Talking Points

I've been talking about three things on Twitter this week: study leave, calculators and contact time. I need more than 140 characters! All opinions are welcome, either through Twitter or in the comments below.

Study Leave
At my previous school all Year 11 and Year 13 students would disappear in early May, returning to school only to sit their exams. It was a girls' grammar school - the students were hard working, driven and independent. They made good use of their study leave, and the teachers made good use of gained time for projects such scheme of work development. I now work at a boys' comprehensive where students are expected to attend school throughout the whole exam period. This 'no study leave' approach is fairly common. I think it raises really interesting questions about how schools can best support students preparing for public exams. What do you think? What's best for students - studying at home or at school?

My school does Linked Pair GCSE and my Year 11s have one of their four maths GCSE exams in the afternoon, which is unusual. Three hours of maths revision at school has been scheduled for the morning of that exam. I'm worried that this will exhaust my students, perhaps to the detriment of their exam performance. Five hours of maths in one day doesn't sound like a smart idea.

I'd rather they stay at home, but it's not up to me. I will do my best to create a relaxing and encouraging environment at school. We'll do a little bit of maths, but certainly not three hours of intense last minute revision. What would you do?

Thanks to all who offered ideas on Twitter - let's hope it's a nice day so I can take them outside in the sunshine!

Calculators
Last Sunday I attended the absolutely brilliant 'Maths in the Sticks' CPD event for A level teachers, organised by Stuart Price. I've already shared my initial views on the changes to A level, but in that post I deliberately didn't mention calculators because I haven't made up my mind about them yet.

I'm not a luddite, I'm not anti-technology, but I'm afraid I don't get excited about calculators like some people do. I still use the same calculator that I used at school and university.

I like the fact that C1 is currently non-calculator and I will miss this element of A level. I'm also quite fond of statistical tables. I accept that statistical tables will eventually go the way of log tables and slide rules, but I do feel a bit sad about it.

I used to tutor a private school girl who was struggling with A level maths. One day she showed me a snazzy new calculator that she'd been sold at school. Although she didn't understand the maths involved, she was very good at using the calculator. Clearly her teacher had spent a lot of time in lessons going through the instructions. I was surprised that this calculator was allowed in exams because it seemed to give her an unfair advantage over students who couldn't afford an expensive calculator.

You could argue that learning how to use this kind of technology is a useful skill, but I'm not convinced it's as important as people make out. I suspect that these skills will be forgotten within weeks of the end Year 13. Plus technology quickly becomes outdated anyway.

So forgive me for not welcoming the 'use of technology' aspects of the new A level with open arms. I'm already bored by it. There are also practicalities to consider. And don't even get me started on 'large data sets'...

Contact Time
Finally, thanks to everyone who replied to this tweet:

It was fascinating to see how much variation there is between schools.

As expected, it seems that larger schools are more likely to have a number of TLRs in the maths department. But this is not always the case - in some large schools the Head of Maths has to do (or delegate) everything (which is a lot!).

Answers regarding contact time were inconsistent, ranging from no extra time allocated to four hours per week. It seems that most Key Stage Coordinators are allocated between 1 and 3 extra non-contact periods a fortnight.

The job description of a Key Stage Coordinator also varies a lot - roles may involve running help clubs and interventions, preparing assessments, undertaking lesson observations and performance management, analysing data, processing exam entries, developing schemes of work, organising competitions plus a plethora of other duties.

Key Stage Coordinator roles are a good stepping stone to Head of Maths, so certainly worth having a go at. I used to be a Key Stage 5 Coordinator and really enjoyed it. I'm not sure I'd do it if I wasn't allocated any extra time though.

Opinions are most welcome!

Please do let me know your thoughts.

Gem Awards 2016

On 27th April it's resourceaholic.com's second birthday!

Last year, on the first anniversary of my blog, I wrote Gem Awards 2015. Since then I've published an additional 28 updates from the world of Maths EduTwitter. Today I bring you some highlights from those posts. So raise a glass of champagne with me, and toast the winners of the second annual Gem Awards!

1. Best Game
The maths teachers at my school love Is this prime?. We get students from Year 7 through to Year 13 playing it in the classroom. We compete against each other in the Maths Office too. It's fun, addictive, accessible and surprisingly challenging. Top marks to Christian Lawson-Perfect for a wonderful game.

2. Best Teacher's Website

My favourite new find this year is drfrostmaths.com. James Frost teaches maths at Tiffin, which is a London grammar school shortlisted for the TES Maths Teacher or Team of the Year Award. His website, which I featured in Gems 41 last October, includes worksheets and presentations suitable for high attainers, enrichment resources, A level resources and more.

