granny’s lent them or whatever and then the one they get given in the exam if they don’t have it is just a completely different model they don’t have a clue how to do it that’s that’s obviously uh it goes without saying but this is one you’ve changed my my opinion on this joe um i know you are calculator obsessed and as a result i’m a bit calculator obsessed now so to use i think your fractions examples are a really interesting one so in the past i would never like for the whole fractions unit the kids would have never gone anywhere near their calculators because i think well the whole point of fractions is you’ve got to be able to do it using written methods and so on but now even in something like addition of fractions they would always use the calculator to check their answers and this goes back to what well there’s two things here one it gets them fluent on their calculator yeah two it goes back to what we were saying earlier on about having the answers available right because again that they then have a bespoke answer at the point they’re ready they can check on their calculator so yeah i can’t see an occasion where i wouldn’t want a child having a calculator in their lesson as long as i can trust them you know and the messaging’s right that obviously you’re not going to always be able to use this in the exam but let’s get really fluent with this calculator and it’s your own private chat it’s your own private set of answers yeah then i can only see benefits yeah i agree it’s interesting because i had some year 10s recently we were doing some work on surds and there was a it was a question where they required a lot of manipulation of surds i did see some of them using the calculator to simplify the serves and i said to them like i can it’s good that you know how to do that on your calculator but obviously this whole question would be on a non-calculator exam so you just need to you need to practice the simplifying of thirds and don’t use your calculator to do that but for you because otherwise you know that’s not gonna you’re not gonna know how to do it yourself so there are times where you have to just sort of tell them to yeah you kind of you need to have that maturity don’t you yeah i know you’ve got one on your desk but you need to be mature enough to know that this won’t benefit you if you use it for this particular thing exactly but please do use it to check your answers um it’s interesting about the fractions because i have a there’s a test that i when i give them the end of unit fractions test um we did it this year and it was mixed in after the fractions test had another topic on it where you had to use a calculator and so it was a pain because we had to write a fractions test where it was okay to have a calculator um so that was quite challenging so we did things like um it was a fraction division question but it said you must show your method and that’s fine so then we can check their workings but there was one question on there and i gave a one mark for it and it was um multiplying two mixed numbers and i said you may use a calculator for this one and it was something like um one and a third multiplied by five and two-fifths or something um and as i expected because it always happens about half the class got it wrong and even though it sent you to calculator question um and what they’ve done wrong was they had they don’t even though i had actually told this class hadn’t i hadn’t spent i hadn’t modelled it enough clearly they don’t know that shift and the fraction button gives them a mixed number um so you know if you want to input five and two fifths and use it in a calculation you do shift fraction button and it comes up with the three little boxes yeah if they don’t know that then what they do is they input like five and then they press the fraction button and then they do their two fifths or whatever and that is actually giving them a five multiplied by two fifths so you get totally the wrong answer out there and that’s the sort of thing where it’s such a basic thing but so many students are not told about that and so many students are not told that if you want to input a mixed number you need to do shift and the fraction balance and again it’s probably it’s probably because they haven’t again it fractions is treated as a written topic not a calculated topic yeah yeah and it’s interesting i remember once i took i took over class you’ve been taught pythagoras no it was they’ve been taught um area of a circle and what i saw them doing was um weren’t using the square button they were just doing say radius times radius and it’s not that they didn’t know that it was radius squared it’s they didn’t know that they could use the square and you think that’s like come on show them how to use subscribers i mean and this is again really good useful visualizers to show to model those techniques so it’s like i’m modeling an area of a circle question and i will literally tell you what buttons you should press in your calculator um actually this is another example like you said of where you can get and use your calculators to check answers so um or or to practice other bits of math so for example if i was teaching every circle then i might say right i want your um i want your answers in terms of pi nice and then i also want your answer in decimal form rounded to two decimal places um and so they’re they have to know how to do 16 times pi on their calculator which again needs modeling because pi is ridiculously hidden in a shift button for no reason and so you have to model that and you have to model the pressing the sd button to turn into a decimal and then you then need them to round it which is testing another math skill and in fact you could even do that in a lesson on rounding seven before they’ve even done circles because you could say right we’re gonna do some rounding practice today but we’re gonna do it by doing uh 16 times pi press the sd button and bound that number so you could actually use like for rounding calculators are amazing because you get them to do a whole load of calculator stuff around the answer and the key topic in the lesson is practice rounding but at the same time they’re just practicing using their calculators and they’re getting really used to using them they’ve got the habit of using them lovely stuff right final two points on this so um the first thing to say is i have a bit of a theory on this you know how um obviously the gcse used to be one calc and one non-calc paper and now it’s one calc and um two calculator papers so it must be a nightmare as you were saying for the gcse examiners to come up with all these questions where well yeah it’s hard isn’t it to write a calculate a question where kids are allowed to use a calculator but also they can’t just kind of bang it straight into the calculator if that makes sense so i think that’s a real challenge and i think you can do a fair bit of paper two and three in the math gcse if you are a bit of a whiz on your calculator can you do some amazing stuff on the calculators these days right so obviously you can do all your tables of values stuff and for plotting straight line graphs you can do all your quadratic formula stuff there’s when you get to a level you can do even more stuff so it’s i think it’s a real wow moment when you show the kids you teach them how to do it you know using written