Last night was our third Northern Suburbs evening event where we covered the use of open educational resources (OERs) and technology when teaching maths. Once again we were hosted by the Experilab in Bellville, which offers a fun venue for our presentations. Guests are able to browse the shop while enjoying a glass of wine and some snacks, or chat to fellow teachers and get to know each other.

Mark Horner was back from his travels and so presented our own resources as well as other online resources we have been experimenting with. As 40% of those present had been to our opening evening with Neels, Mark did a recap of what Siyavula is all about, and what “open educational resources” means.

An innovative maths teacher from America that we at Siyavula admire, is Dan Meyer – you can see his blog here. All his content is freely available for you to download, and includes PowerPoint presentations, PDF’s and class handouts (on his blog it is under the heading on the right, “My Curriculum”). Mark showed the video of Dan speaking at TED Talks, which can be viewed here.

Dan Meyer uses technology in the classroom as part of his formulation of maths exercises and activities, without needing his learners to have the same technology. He creates these activities by using everyday examples and concepts, and really gets his learners to engage in the problems by stripping away all the information usually presented, which results in discussion and argument amongst the learners as they approach the problem. This is because through engaging with his learners and allowing the whole class irrespective of their maths aptitude to get involved in the discussion, he reduces the problem to a level of every day intuition so that everyone can participate. He teaches maths in a completely different way. He says that textbooks construct problems around a formula, so once learners know how to find the formula (and sometimes the word problems refer them to previous example exercises which literally spell out the formula), they don’t actually have to think. This is a real problem as it means that learners don’t have to understand the material, they just need to know how to fish the formula out of the word problem.

Mark then touched on some other resources that were briefly mentioned in Neels’ opening presentation, namely Khan Academy videos and PhET Simulations. Khan Academy videos are a great online resource of short educational videos that provide brief explanations of concepts, and that can be downloaded and saved to your computer. Videos cover a large range of subjects, with over 2000 videos that can be inserted into most lessons due to them being short and not following a curriculum. There is a huge number of videos covering algebra, arithmetic, banking and money, brain teasers, calculus, finance and much more! We think that this is an excellent resource, that could either be used in class to further explain a concept, or used by learners as a form of class preparation or revision.

PhET Simulations are fun and interactive simulations of physical phenomena, manipulated by the user with instant animated responses. One can go wild using it – set crazy parameters and see what happens! You could either demonstrate this using a projector in the classroom, or take your learners to the computer lab and let them play around with the different tools and settings.

Mark further explained our Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), where we are embedding a selection of rich media resources such as presentations, simulations, videos and links into the online version of the FHSST books at the relevant sections. This will not only present them with a selection of locally relevant and curriculum aligned resources, but also position these resources within the appropriate grade and section. Links to these online resources will in turn be recorded in the print or PDF versions of the books which will make them into a tour-guide or credible pointer to the world of online rich media available. Click here for an example of a single chapter enriched with Khan Academy videos, PhET Simulations, links to FullMarks and embedded powerpoint presentations which have been made available by educators.

Our textbooks will really help educators and learners make use of all the free and open online resources. As was mentioned in the talk, the internet is a big place, and it is quite daunting and time consuming trying to find appropriate resources that can be used in the classroom. We have also just launched our mobile front-end, making access to these free resources online even easier – point your mobile phone at http://m.siyavula.cnx.org/ . We have now crossed the digital divide, as learners can now access this wealth of educational resources via their WAP enabled mobile phone, and benefit from what the internet has to offer. In the not too distant future our cost of bandwidth will come down too, with the new undersea cables that will be installed to improve internet penetration in Africa. See Steve Song’s map here. This will hopefully mean that schools will benefit from this and teachers can use more online resources in the classroom.

An important message that has come out of last night’s talk is that while there is soo much content on the internet, and so much technology that is constantly changing, find something (be it a website or online tool, a teacher’s blog that you follow – anything) that makes your life and teaching easier, and stick with it. It is so easy to feel overwhelmed by all that is out there, and no one can keep up with it all! Take a leap and try something new – your learners will thank you for it.

Next week is our Physical Sciences evening (Thursday 3 March), followed by English on Thursday 10 March and Life Sciences on Thursday 17 March. Please sign up by following the links. Hoping to see you there!

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