3. Best Gif

I love gifs! I particularly like these tessellation gifs which show polygons that do and don't tessellate. If you'd like to see how I used these animations in a lesson, read my post 'The Joy of Planning'.

Special mention to this Order or Operations gif that I featured in Gems 46 - it still makes me laugh!

4. Best Demonstration

Speaking of gifs, I've always used an animation to demonstrate to my students that the exterior angles of a polygon sum to 360^o. I've never thought of doing this lovely paper demonstration instead. This was shared by Sharon Porter and featured in Gems 32.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Twitter is good for - sharing pictures of things you've done in the classroom that other teachers may not have thought of.

5. Best Prompt
Anything that prompts interesting class discussion is worth a look. I really like these lovely statistics graphics which get students thinking about the reliability of statistics. I used them in my first S1 lesson of the year. 

6. Best New GCSE Support

The most useful set of resources for the new GCSE is the collection of Exam Questions by Topic on justmaths.co.uk. Mel has collated exam questions from the sample, specimen and practice papers of all four awarding bodies. I find these resources incredibly helpful when planning Year 10 lessons.

The best department meeting we've had at my school this year was one in which we looked through some of these resources- see my post about this here.

Special mention also to AQA for their new GCSE support and resources - their Teaching Guidance is fantastic and I love their topic tests, which I often use as homeworks.

7. Best Resources
Don Steward has always been my favourite resource provider - in fact I gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in last year's Gem Awards. His blog is approaching its millionth view and I look forward to hosting a #mathscpdchat next month in which I will be asking people to share their favourite Don Steward resources.

Given that I already gave Don the Lifetime Achievement Award last year, this year I have decided that the 'Best Resources' award goes to MathsPad. 

MathsPad is packed full of brilliant resources. Some are free and some require subscription. The writers, James and Nicola, are constantly adding new resources which are always well designed and high quality. I often feature their resources in my gems posts.

I also want to mention a couple more resources that I discovered in the last year.

• I love angle chases! They're lots of fun. I was delighted when Mo from MathedUp! shared a great set of angle chases which I featured in Gems 35. 
• In Gems 48 I shared a resource from Dan Walker on TES. He has taken problems from Junior and Intermediate Maths Challenges and organised them by topic in a PowerPoint, with solutions. This, along with Leanne Shaw's new website Maths Problem Solving, means that it's now much easier to find problem solving activities for specific topics.

8. Best Revision Idea
I love Mel's Keeping Time idea in which students are given twelve 4 - 6 mark questions to complete in an hour on A3 paper which has been split into twelve sections, like a clock face. This is a great way of practising working under timed conditions ahead of the exam and it helps keep students focused throughout the lesson.

Maths teacher Miss Suganthakumaran read about this idea in Gems 42 and found it worked really well in fast paced revision lessons with her Year 11s. She has uploaded her adaptation of this resource to TES. I look forward to using it with my Year 11s.

Special mention to John Corbett for sharing his revision idea which involves sending packs of goodies to students at Christmas. Read his post to see how it worked. I've seen lots of lovely adaptations of this idea, including this example from @mathsbrowning.

9. Best Puzzle
There are loads of awesome maths puzzle makers who share their creations on Twitter. Do check out the puzzles of Ed Southall and Emma Bell if you're not familiar with them.

My prize for the best puzzle this year goes to a different type of puzzle. The winner is Lisa's Puzzle from The Simpsons, because I really enjoyed my students' reactions when I took it into school. I put it on posters in the maths corridor to advertise an enrichment talk, and I later saw students crowded round it trying to work it out. Some people solved it instantly, but others (including maths teachers and Year 13 Further Maths students) couldn't work it out at all. I tried it with some Year 4 children and once they'd solved it they were really excited to take it home to try on their parents! It's great that a puzzle can appeal to all age groups.   

10. Bright Idea
My final award category is 'Bright Idea' where I look at some of the best original ideas that I've featured in my gems posts over the last year.

The award goes to Nikki's presentation guide, which I featured in Gems 35. I think it's really important to set clear exceptions for students at the beginning of the year.

John Corbett had a lovely idea, featured in Gems 39 - he put stationery baskets and photo frames on desks. The frames display Nikki's presentation standards. The picture can be changed regularly, for example to display information about revision sessions, star students and so on.