methods and then you say right now i’m going to show you how you can do this on your calculator now as you say you’re not always going to have your calculator with you for doing this but up skilling the kids to do some of the amazing functions that you can use on the calculator i think it’s a really really nice thing to do and when you get slick on using your calculator it’s incredible right some of the stuff you can do yeah it is and the thing is yeah i’m not like i’m not massive i’m a bit old-fashioned in a way you know i like the students who use calculators from early on but i i don’t like it that i don’t like it the more expensive calculators give advantages yeah that really really annoys me so all of our students have the 10 pound you know the classic casio that kind of everyone has now um but it frustrates me that they can have a graphical calculator and it can give them huge advantages and that really really annoys me i just feel like it should be a level playing field but even the old like this old class this whole classic here that the class wiz you know that’s i call that the a-level class with yeah yeah i mean even that the stuff you can do on that it’s mind-blowing these days right yeah yeah absolutely well yeah like you say a lot of students aren’t taught these little things and i think that the um the good example is the fact the prime factorization yeah yeah i had a student i had a group of students a couple years ago and they were chops at year 11 they’re absolutely flying through practice just before the gcse and they had a question and it said something like it was asking them if a number was prime and they had to know whether a number was prime and it was a huge number it was something like 700 and something or i know it was a really big number and they got stuck on this bit of the question it was a big problem-solving question but they got stuck because they didn’t know if that was prime now they know how to check off a numbers prime but you know that’s going to take forever so so that’s when i said well you do know the prime factorization button and um and i said well you can actually you know and then thing is i said it shows the prime factorization but then they need the understanding to know whether that shows its price so you know if they’re if they’re putting in a number and it’s saying so if you put in um 16 and it comes up with 2 to the power 4 that’s clearly not a prime number because we’ve got these factors of 2. whereas if we put in a number and you try and use that button and it’s just coming back with the same number that’s because it has no other factors to list um so it’s just it’s a really um it’s a really powerful part of teaching prime factorization to get using that button and to look at what that tells you about numbers um but i just again loads of students will never have seen that um and i don’t think it offers a huge advantage in having it in gcse available but it does help build understanding and it’s just a really nice teaching tool for reasoning to do with primes absolutely and my final point about calculators joe this goes back to something we were saying earlier as well you’ve got to be able to visually show the kids the buttons that you as a teacher are pressing on the calculator so whether you do this using an emulator or whether you bang it under the visualizer it’s not enough i don’t if i’m stood at the front tapping i like the kids have got different answers and then i’ve got to then try and figure out why they’ve got the different answers whereas a big old one on the board or stuck under the visualizer it’s the key isn’t it oh absolutely yeah it’s really interesting when they come out of a different answer on the calculator um and sometimes like uh it’s like oh you just had to do it might be a trig question and then they had to do a closed bracket or something are they um or quite often it’s where they um haven’t squared a negative properly and yeah it’s common it’s not mistake so once you get experience you can kind of say if they say to you myth i’ve got a different answer if you know what the common mistakes are then you can say just look at what’s on your screen because that’s a good thing these new characters the way i still think it’s amazing that you can go back and see what they typed in so i’ll say right like you know don’t use your cursor to go back look at what you typed in did you put brackets around that negative two squared or whatever yeah so it’s that it’s that kind of thing where um you get it gets the point where you can um as a teacher you can predict where they’re going to mess up on their calculator and you can preempt that um but yeah i absolutely agree they need to see it modeled properly and and you know i the emulators are expensive or you know you can get them free if you buy if you’re gonna buy calculators to sell or to give to your year group you do get the emulators for free from casio or used to anyway um but yeah if you don’t have that then absolutely and a calculator onto a visualizer um works wonders but yeah they actually you know i i’ll literally say to them type this in now check the number on your screen tell me if that’s not what you’ve got and i’ll come to you yes you know we’re very i’m very specific and like take the time to make sure that i haven’t just told them to put it in a calculator but i’ve checked they’ve got the right thing on their screen when they’ve done that final word on calculator we’re old me and you everybody everybody knows yeah i’m still blown away a big game changer in the world of calculators would be was when fractions looked like fractions because when i was in school and stuff it was the little l’s right it was like you know what like two thirds was two l threes like whatever the calculators could do fractions i was like this is a yeah i agree and i’ve still got students that we’ve got you know that was ridiculous our uniform supplier put calculators on the website so that when parents were buying unicorn come in year six they were like oh there’s a cupcake on this website we’ll buy that and it was like some hedix rubbish like absolutely nonsense and um and so we have some students who would obviously we’ve now told uniform supplier to get rid of that because that’s not the calculator we want to use and then they join in year seven and we say right you have to have this casio but yeah any of my students have got that rubbish calculator they when we get to fractions like they’re they’ll say to me what’s this on my screen i’m so sorry you’ve got that calculator but yeah i agree i am still um i’m still impressed with the i love the way that it can go that that sd bus i don’t know what people call it no i do button yeah i wish it had a proper name it wasn’t fc on it like um but i i like the way that if your answer is a mixed number you can convert between mixed number improper fraction and decimals from that form just by pressing it and i just love that yeah because like you say the calculator’s from our day and it also the order used to be different didn’t it yeah i used to have to with trick i had to put in the angle and then press yeah sometimes i just press that sd button just for a bit of a laugh just kind of flick in between that makes me happy and i should say i don’t think helix is going to be sponsoring this podcast any time i don’t even know if it is