More tips from Jo Morgan
Video transcript
what’s your fourth tip please right tip number four use visual aids including props images and online chores to bring explanations alive oh okay right tell me more about this um so again i’m going to talk from a sort of math perspective but um i think this probably applies in lots of other subjects as well particularly um science and well lots of subjects geography all sorts of things um i i remember going to see a science lesson a few years ago and the teacher was talking about a balloon and he was talking about filling a balloon with air and there was no balloon in the room i just thought he was talking about filling a balloon with air and he did not fill a balloon with air and it’s a very very very simple thing to do um what i’ve done recently is i’ve taught a lot of volume and surface area i just happened to teach it like similar topics to three year groups and when i was teaching surface area um i found a shoe box at home and i covered my shoebox in paper this took about five minutes i’m not someone who’s gonna sit at home and spend ages making props for my lessons but i covered my shoebox in paper and i labeled the sides the faces sorry abcdef and then when i came is that right f um and then when i came in um to school i had my prop for surface area um when uh whenever i see a cylinder pringles tubes are great i bring it into my classroom and i have a drawer full of cylinders and then when i’m talking about surface area of a cylinder i’m sure lots of i’m sure i hope all my features do this i get a piece of paper and i wrap it around that cylinder and then i unwrap it and say hey look what’s this oh it’s a rectangle and what’s the length of that rectangle you know so i’m sure most teachers do that sort of thing but basically props are really really powerful and um and i use props alongside um alongside uh animations and alongside visuals so i think these things will work together um but i do think um you know i’m always on the lookout for things i can use as props um and sometimes i don’t work like i remember when i was a trainee or an nqt and i decided i wanted to make props for 3d pythagoras and i used i bought pipe cleaners online old-school crafting tools and i made a cuboid out of pipe cleaners and then made that kind of space diagonal and it was just rubbish i mean it was a slinky rubbish that didn’t work at all and now um i talk about the room we’re in and i i talk to the students about the classroom and i talk about the space diagonal and i go literally like they think i’m crazy because i run across the room and i go and stand in one corner and i talk about the other corner in the top end i sort of try and point to it i’m not sure enough and i talk about the space like that so now i’m kind of using the classroom as a problem so you know we at once i mean i haven’t done once um when i was doing vectors through year 13 and you have to do i can’t even remember because i haven’t taught it in so long but i remember i once attached a bit of uh wool from one corner of the room to the other to demonstrate whatever it was i was teaching i couldn’t remember but um so i don’t i don’t do this very much but in terms of like things that take a bit of effort to do because i haven’t got time to do it but there are some topics where without a prop you’re really you’re really not helping your students with understanding a concept um now like i said it doesn’t have to be a prop though it can be um a a meter ruler it’s a good example of a visual like how can you teach units without for the entire lesson waving a meter ruler around because i don’t put that need to water down when i’m teaching you this in fact i pick up the meter ruler in many many lessons and then i like sort of i like pointing around with it but really i’m trying to say to them this is what a meter looks like and i say it so much surely they can never possibly forget what the meter wallet looks like because i think i’m a crazy person that’s just always saying this is a meter don’t forget um and then things like um uh lining people like if you’re gonna if you’re gonna talk about the concept of a median i don’t this i don’t necessarily get students out of their seats i don’t like doing that anymore but it used to it might have been the time where i lined them up but now i might say right i want you to visualize a line of students and we’re going to line them up in order of what they got on their last maths exam i would never do this to you because this is cruel but let’s imagine that i am a horrible teacher and i’ve got the person with the lowest mark standing over here and this person got 43 percent on their matters down and next to them i’ve got a person who got 45 they did a bit better i got them all lined up and then right over by this wall over here this person got 100 this kind of person is really pleased that simon gets this wall and everyone’s thinking oh my god she’s never going to do this issue and and then i said i’ve got them all picturing this line of students and then i’ve said right so what’s the median score let’s find the student standing on that line let’s picture that student and they’re standing in the middle and they’re looking they’ve got the same amount of people over here they’ve got the same amount of people over here and that student’s score is the medium so this is an example of using it’s not even a visual because i haven’t got the students up there but it’s a visualization um so so that’s one part of it but i i also mentioned um online tools and it’s really what’s really interesting craig is that when i did my pgce i reckon like the only thing they taught me on my pgc was that i should learn to be a geogebra expert like this was the one thing they said a million times they were like and at the time it was german just sketch pads and geogebra and obviously now we’ve got stuff like um desmos and we have um well i suppose there’s autograph and uh what else there’s loads of stuff there’s loads of cool tools you can use to um to do um like dynamics um software that you can use to show geometry um and i have never i mean i know you’re a bit of an expert on these things autograph things like that but i’ve never learned how to build things on that yeah and i don’t think it matters because you can just google it and someone else has done it for you so that i will google um surface area of a cylinder geogebra and i find that some lovely person has made a geogebra that where i can move a little cider along and it unwraps that on the board so i would use that as well as a physical prop and i think that a lot of teachers don’t know that you can google geogebra and other people have made all these amazing things like even last week i was teaching conquering triangles that didn’t occur to me that if you google geogebra congruent triangles there’s some really cool stuff you can use um and basically you can use dynamic software to explain