How can ICT be used in CAME lessons?

ICT Interactive whiteboard technology has enhanced the classroom practice of CAME. There are many reasons why the Thinking Maths approach can benefit from the use of the interactive whiteboard:

Planning around key questions and challenges

Thinking Maths lesson agendas and worksheets are structured around key conceptual questions interspersed with supplementary ones that either prepare for, or elaborate on the concepts developed. The key questions can be put onto flipchart pages and students' answers recorded alongside. The use of planned slides serves to keep teachers on track as they progress through the lesson agenda. Often the teacher needs to change supplementary questions once a specific focus emerges in a particular class, so as to use students' own ideas and wording. This responsive nature of TM lessons is assisted by the IWB so that what the class focuses on at any one time can be formulated and stored in their own terms.

Resources and tools

The IWB drawing and other tools assist on class focus upon the key cognitive challenges rather than upon time consuming tasks that require minimal discussion and thinking. Features such as 'hide and reveal' allow teachers to selectively focus the attention of the class upon specific questions or groups of numbers etc. The technology also allows teachers to produce dynamic results, e.g. plotting points on the graph each time a new value is calculated. Hence the link between different representations of concept such as words, symbols, table, and graph is immediately visible.

The use of the tools (and their speed of application) allows the teacher to be more responsive to the thinking of the students. Students' ideas can be illustrated and linked to others and to the mathematics and other contexts in real time.

There is the facility to enable multiple inputs from students during times of sharing and reflection i.e. drawing many coloured lines to show their ideas on functions. This is an important aspect of collaborative development of thinking, termed social construction, and an extension of individual effort.

Storage

Outcomes from lessons, including students' work, can be easily stored and used at a later time with the same class. That is convenient where the planned activity takes more than one session, and the teacher refreshes the class memory with displays of what they had done previously. Such outcomes are also important for teachers' own reflection and development, and have value for formative assessment, and for action research on teaching and learning

cognitive acceleration

DEVELOPING CHILDREN'S THINKING