Further to Ray’s excellent piece from July on the importance of failure in Maths-Whizz exercises, comes a long New York Times piece from last month, asking ‘What if the secret to success is failure?‘.

What if, indeed?

Dominic Randolph, the principal of a hugely successful New York school, was quoted in the article as saying:

I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure.

He touches on something vital both in education and in life. It’s akin to a sentiment often expressed by some of the most successful people: that they have failed more often that they have succeeded.

The Economist recently looked at the importance of failure in business:

Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of “failing forward” as a common tech-industry phrase puts it[...]

For those people, failing was a natural consequence of  trying, and it actually made them stronger, better. For my own part, I have an analogy in rock climbing. Whenever I climb (with ropes, harnesses, and safety devices, naturally!) it is exhilarating. But if I am trying a particularly difficult or technical route, I sometimes get scared. I become afraid of heights, afraid of falling, afraid of failure. And, until I have tried, failed, and fallen off, I am paralysed by the fear that I might. Knowing that I can fall, and try again, makes me more confident the second time around.

To return to the NYTimes piece, a common focus is ‘character-building’. How a student can be inculcated with ‘boy scout’-style character traits of self-reliance, persistence, discipline, and so forth. A schools superintendent found that the graduates of his schools who went on to do well at college were not necessarily the academic ones, but also those:

[...]who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

So, what if we aren’t teaching students to ‘bounce back’, but instead to expect success, and happiness, every time? And what are we going to do when those students, inevitably, fail?

Maths-Whizz is about happiness in numbers. And that happiness comes when a student finds he or she has suddenly acquired the keys to a palace of maths learning, and the opportunities that creates in turn; I’ve written before about how important maths is to all sorts of careers.

But we risk wrongly assuming that the pursuit of happiness entails being always happy, without pain, difficulty, or uncertainty.

A common complaint we hear from parents and children is that some exercises are just too hard, or ‘unfair’, or suchlike. Sometimes, this is the result of a bad assessment – where the child has been pushed artificially above his ability level, and is receiving advanced lessons too early as a result. But often it is because the child simply doesn’t like getting things wrong, and gets distressed as a result. And any parent, naturally, hates to see their child distressed, and wants us to ensure that doesn’t happen, and that we ensure it doesn’t happen.

The brutal answer is: we won’t. We can’t. If the assessment has been completed properly, then the lessons he or she gets should be correct, according to our tried-and-tested curriculum. If the child fails, we say: “Wait, think, and try again. And keep trying.”

Maths-Whizz provides help for students, but it doesn’t assume that if you’ve failed once or twice you’ve earned the right to pass. This isn’t a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy; it’s not even cruel.

There is a crucial difference between telling someone that they can succeed if they try, and telling them they have already succeeded because they can. In the first instance we are building confidence, but in the second we are secretly undermining it, because no child will truly understand what it means to try, fail, or pass, until she experiences it for herself.

So: Try, fail, learn, try again…

The article’s authors, Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford, argue strongly in favour of a maths curriculum that exists in relation to the science, engineering, finance (and so on) that it serves every day, and they say why it’s so important.

Garfunkel and Mumford make an analogy with languages. Learning French teaches both abstract grammatical skills and practical language, but you will never have the chance to use Latin to buy a loaf of bread. In this respect – they argue – the abstract skills that you might gain from a dead language are wasted if they aren’t learned in a context that you can use.

This chimes with recent suggestions from a review into maths education in the UK (led by the lovely Carol Vorderman) that our maths curriculum pre-A-level should be broken up into ‘practical’ and ‘formal’ maths.

In this curriculum every student takes practical maths, arming them for a life choosing between mortgages and interpreting medical test results. More able and motivated students can opt to take the additional formal, and more abstract, maths module.

Mumford and Garfunkel say that the new US Common Core State Standards, which I’ve helped Whizz align its maths lessons to, is “highly abstract”, and “simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.” But I’m not sure they’ve got the point of that (or any) curriculum. A curriculum should tell teachers and students what they need to study, not necessarily how, or even why, except maybe to put a subject in context.