Other 'Bright Ideas' that deserve a special mention include Videoscribe, which I used to make expectations videos for each of my classes back in September; Famous Five, a lovely idea from Emma Mccrea that you can read about in my post 'Some Things I've Tried'; and Hannah's resources noticeboard for the Maths Office on which teachers pin their recommendations for upcoming topics - see Gems 39 for more on this.

That's it for the 2016 Gem Awards! What a fantastic collection of ideas and resources. If you want to read more Maths Gems, there's an index here.

Thank you to everyone who tweets about what they've tried in their classroom. Please keep doing so! I've been on Twitter for two years now and I still can't get enough of all the resources, inspiration and support. Long may it continue.

5 Maths Gems #55

This is my 55^th update from the world of Maths EduTwitter. If you're not a tweeter, or if you're wondering whether you've missed anything, here's a summary of some of the latest resources for teaching maths.

1. Daily Problems
White Rose Maths Hub (@WRMathsHub) will be publishing daily GCSE problems on Twitter in the run up to this year's exams. The files are available through TES.

White Rose Maths Hub has also made a fantastic collection of Reasoning and Problem Solving Questions designed for Key Stage 1 and 2.

2. GCSE Revision Cards

Thanks to Maria Howard ‏(@MrsHsNumeracy) for creating this nice set of GCSE revision cards so students can quiz each other.

3. Problem Solving PowerPoint
Thanks to Emma Bell (@EJmaths) for her work on AQA's Problem Solving PowerPoint. She has organised the questions by topic and tier so now it's much easier to find problems that are relevant to the topic you're teaching. She has also added the answers to make this a really user-friendly document.

4. Quibans 
If you teach Core Maths then you might be interested in these Quibans tasks from Mark Dawes (@mdawesmdawes). Quibans are 'questions inspired by a news story'. Mark's posts include suggestions of the sort of questions you could explore.

5. New Websites

I've seen a couple of new (free!) maths websites this week.

Darren Carter (@MrCarterMaths) has launched MrCarterMaths.com. This website displays sets of questions by topic. It is well formatted and easy to use.

Thanks to ‏@SaintAidansMath for making me aware of pentaed.com which is a revision website for students working towards a C. Again, I really like the uncluttered, user-friendly format of this website. Each page displays five GCSE questions - click on each question to reveal the answer. Follow @pentaeducation for updates.

Update
I've had a busy first week of the summer term what with mock exam marking, reports, a Parents Evening and lesson observations. It seems like ages since the Easter holidays!

Did you catch my recent post about A level revision resources?

If you're looking for ideas for GCSE revision lessons then my post Higher GCSE Revision will help, as will Craig Barton's 2016 TES Maths GCSE Revision Collection.

Puzzles
Finally, I'll leave you with two puzzles that you might enjoy. The first was Alex Bellos' (@alexbellos) #MondayPuzzle in The Guardian. Can you fill in this grid with the numbers 1 to 16?

The second puzzle is a Yohaku. The example below might work well as a lesson starter. Here you have to fill in the cells to get the products in each row and column and the sum of the four cells must be 31. Check the Twitter account @YohakuPuzzle for more challenging puzzles.

A Level Revision Resources

I thought it might be helpful to pull together a list of revision materials for A level.

These resources are aligned with the Edexcel A level Maths and Further Maths specifications.

1. Exam Papers
There are a huge number of practice papers freely available to students. These are summarised in the table below.

All of these papers are available to download from physicsandmathstutor.com, including the IYGB practice papers which are taken from madasmaths.com.

For most modules there's plenty here to keep even the keenest students busy. Some modules have more past papers than others (for example FP1 papers only go back to 2009 due to a change in specification). If you're willing to pay, ZigZag Education provides additional practice papers for a number of modules.

It's worth mentioning that the Gold, Silver and Bronze papers are useful but do not contain new questions, so if students have already done all the past papers then they will recognise the questions in these.

The IAL (International Advanced Level) papers are nice - I particularly like the 2.5 hour C12 and C34 papers.

2. Revision Cards
I've shared revision cards for C1, C2, C3, S1, S2, D1 and M1. These can be used for a class activity or students can take them home so a parent or friend can quiz them.

These crib sheets from dotmaths.com are really nice.

