Mathsliteracy Teachers resources

Here you will find links to lots of cool mathy things on the internet. We'll post some new items each week for you to enjoy. We hope you are as inspired and excited by these creations as we are!

Ingrid from MD Bright Media has uploaded the Afrikaans translations of the Grade 10, 11 and 12 booklets that are Managing Your Money in English. Please give them feedback!! They have been revised for the new core curriculum fous, but provide cross-curricular and learning opportunities beyond the curriculum, in practical real-life financial situations.

Lesson plan idea: Using this infographic, the students can create a similar breakdown of costing for our South African scenario. And they can do a comparison of what it cost to study here and overseas. 

This is the kind of thinking we should stimulate in our students

Students will learn about daylight. They will collect data on sunrise and sunset in the town or city where they live.  They will understand the data pattern and offer a hypothesis about  the reasons that the amount of daylight varies during the year.

The objective of good math teaching should not be to "cover the curriculum" but to show students how to explore our fascinating and beautiful world through the lens of mathematics. We must change our focus in math education from a focus on a largely irrelevant and uninteresting set of learning objectives to a focus on making math relevant and engaging for students.

How a maths teacher is using twitter in his classroom.

"MathX is a mathematical game where the player is given 4 single digit numbers (0-9). The player must apply the basic operators (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) to each of these numbers, using all the numbers once only, to get to the answer 24."

New article published online in Pythagoras, 32(1): Rasch modelling of Mathematics and Science teachers' preferences of real-life situations to be used in Mathematical Literacy.

In order to ascertain the real-life situations that teachers, as stakeholders, would find suitable and appropriate to deal with in Mathematical Literacy (a compulsory subject for students who are not doing Mathematics at the Further Education and Training level of the South African education system), we embarked on a study known as the Relevance of School Mathematics Education (ROSME). The principle underpinning this article is that there are times when it is necessary to assess the functionality and quality of questionnaires used to ascertain affective domain issues. The study provides an analysis technique which is not affected by the sample of individuals completing a questionnaire, provided that the instrument meets particular requirements. It thus improves the rigour of measurement. Various statistics obtained in this study showed that the instrument used to determine the real-life situations which teachers prefer for Mathematical Literacy reasonably identifies this variable. However, it is cautioned that much more care needs to be exercised in construction of such instruments. The results also indicated the real-life situations which teachers most and least preferred to be included in Mathematical Literacy, providing useful information for policy-makers and textbook authors on contextual situations to be included in learning materials.

"Ons het hierdie opdrag gebruik vir die Graad 11's vir 3D vorms. Dit is die 1ste keer wat ek nie gesukkel het om opdragte in te kry nie. "

Some interesting perspectives here.....Please go and give your 2c worth here: http://mathsliteracy.ning.com/forum/topics/how-to-fix-our-math-education

"this 1600+ video library is the most-used educational video resource as measured by YouTube video views per day and unique users per month. We are complementing this ever-growing library with user-paced exercises--developed as an open source project--allowing the Khan Academy to become the free classroom for the World. "

This problem presents students with a "which-is-thebest-buy" scenario involving admission to an amusement park. Students choose between four different admission rates, and then must justify why they selected the rate that they did.

A simple guide to understanding basic statistics, for journalists and other writers who might not know math.

Lots of local and global mathematics resources for learners

Math is all around us - How do we get math into the classroom? - If we do, how does that change what is happening in our classrooms?

"Lesson McMaths Fast Food Challenge: This Lesson Covers both curriculum areas of Maths and Health including percentages, conversion & Calculations, Food tables, nutritional Value and Recommended Daily Intake. I did this series of lessons earlier in the year with my students and it was one of the best learning experiences we had as we learnt a great deal about nutrition and some pretty open ended maths strategies over the course of the week that it runs for. Students were really engaged learning about these 'fast' foods they eat regularly and the excessive amount of calories they consume if they are not selective when eating out at fast fast food venues. More so some of them were shocked at the amount of exercise required to burn off that Big Mac, Coke and Fries and really started to make the connection that 'fast food' was a 'slow slog' to burn off."

The memo is here: http://www.timeslive.co.za/multimedia/archive/00676/Maths_Literacy_Pape_676140a.pdf

"Online social network sites like Facebook and Twitter became common destinations for young people. Throughout the world, young people are logging in, creating elaborate profiles, publicly articulating their relationships with other participants, and writing extensive comments back and forth. South Africa was not left behind and Facebook became increasingly popular amongst people of all ages. Figure 1 below gives a summary of the total number of Facebook users in South Africa from March 2011 to July 2011. Study Figure 2.1 and answer the questions that follow:"