RebelMaths

EAMS Day 2 Day 2 of EAMS had a LOT of speakers (of which I was one). I couldn't possibly hope to do justice to all the interesting and varied content presented so I'll just pick out a few things that caught my eye and made me think "hmmm....what if I tried that out with .....". The day started out with a Keynote from Paul Milner from nationalnumeracy.org.uk  entitled "Maths outside the Classroom".  Paul introduced us to some scary statistics about the lack of Numeracy among adults (in the uk, but have no reason to believe the story would be much different in Ireland). These poor levels of Numeracy in the working adult population are costing the UK economy approximately 1.3% of GDP. He made a great point that even if we somehow got the current education system 'perfect' it would take 50 years for this to address the adult numeracy problems. We were shown a diagram from the National Numeracy website showing the three key attitudes that an adult lea...

E-Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences 2018 What is the EAMS Conference? Today I had the pleasure of attending day 1 of the EAMS 2018 conference in Newcastle University. EAMS stands for E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences. I previously attended this conference in 2016 together with Julie Crowley but today I had to brave it alone. The content of the conference lands wonderfully somewhere in the intersections between Mathematics, Pedagogy, Education Technology and Computer Science. Each speaker seems to come at the problem of E-assessment in Maths from a slightly different perspective thus making the conference a fabulous melting pot of ideas and knowledge. I had this great idea to write a take aways blog post for each day. However when I actually sit down to write it I realise that I learned far too much today to easily to sum it all up in a neat little post with a snappy title. On top of that I had planned to write it immediately while things were still fresh but now I'm...

Google Classroom as a great alternative to Moodle or Blackboard Google classroom was a total unknown to me up to a few weeks ago. I had heard it mentioned at the occasional conference but I had never looked any further into it. I always had either Moodle or Blackboard to use as a VLE so I didn't look into the alternatives. However, a few weeks ago I started a short course with students who were attempting to qualify to enter college and so did not have access to the college's main blackboard system. I find it very wasteful to print of reams of notes that probably end up in the bin and asking students to take down loads of notes seems like wasting time to me. I decided to look into what free system I could use that would be fairly straightforward for myself and the students. And so I started looking into google classroom. It only took me about 20 minutes to go from looking it up to actually having a classroom up and running. I was delighted with how simple it was to get...

5 reasons to use the Numbas e-assessment system for Mathematics   I first learned about Numbas when Julie Crowley approached me in 2015 to do some work as project  assistant   for the teame (Transitioning to E-Assessment in Mathematics Education) Project. My first job was to test the existing questions that had been developed for use in two Cork HE Institutions. After that we did a lot of work on making it easier for other institutions to use the resources we had developed. We wrote an implementation guide  and tried to spread the word on how well this system can work. Numbas is a freely available e-assessment system for Mathematics that has been developed in Newcastle University. The Numbas system has a proven track record and a strong reputation (B. Foster 2012) and (Perfect 2015). It has been used in Cork Institute of Technology and University College Cork as well as at  Newcastle University (B. Foster 2012) , University of Leices...

About six months ago I was browsing on twitter when I came across some Maths education people tweeting about #VRG, #VNPS and #thinkingclassroom. This led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of figuring out what these mysterious acronyms stood for. In today’s blog post I’m going to focus on #VRG which, I discovered, stands for Visibly Random Groups. Visibly Random groups is an idea put forward by Peter Liljedahl.  Usually when it comes to carrying out some group work in the classroom there are two standard ways that the groups are formed. Either the students themselves pick the groups or the teacher picks the groups. When the teacher picks the groups, there is usually some underlying reason that the groups are assigned in this way. Perhaps the teacher wants to make sure that there is one strong student in each group. Or maybe the teacher wants to split up some students who tend to be chatty. When the students pick the groups they will tend to pick groups with their friends. In v...

Hello and welcome to RebelMaths! Who are RebelMaths? RebelMaths are two Mathematics Educators working in the Irish Higher Education Sector. We are always seeking ways to improve our teaching and see this blog as a great motivator to make us gather some of our thoughts and maybe share some things we have learned along the way. What will the RebelMaths blog be about? We will be writing about our current interests in the field of mathematics education and I'm sure that these interests will evolve as time goes on. Currently some topics we have on our minds include E-assessment in Maths Mathematics Learning Support  Vertical non-permanent surfaces and Visibly Random Groups Peer Assisted Learning Using edTech in the Maths classroom at third level Finding great ways to teach Transposition If you are interested in any of these topics, or other topics in Maths Ed then you might like to check in from time to time to see what we are on about.