3. Other Resources 

• The A level assessments for C1 - C4, D1, D2, FP1, FP2, M1, M2, S1 and S2 from @OxfordEdMaths can be used as topic tests or for revision. 
• I like the C1 & C2 Workbook and Exam Papers from m4ths.com. In fact it's worth exploring the whole A level page on m4ths.com. 
• There are loads of resources on MathedUp! (mostly for the AQA specification). This includes a set of Core 1 Essential Skills sheets and A level Takeaways for 13 modules.
• StudyWell has nicely formatted collections of past exam questions by topic for C1, plus mixed revision worksheets for C1 - C4. 35 Basic C1 Questions is a helpful resource too. 
• For more past paper questions by topic try Maths Genie. 
• Crashmaths.com has practice paper sets for C1 - C4, M1 - M3 and FP1 - FP3.
• DrFrostMaths.com has loads of A level material including revision resources, such as this C4 revision sheet.
• I made a C2 revision relay - you can download an editable version if you want to tweak this.
• I also made a C1 Revision Clock, a C2 Revision Clock, a C3 Revision Clock and a C4 Revision Clock based on Mel's 'Keeping Time' idea.
• My C1 Quick Facts Quiz, C2 Quick Facts Quiz and C3 Quick Facts Quiz are useful for testing knowledge of key facts. These make a good starter in a revision lesson. I also have two S1 Revision Quizzes.
• My students enjoyed Stuart Price's 'Correct Answer Only' activity. I adapted his resource to make versions for C1, C2, C3 and C4 - these can be downloaded here. Students work on their own to complete 8 questions, then submit them for marking. They simply get a tick or cross for each answer and then have to re-try anything they get wrong.
• There are tonnes of revision resources on TES including a PowerPoint of C4 Exam Questions from supergenau, Integration Tips from cward66 and S2 Revision Sheets from SRWhitehouse.
• There are some great A level revision resources on MathsBox, for a small subscription.

There are many online videos for students revising at home - the revision videos from the FMSP cover all modules. Don't forget about revision workbooks too - for example there's a C3 and C4 workbook.

I can't list every single A level revision resource here, but if you know of anything particularly good that I've missed then please let me know.

5 Maths Gems #54

This is my 54^th update from the world of Maths EduTwitter. If you're not a tweeter, or you've been away over Easter and you're wondering what you missed, here's a summary of some of the latest resources for teaching maths.

1. Algebra by Example
In response to my blog post about whether posters ever work well in maths lessons, Chris K (@k_sirhc) shared the Strategic Education Research Partnership's maths website. It contains poster problems and a range of resources called 'Algebra by Example' which are worth a look.

There are 42 short activities that could be used as starters, exit tickets, assessments, homeworks or prompts for class discussion. Each activity involves commenting on another student's work and then answering a similar question. Here's an example:

2. Deepening Understanding
Ben (@DUMaths) is a Year 6 teacher who has recently launched a new website deepeningunderstanding.co.uk containing maths resources aimed at Year 6 students. There's some lovely stuff here and the collection is growing.

3. GCSE revision

Steve (@m4thsdotcom) from m4ths.com is always making useful resources. He has recently published a Foundation booklet and a Higher booklet for Year 11, full of practice questions for all the 'must know' content. I'm always impressed by the efficient use of space in Steve's resources, to minimise photocopying costs.

4. UEA Resources
This week I discovered a set of maths resources from UEA Study Advice (@uea_let) which are suitable for GCSE and A level.

There are some nice worksheets here - I've added some of them to my resource libraries. For example this Sine and Cosine Rule activity is good for practice and consolidation.

5. Questioning

Thanks to Amie Albrecht (@nomad_penguin) for sharing '100 questions that promote mathematical discourse' from @johnASMS and @miss_seh.



Update
My Easter holidays are nearly over - back to school on Monday for an unusually long summer term. Exam season is almost upon us.

Over the holidays I've spent time preparing presentations for some of the events I'll be speaking at during the Summer Term -  Maths in the Sticks, LIME Oldham and Edexcel's Warwick Conference.

If you missed any of my recent posts, here are the links:

• Posters vs Posters
• A tour of resourceaholic.com
• 5 Maths Gems #53
• A Level Reforms: First Thoughts

I'll leave you with this lovely poster from @mathforge. You can download it here.

Posters vs Posters

Tom Bennett recently wrote an article in the TES in which he suggested that some tasks - like making posters - aren't always the most effective use of lesson time. Some people didn't read the article properly, interpreted the headline as a personal attack on their teaching, and a Twitterstorm ensued.

When asked my opinion on poster lessons I said that they aren't my cup of tea, but I was picturing a specific type of lesson. There are posters, and then there are posters...

