Hi All!

I have made a new years resolution to do a monthly summary of what is happening in the Maths lit community at http://mathsliteracy.cing.com and thought that I would do a brief update here as well for those who are interested…..

The maths lit community is a “social network- community of practice” for maths lit teachers, ml teacher supporters and publishers in South Africa and you can share and upload resources, videos, photos, have discussions, chat and network. We also have F2F and online workshops from time to time and it is a completely volunteer community with teachers from both government and private schools. We have also created dedicated groups (and you are free to create your own interest group within the community as well) for ML textbooks, so that you can share experiences and problems and ask questions regarding your chosen textbook  . It is a closed group and you need to go through a short registration, in order to join.

So what new resources have been loaded in January?

Johan has loaded the FET work schedules for grade 10 to 12 from the WCED and we challenge the other provinces to follow suit! Alison has loaded her 2008 grade 10 and 11 final papers. I asked her what makes her a “sharer” and here is her answer:

“I don’t know what makes me share other than a real belief in helping each other, gaining ideas from each other and not reinventing the wheel every day which is just plain stupid- work smart, we don’t get paid enough to do it in any other way. I have also benefited so much from others sharing.”

Discussions:

Apart from welcoming any feedback on uploaded resources, we also have the following new threads in our discussion forum for you to contribute to (Just click on the links to go to the discussion, if you have not joined the community- it is a quick process (please only local teachers/trainers/publishers may join – we need to have the local perspective)

New tools to use in the classroom:

I have discovered this cool new tool called  Gapminder world (www.gapminder.org ). It visually shows statistical trends in the world (including South Africa). You can also create your own graphs from your own data using Google docs spreadsheets. To see more information about it and how to use it, click here: A great free online tool that is really WOW WOW WOW for learning outcome 4! Has anybody used it before?

New features in the community:

I have added the video adding facility for us to post our favourite maths videos to. It also have a facility whereby you can load videos straight from your cell phone. This means in effect that you can take little video snippets of what you/the learners get up to in the class and post it using MMS! Can’t wait to see some! I have added the “That’s mathematics” video and one about maths jokes  for you to enjoy so long! We also have a chat room where you will see who is online and can chat to them.

This community is restricted to mathematical literacy teachers, teacher supporters (trainers, lecturers) and publishers of ML textbooks.