The Whizz

The parents’ evening is going out of fashion, according to an article in The Guardian, yesterday.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

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Whizz Education is on Facebook!

The social networking website that threatened to take over the world in 2007 now features a Whizz Education company site where you can become a fan, view Whizz videos, check out Whizz company pics and chat away about Maths-Whizz Tutoring and Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource with other fans until the cows come home.

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Eagle-eyed Whizz Blog readers - what other kind are there - will have noticed the snazzy Whizz Scientific Calculator lurking in the sidebar to the right of the main blog page.

The Whizz Scientific Calculator is as it appears in our Key Stage 3 animated exercises in our Teachers’ Resource and our online Tutoring service; it features power functions, logarithms, trigonometry buttons and fraction conversion and all that jazz. Do your homework, work out your tax, write rude number-words or calculate the budget deficit (though you may need a larger screen for the last one).

Visit the Whizz Calculator Widgetbox page to put the Whizz calculator in your blog, on your website or even in your Facebook page or Google homepage. Click the ‘Get Widget’  button, select where you want to put your own Whizz Calculator, and copy the code as appropriate.

You can also add the Whiz calculator to your iGoogle page instantly with this link.

Abstract concepts are better for teaching maths than real-world ones, according to a study reported on in a recent New York Times article. What does this mean for teaching maths and what does it mean for Maths-Whizz?

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Whizz Education is on the Tube (YouTube, that is)! 

 We’ve created a new Whizz Education YouTube channel to help spread the word about Maths-Whizz - both in schools and at home, offline and on-.

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Maths teachers are always thinking of new ways to teach the subject. We’re constantly surprised at the ingenuity and variety of styles and methods that teachers use; but teaching maths in French - at a Scottish school - is new to us.

Maths genius Pierre de Fermat - coming soon… from Scotland?

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Discover Whizzy Worlds - a brand new range of Maths-Whizz CD-ROMS from Whizz Education.

Each Whizzy Worlds CD will cover a major topic area in the UK Primary Strategy for Maths and teach the essentials with our award-winning animated exercises and a bunch of additional features to stretch and education students.

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This is due to the resource upgrade being installed into the wrong path.

Launch the updater again and when asked to select your current Maths-Whizz installation, browse to ‘c:\Program Files\Maths-Whizz’, assuming you originally installed the product to this location (this is the default location). Double click this folder then click ‘ok’. You will now see the correct path in the input box. Click through to complete the upgrade.

Earlier versions of Maths-Whizz (v2-v2.2) require ‘read & write’ permissions to the ‘c:\Program Files’ folder on each of the local/client machines. Upon run-time a folder called ‘Maths-Whizz’ is created as a subfolder under ‘Program Files’. If this folder has not been created on the machine you are using, then the software will alert you that you do not have a licence to use it, and you must adapt the permissions on that machine.

Another way around this is to create the ‘Maths-Whizz’ folder manually on the local machine and adapt the privileges to that folder exclusively.

A few users have experienced flickering when launching an exercise. A solution to stop the flickering is to load any of the resources (Matching Charts, User Guide, Licence Agreement etc). Once the resource has fully loaded and you return to the exercise, you will usually find that the flickering has stopped.

From version 2.3 onwards you can run an alternative Maths-Whizz program file, called  ‘Maths-Whizz(Low Res).exe’ that will fix the flickering. Find this file in the folder  ‘Program Files\Maths-Whizz’. If you installed Maths-Whizz in a different location, look in the Maths-Whizz program root folder.

This alternative file runs at a low resolution of 800 × 600, and should prevent any flickering.