It’s the good teacher who draws the abstract and the practical together to greatest effect. Not every teacher – especially at primary level – may be confident enough to link the two, but by giving the teacher the opportunity to do this, rather than prescribing how to apply ‘practical’ maths, an ‘abstract’ curriculum can be as relevant as the teacher and her students want it to be.

Maths is often called the science of patterns. And if chemistry really comes alive when we blow something up, then maths should come alive when we use it to, say, spot the ‘golden ratio’ in Chartres Cathedral (see Marcus du Sautoy’s BBC Series, The Code).

But it’s a two-way street. Project Euler, which I wrote about last month, trains budding programmers by getting them to solve maths puzzles. Garfunkel and Mumford say that practical skills, like learning to code, are more useful than abstract, but in the case of Project Euler the abstract is successfully used to teach the practical, and with some success.

I’ll concede that the principle outlined by Mumford, Garfunkel, Vorderman, et al – of the difference between the maths you use to calculate change and the maths you use to describe fractal geometry – makes perfect sense. But it may be a false distinction.

Whizz Education US company president, Ben, has a skill which I envy – he can intuitively understand the relationships between numbers. For me, it’s not quite so easy, but I wouldn’t want to be denied this insight into abstract maths because of a lack of natural ability; I can still appreciate Chartres Cathedral.

To return to the NY Times’ authors’ analogy, I took Latin and Ancient Greek at GCSE – two subjects that are, in themselves, utterly useless in the real world. But I was enriched by learning them. I could spot some of the hidden histories and meanings in words with ancient roots, and read street signs in modern versions of the ancient Greek alphabet.

If creativity lies in making connections between apparently unrelated subjects then ‘pure’, or theoretical, maths must be vital for creative young science minds, wherever they are. To assume that they should only use maths that tells them how to calculate compound interest (a truly vital skill) is to assume that they will get no pleasure from discovering a subject for its own sake. And that is sad.

At Maths-Whizz we try to instil a sense both of the practical and the abstract – and with our 1200+ maths lessons there’s ample opportunity for the young Whizzer to link the two. As Hilary and Steve, two of our expert founding mathematicians, once pointed out to me – put a pound sign in front of a sum or subtraction with decimal values and it suddenly becomes easier.

So, here’s to producing mathematicians who know that the abstract and the practical are two sides of the same coin. It’s a coin that can teach them as much about pi – that most wonderful of irrational numbers – as it can about the price of a loaf of bread.

For that reason, if no other, parents should encourage children to be confident and comfortable with mental maths – to work out change in a shop, determine the best mortgage, choose the right three-for-two deal, or calculate the rate of return on an investment.

This last skill is where the ‘Rule of 72‘ comes flying to the rescue.

As the wonderful h2g2 encyclopedia describes it, The Rule of 72: “…tells us how many years it takes to realize we would have had twice as many small, green pieces of paper if we had invested them at a given rate of return instead of stuffing them in our mattress”

If you want to know how long it will take your investment to double at a given investment rate, use the rule of 72. If you want to know at what rate you need to invest for your money to double after a given period, use the rule of 72.

For instance, if I invest at 6% p.a. My money will double after 72/6 = 12 years. If I plan to invest for 20 years, I will need to invest at at least 72/20 = 3.6% for my money to double.

Easy!

Michael Blastland over on the BBC News site illustrated the usefulness of the rule of 72 in demonstrating how quickly incremental changes can add up to double (with investment) or halve (with inflation) your money.

Seemingly small differences in rates can have dramatic effects in just this way. BetterExplained points out that:

If your country’s GDP grows at 3% a year, the economy doubles in 72/3 or 24 years. If your growth slips to 2%, it will double in 36 years. If growth increases to 4%, the economy doubles in 18 years.

