Mr P's SMART Board

One teacher's record of the implementation of a SMART Board Interactive whiteboard into a primary school classroom. For links see the Simply Science FURL. For science education try Simply Science site. For ICT check out My Other Blog. For one with the lot then go to my Suprglu archive.

Friday, May 06, 2005

Decomposing Interactively

As many teachers can relate teaching subtraction with trading can be a lot of fun, not. Some kids just don't seem to be able to catch what is going on. Again demonstrations on the floor with Multi-based Arithmetic Blocks is okay for most but for the children whose attention wanders just that little bit, (read for that the ones who have trouble latching onto what is happening), it is often not as effective as one might hope. As this was the topic of the moment it was great to remember that I had seen some MAB interactives at the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives For Interactive Mathematics, (wow what a title) at http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/index.html. A quick connect to the internet and a Java update later, (the interactives are written in javascript), and we were on the go.

Boy did the use of the board make a huge difference. All at once everybody was involved, especially when the blocks decomposed. Even better was the fact that the blocks were colour coded so that we could talk about the top number, (or minuend for the technically inclined mathematicians) as being the number you had that you could give away. The number being subtracted, (subtrahend, yeah I looked the term up....) was red. Therefore when we went to work in our books we did our examples in these colours and the confusions in the main disappeared as all the children knew that it was the blue they had to give away and the red they were to give.

There was one minor irritation and that was that the interactive didn't actually record the decomposition and trading just the way we like to show in our classes. Though the computation shown could be overwritten on the board with the pens, each time the screen was refreshed for the following step this annotation/recording disappeared and had to be replaced which was a potential distraction.

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