My Bad Poster Experience
In my NQT year I had to teach Year 7 about the Fibonacci sequence. There are many approaches I could have taken here: a lecture, a rich task, an investigation, a video... Open Evening was approaching and I'd been told to put some student work on my classroom wall, so I decided to take my students to an IT Room to make Fibonacci posters. Here's the brief I gave them (written by my NQT self):

The Fibonacci sequence is a famous sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 35, ... Your task is to create a poster about the Fibonacci sequence. You may submit this poster at the end of the lesson, or if you want to finish it for homework you may hand it in on Monday.

Your poster should be eye-catching and easy to read and contain interesting facts about the Fibonacci sequence. You should focus on one or more the following ideas:
1. Who was Fibonacci?
2. Fibonacci’s rabbits/family trees
3. The Golden Number/Golden Ratio/Golden Section
4. Fibonacci spirals
5. Fibonacci rectangles/geometry/architecture/Islamic art
6. Fibonacci in nature (flowers, plants, pine cones etc)
7. Fibonacci poetry
Important: Do not just cut and paste stuff from the internet without reading and fully understanding it. Try to put things in your own words. You must understand everything you put on your poster and be ready to answer questions about it.

I also provided a list of useful links to steer them in the direction of decent websites.

Some students made their poster on the computer - they cut and paste some standard information about Fibonacci into Word and spent most of the lesson playing around with fonts. I suspect that if I'd quizzed these students afterwards on what their poster actually said, they'd be clueless. Zero learning there then.

Some students did the research online and made their poster by hand. These were lovely, but far more time had been spent on bubble writing than actually learning about Fibonacci.

I took a quick look at the posters, realised that it hadn't been a particularly effective lesson, praised my students for their efforts and put all of the posters on my classroom wall.

I was mortified on Open Evening when a visiting dad called me over to the display to point out all the mistakes. "Look," he said, "this text doesn't make any sense" and "Four of these posters haven't even got the right numbers in the Fibonacci sequence". He was right. The posters looked pretty but the content was terrible. I wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't expected anyone to actually read the posters! This man, understandably, had higher expectations of a top grammar school. There it was on my wall, for everyone to see - evidence that my students knew very little about Fibonacci.

That was the last time I did that kind of poster lesson. I'm sure there'll be lots of people who'll tell me that they've had much more success with similar tasks. That's great, I'm not telling anyone not to do this, I'm just telling you about my personal experience. After my 'create a Fibonacci poster' lesson most students knew very little - if anything - about Fibonacci.

My Good Poster Experience
The resources of the Standards Unit and Mathematics Assessment Project are widely regarded to be outstanding. Many of these resources involve making 'collaborative posters'. The aim of these activities is for students to work in pairs (or small groups - but I'd always go for pairs) to develop their understanding of a concept. These are nothing like the kind of posters I described above. These activities are about students actually doing maths, and the 'posters' are just a place to organise their thinking.

I used the Sorting Equations of Circles 1 lesson from Mathematics Assessment Project with my Year 12s just before Easter and it worked very well. After I'd taught them the general form of the equation of a circle, I asked them to work in pairs to allocate equations to the categories on the grid (which was printed on A3 paper). The solutions are shown below.

I don't often do pair work at A level but in this lesson I heard excellent discussions in which students were really developing their understanding of the topic. Afterwards I collected the posters in, photocopied them onto A4 paper and handed a reduced copy to each student to put in their folder.

Another example is this brilliant activity Identifying Similar Triangles, again from MAP. This was done by my Year 10s at my previous school. They had to sort eight pairs of triangles into 'similar', 'not similar' or 'can't tell', drawing on their knowledge of angle facts. They worked in pairs - it's quite challenging so it took most of the lesson.

If you've not tried the activities from the Standards Unit and Mathematics Assessment Project, they're definitely worth a go, whatever your 'style' of teaching.

I'm pretty sure that when Tom Bennett wrote his now infamous poster piece, he was thinking about the former type of poster lesson - the one where no-one learnt anything - and not the latter.

A tour of resourceaholic.com

There's a lot going on here on resourceaholic.com. I thought it might be helpful to publish a guide to help new visitors find their way around.

Resources

My resource libraries can be accessed using the tabs at the top of the page. I update these libraries whenever I discover a particularly good free resource. I also do regular maintenance to remove broken links. I hope that my libraries help to reduce teachers' workload by giving them quick, easy access to good resources.

The most visited page is Algebra which lists algebra resources for Key Stage 3 and 4. The resources are grouped by topic.