So when government officials talk about increases or decreases in the growth of a country’s economy, or population, even a fraction of a per cent change can have a large effect, and the Rule of 72 can help you quickly see the implications of such changes.

The Rule of 72 is not magic; it’s all about powers of two. You can get stuck into the maths over on the BetterExplained site.

As Michael Blastland points out, 69 or 70 would be more accurate numbers to use for this particular rule of thumb, but because 72 has lots of handy factors (such as 2, 4, 6, 8, 12…) it’s a lot easier. And, for mathematicians trained ont the wonders of Maths-Whizz, it’s a doddle.

So, don’t be part of the human race that famously doesn’t understand the exponential function (according to Al Bartlett), learn the Rule of 72!

(Via Terry Jones)

It's all code...

Because of this, you’d be forgiven for assuming that an understanding of computer code would be widespread, and that students everywhere would be learning basic, well, BASIC, or some other computer language, in order to function as modern humans. (Never mind that the UK jobs recovery, according to some analysts, will come in IT, amongst other sectors.)

And yet most of us treat our computers and their software programs like we treat our cars – we can use them just fine, but we generally don’t want to know what goes on under the bonnet. Those who do know these things seem to have a magical understanding (along with a special name to mark them out – ‘geek’).

Project Euler (‘oy-ler’) is a website (and community of mathematicians and coders) that long ago set out to break the novice into the principles and techniques of computer code. Named after the legendary 18th century mathematician Project Euler opens the bonnet, so to speak, with maths puzzles.

I’ll let Project Euler’s founder, Colin Hughes, describe the goal of the site:

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

This admirable ideal reminds me of a certain excellent online maths tutoring program I’m well-acquainted with. Hughes understands what motivates and enables people to tackle subjects that seem difficult and arcane on the surface – the human brain’s love of problem-solving and its willingness to push at the edge of understanding.

Basic maths is no different. Ask someone to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem and they may run for the exit, but give them some paper and scissors and a geometric puzzle to solve and they might actually have fun illustrating one of the key principles of maths.

Project Euler requires that you know some maths and the basics of a programming language before you start – it’s not for the utterly uninitiated. But it is designed to present the beginner programmer with a series of maths puzzles of increasing difficulty that test and expand their skills.

Many modern programming manuals walk their readers through interminable mini-projects with apparently practical applications, requiring the student to copy and memorise techniques and strings of code. Hughes’ puzzles on Project Euler have little obvious practical value, for good reason. Learning doesn’t have to be ‘useful’ for it to have value; it’s in the creative application of skills and knowledge to unexpected ends that we use our brains best. (My classics teacher once remarked that knowing Latin made him a better Swahili speaker.)

Equally, many of the answers to Project Euler’s puzzles could be found online with the aid of a search engine. But that’s not the point, just as lifting the answer from your neighbour in maths class is not the point – it’s how you get there that matters.

Programmers and mathematicians alike strive to find elegant, efficient, and comprehensible solutions, and these are what Project Euler encourages you to do – find the best programming solution to a mathematical problem. If you’re a budding programmer, check it out!

With summer already upon us in calendar terms, if not yet in lazy, warm days, now is the perfect time to set in train habits that will ensure your students carry on improving their maths over the long holidays.

Holiday learning loss is the phenomenon whereby those long summer, Easter, and Christmas holidays away from study books and the nagging attentions of a teacher retard a student’s learning. Holiday learning loss is about forgetting, and the understanding that a learned skill is lost without practice.

For a teacher holiday learning loss means wasting precious time at the start of Autumn Term. For a parent it means a frustrated child and a wasted opportunity. Here’s how we can help you avoid this.

Title: Holiday Learning Loss
Presenter: Natalie
For: Teachers and Parents
Time: 2:19

Notes:
This short video reiterates the importance of holiday learning loss, and the potential for combating it with Maths-Whizz.

