d. Planning the Work of Learners

The teacher was now in a position to plan the activities which he wanted pupils to carry out and estimate a time scale. He wanted to make sure that the ICT did not dominate what was mainly a maths activity, so he decided to start the unit of work in the usual classroom with an activity which introduced them to the idea of identifying functions. He would also finish in the usual classroom, with work designed to check that they could apply their learning away from the IT room.

Questions for Consideration

• What are the advantages of starting away from the computer?
• What are the disadvantages?

With lessons of 1 hour duration, he thought that we would need:

• One lesson in the classroom playing the Function Game (provide detail of this) and discussing strategies to identify number operations used to generate tables.
• Two lessons in the IT room, doing the same thing with "mystery" functions in spreadsheet tables with pupils checking their results by putting in their own formulas.
• A third lesson in the IT room, where pupils try to create a given table using two different formulas, one with brackets and one without - eg. 2*(B3+1) and 2*B3+2.
• A final lesson in the classroom in which conventional mathematical notation would be introduced, and pupils asked to write up all their work using formulas such as y=2x+2.

Armed with this plan, he set out to book the necessary resources for a convenient sequence of lessons. This was eventually achieved by the ICT Co-ordinator agreeing to move a GCSE IT class to an ordinary classroom for one of their lessons. He also suggested that the IT technician could be available to help in these lessons.

Questions for Consideration

• Are there any difficulties in gaining access to ICT rooms in your school? How can they be overcome?
• Do you feel that this amount of time spent on the topic is:
  • necessary?
  • sufficient?
  • justifiable?

He wanted the pupils to produce some work on paper so that he could assess their learning and so that they could keep a permanent record. He did not ask them to print and hand in copies of all their spreadsheets, as this would lead to a massive demand for printing in the lesson and would not help him to assess their mathematical learning. It might also give the impression that the appearance of the spreadsheet was important, rather than the conclusions drawn from it.

He thus designed some worksheets, which provided space for them to write in their formulas and also asked them to draw conclusions from their investigations - these can be downloaded below. He also produced a help sheet, which gave instructions on organising the task and the main techniques for using the software.

How do I download Word documents?

Algebra Worksheet

Questions for Consideration

• Why is it important for pupils to keep a permanent record of their work?
• What advantages does ICT give you in creating worksheets for pupils?
• What disadvantages?
• What other resources might be helpful for the work on this topic?

Key Skills: The main contribution of this work will be in numeracy, especially the mental work carried out when predicting relationships at and away from the computer. Pupils' problem solving skills will also be developed, in terms of the teaching about systematic control of variables.

Part 2: Teaching with ICT