Why Twitter?

Why would a teacher want to use Twitter?

Because just a few minutes spent on Twitter can be very productive. Take this tweet from Craig Barton on an excellent resource – perfect for my Year 11 students revising for their GCSE module in the summer.

Being very selective in who you follow allows you to connect with teachers and other educators beyond your own institution.
Look at the resources I discovered through my early investigations of Twitter –  a couple of great links from Maryna Badenhorst:
Maths posters to download and Brainbusters.

I was also interested to see from Teaching News that teachers on Twitter have shared teaching tips and ideas; see the #movemenon book, from Doug Belshaw (the pdf is free to download).

Some further examples:  Mathscareers Website,   Wolfram Fun Facts  and Mathslinks. 

For a quick way to find Mathematics related tweets do a search on any of these hashtags: #math #maths #mathchat.
You could even join a planned discussion – see the Mathchat wiki for details.

For learning to use Twitter see Russell Stannard’s training videos and some Twitter bookmarks.

So why do I use Twitter (and Diigo and belong to various teaching communities and..)?
For the reasons so well explained by Sacha Chua in her ‘Teacher’s Guide to Web 2.0 at School’.

Mathematics Posters

A consistently popular post on this blog is the one on Mathematics posters. An excellent new addition to the list of sources of free posters is Jenny Eather’s Maths Charts  which includes over 200 posters on a wide variety of topics. (Jenny Eather’s dictionary is also excellent).

For a list of sites including free posters use this Diigo list or Evernote shared notebook.
(You do not need to be an Evernote or Diigo user to use these lists though I recommend both highly).

To highlight a small number of the sites on the list:

Nrich have turned many of their excellent problems into attractive posters. Note the link right at the bottom of the page to a PowerPoint presentation showing all the posters.

The Classic Mistake site has a wonderful collection of those classic mistakes that teachers regularly see. These posters can be downloaded in colour or black and white, a podcast explaining the mistake is also available for each poster.
Note all the other downloads available from the same site.

The Mathematical Moments site features many downloadable pdfs, posters which show the role that Mathematics plays in Science, Technology and Human Culture. A short or more detailed version of each poster is available and a search is provided.

The excellent Maths Careers site includes many posters to download, ‘When Will I Ever Need Maths?‘ for example.

Using a word cloud generator such as Wordle it is very easy to make attractive vocabulary posters.
(See this post for other word cloud tools and ideas for use in the classroom).

Image from http://www.wordle.net/ 

….and on a lighter note, my son sent me this recently! From GraphJam.com.

see more Funny Graphs

Posters

Note the Diigo list with links to (free) Mathematics posters.  See for example all the posters created by nrich of various problems on their site or the excellent classic mistakes posters. (For non Diigo users clicking on the green link will take you direct to the relevant website, select back to return to the list).
Note that the list is also available as an Evernote shared notebook. You do not need an Evernote account to use this, though it is excellent and it is free!

For vocabulary posters it is very quick to produce an attractive poster with a site such as Wordle for generating word clouds.

This post has proved to be very popular, an updated version can be found here,