Students can lose one to three months’ of progress over the long summer break. Maths-Whizz provides a solution for parents and teachers to avoid this and motivate students to learn year-round, without fear of guilt for ‘ruining’ the precious holidays.

Why no guilt? Maths-Whizz works on the basis that the student wants to improve his or her maths, earn Whizz credits, gain rewards, and challenge friends. It succeeds when the student learns without realising he is learning.

In that respect the long lazy summer days, whatever the weather, are perfect for a little bit of Maths-Whizz to brush up learned skills or learn new ones, in-between frisbee-throwing, trampolining, sprinkler-running, and all that.

But in the assumption that carrying on with Maths-Whizz may not be motivation enough to spend time in front of the computer during the holidays we add a little extra to the mix – seasonal promotions.

In spring, this means a special Easter-themed student bedroom and special items to buy in the shop.

In winter, this means a seasonal adventure, complete with advent calendar-style home page, holiday puzzles, wintry maths games and more. Students can only play with our interactive winter treats when they do well in maths lessons.

In summer, we pull out all the stops, with our Maths-Whizz Summer Adventure. The Summer Adventure is a full-featured interactive comic that students work their way through by passing lessons in Tutor Mode. They must help the Professor in an adventure through the Central American jungle and play jungle-themed maths games along the way.

Teachers and parents will be kept informed of holiday features and promotions, and will still be able to view online reports and student status information.

Log on to Maths-Whizz this summer to make the most of our Whizz Summer adventure and beat holiday learning loss!

Further Viewing
We have loads of tips for teachers on getting the most out of Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools. I may well share some of these tips in more detail in coming posts, but in the meantime here are links to some of our other key videos on this subject:

• Completing Assessments in School Time
• Recommended Usage – Tips For Teachers
• Getting parents involved
• Manage student motivation
]]> http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/holiday-learning-loss/feed/ 0 http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/making-the-most-of-maths-tutoring/ http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/making-the-most-of-maths-tutoring/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 14:00:25 +0000 Duncan McMillan http://www.whizz.com/blog/?p=2054 Once you’ve got up and running with Maths-Whizz, and student and parent alike is comfortable with all our tutoring and reporting features, what’s next?

The beauty of maths tutoring with Whizz is that it is as good as you make it. What users put into their online tutoring is repaid in student rewards, greater confidence and engagement and – crucially – a higher maths age and numeracy ability.

So how can you and your student make the most of Maths-Whizz? Here’s an example of a selection of videos we’ve recorded to show you how to make your maths tutoring work now and in the long-term.

Title: Parent-Student Motivation
Presenter: Natalie, Product Manager
For: Parents, Students
Time: 3:43

Notes:
Motivation is key to learning. There’s an old joke about how many psychiatrists is takes to change a lightbulb. The answer is: “one, but the lightbulb must really want to change.”

It’s a silly joke, but it is relevant to learning. As Natalie explains, learning just “When I feel like it”, or “When I get a bad report” will not yield long term-results. Maths-Whizz is about building strong patterns of learning and motivations to improve.

Build those patterns of learning by scheduling Maths-Whizz for a regular day and time. Print our downloadable scheduler (available from the parent account dashboard) to help with this.

Schedule regular sessions of between 15 and 45 minutes in Tutor Mode at a time, and add extra time for playing in the student Bedroom. Ensure students don’t ‘burn out’ through over-use.

The scheduling applies to parents, too. If you make a note regularly to view your student’s report you’ll have things to talk about – strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, etc. Send messages or print certificates from the reports console.

We know, and research seems to show, that parental engagement is key to success. As Natalie points out:

The greatest motivation for children is knowing that the people they want to impress or influence are tracking their usage and making comments.

Maths-Whizz makes this easy, and we hope you enjoy using all our features to keep your student improving his or her maths every week of the year.

]]> http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/making-the-most-of-maths-tutoring/feed/ 0 http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/school-maths-reports/ http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/school-maths-reports/#comments Fri, 20 May 2011 12:23:40 +0000 Duncan McMillan http://www.whizz.com/blog/?p=2058 Maths-Whizz Tutoring Plus for Schools would be nothing without the Reports tool.

