Latest Resources and Trends

In this post I've summarised some of the big maths resource updates from the last twelve months. This is aimed at new maths teachers just starting their career (welcome!), experienced teachers who have just discovered my blog, and existing readers who've not had the chance to keep on top of the latest developments. I hope it's helpful!

GCSE Exam Style Questions by Topic

There are a lot of websites providing packs of GCSE questions by topic. Teachers get a lot of use out of these resources. Often the questions are collated from Exam Wizard or ExamPro, so students might see the exact same questions in past papers and assessments which isn't ideal. But there are also sets of original questions that are written in the style of GCSE questions but not taken from actual exam papers. A good example of these are AQA's topic tests on All About Maths, and the excellent sets of practice questions on Corbett Maths.

 

Over the last year First Class Maths has become another top quality source of exam style questions by topic. I love these resources! They are so well written - packed full of clever questions. Two different versions are provided depending on your preferred format - choose from Edexcel or AQA. Loads of new topics have been added over summer so do check out these resources if you haven't seen them before. 

Booklets

Curriculum booklets are all the rage at the moment. I don't teach using a 'booklet approach' myself, but I often make use of MathsPad's brilliant curriculum booklets, either when setting cover or when looking for good quality tasks to use in my teaching. MathsPad are well ahead of the game, having already published booklets for the entire Year 7 - 10 curriculum, with just Year 11 still to come. Each of their booklets comes in two levels: core and support. As always with MathsPad resources, their tasks are very well designed and their booklets include lots of lovely activities for challenge. Here's an example I shared in Gems 175 - these algebra puzzles can be found in the booklet Year 10 Foundation Chapter 2: Algebraic Expressions. These puzzles have six levels of difficulty and would work well with any year group.

And here's another example. This is from the Year 8 booklet on Area and Volume, from the section 'Writing expressions for circles'. At the top of the page we have an explanation:

And following this there are some practice questions. For some reason I never explicitly teach this skill, so this page has inspired me to make a tweak to my teaching of this topic.

Another source of booklets worth checking out is OAT Maths. The team, led by Jemma Sherwood, have been busy creating and sharing their own maths curriculum project. This includes a carefully sequenced curriculum and well designed booklets which feature high quality tasks, for example those of the late Don Steward.

For more good examples of maths curriculum booklets, check out this one on diagonals in quadrilaterals from @AMercerMaths and this one on calculations with standard form from Nathan Day.

Artificial Intelligence

2024 was the first time that AI has really been on our radars in education. As a profession we're rather sceptical about it. Teachers are increasingly encouraged to look to AI for workload-saving measures but I'm not convinced... Given that I don't even like using other people's PowerPoints in the classroom, I'm hardly going to start using AI to plan my lessons. And if I want to write a letter, it would be just as quick for me to write it myself rather then input a load of prompts into AI.

Maths teachers are even more sceptical than others because our initial attempts at using AI for task design using simple prompts like 'give me ten wordy questions on sharing in a ratio' have produced some rather dull tasks and a whole load of maths errors. However, there are two uses of AI worth keeping an eye on:

1.  @DGRAIMaths has created a website aimaths.weebly.com to share his tasks designed with AI. There are some great ideas in these tasks so they are well worth a look.

2. Take a photo of an exercise from an old maths textbook and AI can instantly turn it into a perfectly presented digital exercise. See my post on Digitising Old Maths Textbooks for more on this. Here's an example - I took a photo of an exercise on index laws from Elements of Algebra (Carson and Smith, 1914) and MathPix converted it into a Word document for me. These questions weren't written by AI - they were written by maths experts - but AI digitised them for us in seconds.

New Resources

We are fortunate in maths education to have a constant flow of new resources. I often feature these my gems posts and link to them in my resource libraries, which provide a quick way for teachers to find quality tasks for their lessons. Here I feature some of the most prolific publishers of new resources over the last year.

Dr Austin is an absolute superstar who makes resources for her own students and very kindly shares editable versions on her website draustinmaths.com for free. Her collection of resources is huge and grows all the time. These resources are very easy to use in lessons - I particularly like her 'fill in the blanks' tasks which incorporate both scaffolding and challenge. 