It's a shame that my Core A2 page doesn't get more visits - there aren't many online banks of A level resources and I think there's some really useful stuff here. I use it all the time when I'm planning Year 13 lessons. In two years it has only had 7,000 visits (compared to 42,000 for the algebra page) which suggests that most A level teachers either don't know about it or don't need it.

Posts

I've published 173 blog posts so far, averaging seven a month. Browse through my blog archive.

My top five blog posts (based on the number of views), are:

1. Tricks and Tips 1: HCF 
2. Ideas for Teaching Circle Theorems
3. Five things you might not know about the new GCSE content #1
4. Teaching Indices
5. Words of Wisdom: Teaching Foundation GCSE

If you haven't read Ideas from Shanghai then please do have a look. I wrote it at a time of much opposition (on Twitter, at least) to Maths Hubs.

My favourite blog post - because I enjoyed writing it so much - is The Joy of Planning. I wrote it at a time when some prominent bloggers were suggesting that teachers should deliver scripted lessons.

Most of my posts are about ideas and resources that you can use in the classroom but sometimes I write opinion pieces, for example my post Worries is about recruitment concerns and curriculum change. Occasionally I write posts that aren't maths-specific, for example my posts High Expectations and Behaviour Management for Beginners.

If you're an A level teacher then you might enjoy my posts A Level Reforms: First Thoughts, Bridging the Gap to A Level and Kicking off Year 12. I also have a number of posts about A level resources and topics.

I've written 53 gems posts since August 2014. This is where I collate teaching ideas that have been shared on Twitter so that non-tweeters don't miss out (the full list of gems posts is here). Last April, on the first anniversary of my blog, I wrote Gem Awards 2015 where I shared some highlights. I'll be writing Gem Awards 2016 soon to mark the second anniversary of my blog.

Some of my blog posts contain collections of resources, including Stretching Practice, Higher GCSE Revision and Multiple Choice Questions.

My post Open Evening provides ideas and resources for open evenings, Enrichment provides a list of in-school speakers and Favourite Problems provides links to problem solving websites. I have a number of topic specific posts (such as Teaching Trigonometry and Long Live Stem and Leaf) and posts about methods (eg Factorising Harder Quadratics and Algebraic Division).

Information and Support

Resourceaholic.com provides information for maths teachers including conference listings, Twitter hashtags and links for primary teachers. These pages can be accessed through the 'extras' menu on the right-hand side (this isn't visible on the mobile site).

I want my blog to be a primary source of support for teaching the new GCSE specification so I've worked hard to gather together resources and support on this page. I've also written a number of blog posts about how to teach new GCSE topics: real life graphs, tangents and areas, sequences, inequalities and quadratic graphs.

On a light-hearted note, my pages Mathsy Gifts and Words to Avoid always raise a smile.

Spin-offs
Since launching this website in 2014, I've dabbled in a few side projects. The most successful of those projects is my Pret Homework website which contains over 200 homework sheets created by a wonderful team of contributors. The idea for Pret homeworks came from Kathryn Forster - you can read all about them in this post.

Another project was my Misconceptions website. The idea was that people send me photos of student misconceptions which I collate and publish. This would be useful for new teachers, for example if it's your first time teaching indices you can look at all the indices misconceptions to help you plan effectively. People sent me loads of great examples but I had to give up on the project very early on because it's impossible to work part-time, mother two children and run three websites! It could be automated (ie people could upload photos directly) but I don't have the time or expertise to make that happen. If anyone wants to take control of this project I'm happy to pass it over.

Another project involved pulling together collections of problems relating to specific topics - for example a set of problems that involve Pythagoras' Theorem. There's five sets here and I hope to make some more over summer.

Since I started writing resourceaholic.com I've been involved in organising and/or speaking at various events - you can see a list of my achievements and engagements on my About Me page.

Updates
If you'd like to keep up-to-date with my blog, you can subscribe by email using the 'Follow by Email' box on the right-hand side. Once you've confirmed your email address, you'll receive an email whenever I publish a new post. I currently have around 200 subscribers.

Alternatively you can like my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter. I'm on Twitter a lot!

The majority of my audience is from the UK but I do have a few international readers too, particularly from the US.

I hope this has been a helpful introduction to what you can find on resourceaholic.com. I'm happy to answer any questions - please tweet or email me, or comment below. I'm also happy to take requests for blog posts (but please don't ask me to promote products!).

Thanks for reading!

A Resourceaholic cake to celebrate my 50th gems post
(with thanks to @tessmaths and my lovely Twitter friends)