Maths reports are the glue in the relationship between parents, teachers, and students, what we call the ‘triangle of success‘.



Our maths reports allow teachers to track student progress and send feedback to students. They allow parents to view their own children’s reports and discuss those with teachers. They ensure that students are responsible for the maths progress they show to parents and teachers.

Watch our detailed video to find out just how powerful our reports for teachers can be.

Title: Reports for Teachers
Presenter: Liam
For: Teachers
Time: 7:44

Notes:
Watch the video for the full rundown, but read the notes below for a summary of the key points.

• Class Report – dashboard

Students in a class are shown arranged along a maths age number line. This allows at-a-glance comparisons between students, and draws attention to the strongest and weakest students, the hardest workers and the ones who lack motivation.

From here teachers can also send students motivational messages direct to individual students, or print customizable certificates.

• Class Report – student tab

This tab lists all class students and gives easy, traffic-light alerts for low effort or achievement, with recommendations for improving these aspects.

• Class Report – usage tab

The usage number line shows clearly how much students in your class are using Whizz. Usage is key – without a minimum usage (we recommend 3 sessions of 15-45 minutes, according to age and ability) students will fall behind and not see the 1.6 year maths age improvement every 12 months. We tend to see this level of progress with 60 minutes per week of usage.

Use the usage report 7-day view to quickly see which students have completed assigned homework time with Maths-Whizz.

• Student Report – dashboard

Clicking the student report link next to a student’s icon in the classroom report dashboard takes you to the student report dashboard. This is where you can view a student’s individual maths age profile and find key information to share with parents.

The dashboard shows summary charts for maths age improvement since assessment, and dials for usage and performance averages.

• Student Report – history tab

The history tab gives a breakdown of the student’s use of Maths-Whizz Tutor and Replay modes. It highlights the scores in each exercise, the number of times help was needed, and the time taken. The history tab provides the detail that may be hidden in overall reports, showing which objectives might be tripping a student up, or how efficiently the student is passing lessons.

The history tab also allows you to view messages sent from teachers to students via the Whizz Reports console.

• Student Report – progression tab

This horizontal bar chart is the best indication of a child’s maths age spread across maths topics covered in the online tutor. The colour-coded bars show progress since assessment and overall maths age.

Schools often print out the progression charts for parent-teacher evenings, and parents find them an easy way of getting to grips with their children’s maths profile.

• Student Report – text report

puts much of the key student report information into text form, for filing or distributing to parents.

• Student Report – edit

allows you to re-set a student’s assessment. We only recommend re-sets where students failed to complete their assessments without help, or who have not been using Maths-Whizz for many months (see future videos on ‘summer learning loss’ for information on countering this effect). The Maths-Whizz Tutor is designed to account for changes in ability, which is why re-setting the assessment is an action of last resort.

Key points:

• 60 minutes of Maths-Whizz per week will boost a student’s maths age by 1.6 years over 12 months (average).
• Keep track of homework with the seven-day usage report view.
• Celebrate student success with Maths-Whizz messages and certificates.
• Compare high- and low-achievers, high- and low-usage.
• Schedule Maths-Whizz usage with your students.
• Use individual reports to view personal maths age profiles.
• Use the ‘History’ tab to get a detailed view of a student’s usage and messages.

Tips and Tricks:

• Complete the assessment as soon as possible
• Use stickered messages to students as ‘house points’
• Print out reports to give to parents
• Consistent usage is key – routine is best
• Explore the various reports, and discuss report data with other teachers and parents. Maths-Whizz provides a wealth of information to help you raise standards in maths.

There’s loads more to see in Maths-Whizz reports for teachers, so log into your teacher account now and have a look around!