Nathan Day designs very clever tasks packed full of challenge and shares them through interwovenmaths.com. There's a wide variety of resources to check out on his website, including these lovely 'snake' tasks.

Oak National Academy is a DfE-funded initiative which provides fully resourced curriculums in every subject. It launched during lockdown when it quickly became clear that there were massive gaps in the ability of many subjects to deliver content remotely. Since then it has grown rapidly. For maths, Oak provides curriculums for Key Stage 3 and 4, plus sequences of lessons for every topic. These lessons include videos, PowerPoints, quizzes and tasks. 

Last year Dr Frost employed a team of writers to develop his original PowerPoints and expand his collection of resources. As a result there's been a steady stream of new and improved content shared on drfrost.org, including significant updates to his A level maths and further maths PowerPoints. Follow @DrFrostResource to keep up-to-date with the new resources published.

Everything Else

There's always something new being shared in the maths teaching community. Here are a few more things you may have missed over the past year:

• Craig Barton has continued to produce maths education podcasts. My most recent one was on 'Ten ways to get amazing GCSE results' - I was pleasantly surprised by how much nice feedback this received!
• Rob Southern and Susan Whitehouse published the book Teaching A Level Maths.
• New website Maths Advance is full of very challenging extension questions, perfect for high attaining classes.
• LUMEN launched their Key Stage 3 curriculum: learn about it here.
• @StudyMaths continues to add new features to mathsbot.com. My favourite recent additions include Find the Primes and Prime Factory. 
• @cclay8 shared a set of calculator guides for the new Casio model. I have found these really useful in ensuring that I'm familiar with all the functions and menus on the new calculators.
• PolyPad continues to develop its fantastic range of virtual manipulatives. 
• @MattTheApp made hundreds of developments to Maths White Board over the last year - it's packed full of games and activities for students.
• My favourite maths education tweets of the year have been from @catrionateaches who often shares really creative ideas to help improve the way we explain things. 
• My favourite blog posts have been from @MrDraperMaths. His thoughts on task design are always worth reading.

Apologies if I have missed something big here. Keep an eye on my monthly gems posts - I try to cover everything in those!

Social Media

This summer, tweets by Elon Musk angered teachers so much that it sparked a mass exodus to other social media platforms (mainly Threads and BlueSky - though amongst maths teachers, it seems that BlueSky is the preference). Teachers are setting up new communities there where we can enjoy chatting about maths education without our feeds being full of racism and hatred. I already had accounts on both BlueSky and Threads so you can find me there if you wish (mathsjem), though I am still very hopeful that Twitter will come out the other side of all this. Hopefully the Musk nightmare is temporary.

Events and Conferences

If you're looking to attend events with other maths teachers, there are always a lot to choose from. 

Last year Craig Barton and I ran three one-day maths CPD courses 'Marvellous Maths 3' (the online version is still available to buy) and I also hosted the book launch for Matt Parker's new book Love Triangle.  

I'm planning to have a year off hosting events myself, but there are plenty of conferences and events in the upcoming school year that are worth checking out. I have listed some of these here to give you a taste of what's normally available, though most dates have not yet been published. If you've not attended before, why not give it a go?

• Complete Maths usually run three in-person conferences throughout the academic year. These take place on Saturdays in October, March and June at various locations in England. The next event is #mathsconf36 which is on 12th October in Sheffield.
• Big Maths Jam is a wonderful 'recreational maths' event taking place on 2nd - 3rd November 2024. It's not about teaching - it's about maths. There are also smaller monthly MathsJam events for maths enthusiasts to get together in a pub and share puzzles, games and problems. They normally meet on the second-to-last Tuesday of every month in locations around the world.
• Maths Hubs run loads of professional development opportunities throughout the year - get in touch with your local hub to find what's on offer.
• The maths subject associations (including the MA and ATM) offer a range of CPD opportunities. This usually includes a big residential conference in the Easter holidays.
• The MEI Conference typically happens at the start of July.

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Enjoy the rest of your summer break.