mass concepts without having to know how to use dynamic software because lovely people have all put it online for us right so yes i’m talking about dynamic software i’m talking about actual props and i’m talking about visuals um basically anything to help our students get over and remember and understand the concepts we’re trying to explain i love it right a few things about this so i couldn’t agree couldn’t agree more with you and geogebra has come on leaps and bounds right the things that people can do on that just absolutely blows my life i’m exactly the same i’m a google geogebra surfacer or whatever whatever it is i do the same um so a couple of things there one thing that’s great about all visuals but particularly i think this works well with the online stuff more is you can change something and observe the effect it has you’re not fixed with this like hand-drawn diagram this static thing on the board but one thing i think there’s a danger of i don’t know if you agree here so obviously a lot of the jojoba stuff has these sliders and stuff and things changing everywhere i think it’s a real danger as teachers we can just kind of just whiz things from left to right and things magic things happen on the board and it’s just it’s almost like watching a movie for the kids whereas if you say right what i’m going to do now is i’m going to increase the length of this dimension what impact you predict that’s going to have think think about it yourself maybe put on a mini whiteboard or something and now i’m going to do it that way they’re a bit more engaged in it it has meaning to them they then have an opportunity to explain it discuss whereas whenever there’s loads of sliders and it’s the same same on desmos when you when you do like y equals mx plus c and then you just kind of increase the value of m things are just whizzing around without that time for the kids to to just have a think what do i think is going to happen now this has actually happened do i understand why so yeah i’ve been guilty of that in the past anything you want to say about that before i tell you the next thing yeah well you’ve made me think of a good example on mousepad and these are they’re probably georgia’s got some of these as well mass pad has a great animation of um exterior angles in a polygon and how if you shrink that polygon down they all sum to 360. um and i think um yeah i’ve definitely there’s been times where i’ve just like let’s look at the five sides let’s look at six sides yeah don’t look they keep saying yeah like you say it’s a bit too quick so thinking about it now based on what you said i probably would be better to say right so we’re going to start with this fight a pentagon and let’s let’s uh watch what happens when i shrink it down and look all those angles summon 360. what shall i do next can you try six slides what do you think might happen so yeah you’re right i think i’ve been guilty of going too quickly on those things and getting them to either make up addiction or keep a record of what they’ve seen um five sides three uh 360 and then like you know they’re actually keeping your record as you do the demonstration it’s a good idea yeah yeah it’s good and particularly as you say they’re getting the kids to say saintly it’s what you want me to do next what do you want me to try next that’s always a lovely thing okay so joe wants me to try this what do we all think is going to happen here write it down after that yeah really nice and the final thing i want to say is dodgy props it was interesting you mentioned the pipe cleaners like i’m crap at anything creating anything like that but i always remember um when danny quinn came on my mr martin maths podcast years and years ago i think it might have been when i asked her what um her favorite failure was and she described and i don’t know if you’ve done this lesson i’ve tried i said it’s a disaster it’s when you’re teaching surface area of a sphere um and danny described bringing it up bringing in an orange yeah now i’ve never done that i’m peeling it because of course i mean what’s the surface area if i always so the brilliant idea is of course you peel this orange yeah it’s going to fit brilliantly into four circles all of it and it never ever does so you end up kind of dis you kind of get in the kid’s mind that this thing doesn’t work before they even see what the thing is so yeah i’m all for the props but it’s it’s got to be one that you’re pretty sure is going to convey the idea powerfully yeah essentially because there is never done that one but i used to have a giant hair ball which i lost at one score no i don’t have it to it but you know i bought this you know we shouldn’t be spending money on these things so like i should not have bought giant tennis ball just to show some service if you look at the markings on a tennis ball you know how it’s got that kind of it’s like it’s like two circles that are joined together wrapped around each other like it’s like a tennis ball is the one that shows that you could don’t see it on other types of ball um and that and then basically if you unwrap those parts you get these four circles and so i always thought that was quite a nice way of showing it although again it’s still not ideal because it’s like a circle with a bit in the middle and another circle right and they kind of blur together in the middle but actually it is equivalent to four four circles but again it’s not the perfect thing but yeah so i think you’re right there are some things particularly to do with well a sphere is a really good example of you if you’re going to prove or if you’re going to show them the derivation of the surface area or volume of the sphere i believe you need to use calculus to do that i might be wrong i believe think i think you need to to do that um with much more advanced maths and it is quite frustrating there are some things that we can’t actually um explain the why because the students haven’t done advanced enough maths so that’s probably one of these ones where you can just an online version that you know works like you know you can imagine under fancy geogebra one that demonstrates it and then oh yeah and a good example of that is with the um the ones you know i now show for the cone being a third of a cylinder i just got a couple of demonstrations i’ve got a picture that shows it and i’ve got a demonstration that shows it and i am certainly not i mean i never did this but i always intended to somehow get hold of a cone and a cylinder that has exactly the same height and radius and fill one with either water or sand and pour it in now i’ve never done that but i remember i used to want to do it i just couldn’t get hold of the right equipment um but yeah i think that’s fine done with a um with an animation i don’t think we need to hate the water in the classroom necessarily some people might do it really well but i don’t think we need to kill ourselves trying to do this