Further Viewing

• Maths Age
• Reports for headteachers
• Recommended student usage
]]> http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/school-maths-reports/feed/ 0 http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-maths-age/ http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-maths-age/#comments Mon, 16 May 2011 12:16:22 +0000 Duncan McMillan http://www.whizz.com/blog/?p=2052 Whether you’re new to Maths-Whizz or an old-timer with our award-winning online tutoring, you’ll need to understand ‘maths age’: what it means, how it works, and why it’s so important.

Just as every young person can be said to have a ‘reading age’ that describes their literacy level in terms of age-equivalent targets they might be expected to meet, so we have ‘maths age’.

This concept is spreading, as we discovered when MathsInsider included Maths-Whizz amongst the best tools for finding your child’s maths age.

Watch our video introduction to maths age, presented by Whizz CEO Richard Marett, and read on for some detailed notes on how it all works.

Title: Maths Age
Presenter: Richard Marett, CEO
For: Parents, Teachers
Time: 3:38

Notes:
Maths Age is what the Maths-Whizz Tutor is all about – it’s what we use to calculate a student’s maths ability, plan his or her maths learning, and show progress in maths.

The key thing to remember about maths age is that it is unrelated to chronological age. In other words, a confident and able seven-year-old Whizzer can have a maths age above eight, whilst a struggling nine-year-old might have a maths age of seven.

This fact is important, because maths age is all about a student’s personal, and diverse, maths ability. Maths-Whizz teaches maths in up to 17 different topics, from handling data to fractions, place value to equations, formulae and identities.

During our initial assessment we identify a student’s maths age in key topics and extrapolate that performance to related topic areas for our Whizz Tutor to teach all the subjects a student at that level ought to learn.

When parents and teachers view a student report they will see at a glance how a student’s maths age profile can show large differences between different topics at assessment. The tutor tried to iron out these differences and improve overall maths age.

Because maths age is independent of chronological age it is an excellent tool for comparing performance between students, or over periods of time. The Maths-Whizz report console makes both such comparisons easy, providing at-a-glance information.

The overall maths age for a student is calculated by averaging the maths age in all relevant topics. Maths age profiles often show just how varied a student’s individual maths abilities can vary between topics.

For instance, a student confident with data and geometry may struggle with worded problems and number-heavy tasks, or vice-versa. This is just one example, but we often see differences in maths age between best and worst-performing topics of two years.

But these differences are not static, thanks to the Whizz Tutor. The tutoring engine continuously assesses its students, tweaking their lesson plans as students improve their maths skills and confidence.

The maths Whizz tutor does its best to narrow differences within students by emphasising weakest subjects and consolidating stronger ones. Equally, differences between students in a classroom environment can make teaching much harder; students who lag can slow the whole class, so Maths-Whizz recommends more time with the tutor for students who are performing below their expected maths age level.

With Maths-Whizz and our unique maths age, students never stand still. The brightest and best are challenged as much as the weakest and least confident, and Maths age puts the progress they all make into an easy-to-read context.

Here are the key points about maths age:

• Maths age is unrelated to chronological age.
• Maths age works best as a comparative measure of maths ability.
• Parents and teachers can use maths age to easily compare maths ability and progress.
• Maths age is calculated for each relevant topic.
• Average maths age across all topics gives a student’s overall maths age.
• Maths age is assessed and adjusted continuously.
]]> http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-maths-age/feed/ 0 http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-teacher-account-console/ http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-teacher-account-console/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 12:18:32 +0000 Duncan McMillan http://www.whizz.com/blog/?p=2056 In our Friday instalments of Maths-Whizz University we’ll show you how to become a Maths-Whizz Tutoring Plus for Schools whizz.

[All the videos we feature for teachers and users of our schools products are available to view both on the Whizz Education Youtube channel, or on the Whizz website.]

Today we start at the beginning – logging-in. Tutoring Plus for Schools is used by tens of thousands of students, teachers, and even parents, worldwide. It’s a service that brings together all three corners of our ‘Triangle of Success’.

