Nathan Ward: “Turn your students into the experts in the room with the HUE HD Pro”

This post is written by Nathan Ward, a Maths teacher at Ormiston Shelfield Community Academy.

Those Maths lessons you used to dread teaching are a thing of the past thanks to the HUE HD Pro camera. I have been teaching a few years now and used to dread teaching particular topics: constructions, measuring and drawing angles, basically anything.

I have found trying to use mathematical tools on an interactive white board quite fiddly and laborious. The alternative was producing a time consuming and pain staking animation you have had to design yourself, which requires precise timing or positioning to look even half decent. The other option is using a ready made video where students complain about the teacher’s accent or the methods they have used to teach.

A high proportion of the students I have taught can’t then understand how to replicate any of the aforementioned methods. Therefore, the skill is lost in translation, and it then becomes a battle. You can’t blame them, watching a crude animation or some compass jiggling about drawing lines on an IWB is not conducive to good learning of methods and thought processes. These aren’t the physical tools in front of them or the medium they will be using to develop their skills.

This is where the HUE HD Pro steps in! You can seamlessly, in real time, showcase to students how those more hands-on topics are done precisely. I have found it is also brilliant for live assessment, modelling of thinking, developing discussions and quickly spotting misconceptions through co-construction. Students get to witness exactly how that skill should be done using ‘pen and paper’. I have seen a significant increase in class understanding when it comes to these tool heavy topics. All you must worry about is tightening the odd compass!

I use the visualiser nearly every lesson and not just for those laborious measuring and drawing lessons. Students watching how to lay out working correctly e.g. solving algebraic equations, leads to them even improving their general mathematical presentation and etiquette as well as hearing me articulate my thought process for each mathematical step I make.

There are other drawing lessons where the HUE HD Pro comes in handy. Such as when constructing different types of graphs. I deliver these lessons using the visualiser on squared/graph paper making sure scale, spacing, titles and labels are in the correct position. This modelling allows for easy replication in their own workbooks.

I have a dedicated teacher exercise book which I use for all visualiser work. This allows absent students, or students who want to revisit the teaching, to access the modelling I have done. Students have been known to start ‘bidding wars’ to access my ‘Visualiser Book’!

Finally, it’s a great tool for turning students into the ‘experts in the room’. It enables students to lead the lesson, using the visualiser to showcase their thinking and working to the others from the safety of sitting at a desk. This great confidence builder leads to high level mathematical discussions – and some competition as to who gets to use it next!!

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