Tutoring for Schools raises standards in maths by ensuring parents, teachers, and students mutually benefit from the personalised learning, powerful reports, and teacher feedback tools available in the service. Students don’t learn in isolation, teachers can manage their progress, and parents are kept informed and engaged.

Anyway, enough chitchat, here’s our introduction to Tutoring Plus for Schools for the uninitiated, hosted by the charming Harry.

Title: Teachers logging into their school account
Presenter: Harry Baptiste
For: Teachers
Time: 02:20

Notes:
In this video, Harry gently introduces teachers to Maths-Whizz schools accounts, and indicates the importance of linking your school site to Maths-Whizz.

Link to Maths-Whizz. As I mentioned earlier, Maths-Whizz works best when the three parts of the triangle of success link up. We’ve tried to make this as easy as possible by providing communication and information tools that link parents, teachers, and students.

If your school is new to Maths-Whizz the first step in creating your own triangle of success is to link your school website or intranet to the Maths-Whizz homepage.

Putting a simple Maths-Whizz banner on your site is easy, and will save teachers endless hours spent telling students or parents (or even colleagues) to “…go to w w w dot whizz dot com…” when they can instead click the Whizz button on your site. The banner will also help raise awareness of Maths-Whizz at your school and among parents.

Log in. Harry then shows us how easy it is to login using the parent/student/teacher login panel at the top-right hand corner of every Whizz.com page.

Carefully enter your teacher credentials after clicking the teacher logo, and click ‘Login’. Note that passwords are case-sensitive, usernames are not. The teacher welcome page will show (with ticked boxes) whether you have a licence to use Teachers’ Resource, Tutoring for Schools, or both.

Click the Tutoring for Schools button on the welcome page to visit your account summary page. From here, you’ll be able to:

• Upload new students to the system
• Edit or delete existing students
• Manage your active tutoring licences
• Launch our powerful school, class, and student report tool

Further Viewing
If you’re too keen to wait until next week, you can skip ahead and find out how to upload students to your Tutoring student management console, and also edit student details.

• Uploading Students
• Editing Student Details
]]> http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/tips/maths-whizz-university-teacher-account-console/feed/ 0 http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/do-you-know-your-childs-maths-age-mathsinsider-does/ http://www.whizz.com/blog/online/do-you-know-your-childs-maths-age-mathsinsider-does/#comments Thu, 12 May 2011 11:38:38 +0000 Duncan McMillan http://www.whizz.com/blog/?p=2079 MathsInsider, the excellent web guide to maths skills, tools, and services (like Maths-Whizz), looks at ‘maths age’.

Caroline, from MathsInsider, covers the various ways parents can find out their children’s maths age, and how useful this measure can be:

Your child’s maths age is another way of showing what maths level your child is working at. You may have an idea of whether your child finds maths easy or difficult, but knowing your child’s maths age can give you a more precise way of seeing your child’s mathematical strengths and weaknesses.

The four methods MathsInsider suggests are:

1. Ask your child’s teacher
2. Take a test
3. Look at a curriculum document
4. Take an online assessment

Maths-Whizz Tutoring Plus’s introductory online assessment is recommended in the online assessment item.

Maths age is something we developed back in the early ’00s, when we started work on Maths-Whizz. It’s key to understanding how our maths tutor works and it’s also the subject of next Monday’s instalment of Maths-Whizz University.

I won’t jump the gun on next week’s explanatory video and info, but one reason why MathsInsider has recommended Maths-Whizz in the past, and again now, is that our tutoring system provides individual personal maths age profiles for every student.

Those maths age profiles are based around the solid standards and principles that underpin Maths-Whizz. They contain maths ages for every relevant topic, and the tutor uses those maths ages to build a personal lesson plan, emphasising weaker areas and bolstering stronger ones.

Check out the MathsInsider side for more maths info or, if you’ve not already tried Maths-Whizz, register now to find your child’s maths age!

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