Introducing five new resources to help you explore the ClassWiz range

Joely Fashokun has a background in teaching secondary school maths (including in a subject leader role and a teaching and learning-related research position) and currently lectures in maths at the University of Brighton School of Education. So it goes without saying that she can speak from experience when it comes to effective methods of teaching and learning.

We recently had the chance to work with Joely as she developed five teaching resources dedicated to the new ClassWiz scientific calculator range.

The resources are designed to improve calculator fluency and proficiency, and to address some common misconceptions and mistakes students often make when entering calculations. They’re all freely available on our ClassWiz help page now.

Read on to find out more about these materials and how they could benefit you and your students.

What are the resources?

Joely has created five resources focusing on different skills and functionality across our scientific calculator range, encompassing the entry-level fx-83GT CW and fx-85GT CW, and the more advanced fx-991CW. This means they can potentially be used throughout key stages 3 and 4, from year 7 all the way up to higher-level GCSE.

Each resource is available as a PowerPoint presentation for classroom teaching and also as a printable worksheet.

Two of the worksheets use a cross number activity as a route into exploring skills on different calculators. The fx-83/85GT CW version requires students to use the % command in the probability menu and the greatest common divisor function. Solving the higher-level cross number, meanwhile, involves using the fx-991CW’s polynomial and simultaneous equation tools.

Also among the resources are revision sheets with exam-style questions for KS3, GCSE foundation and higher classes, as well as an ‘odd-one-out’ worksheet that highlights misconceptions about calculator operations. This can help students grasp how the answer key, brackets and other specific inputs can affect the final outcome of a calculation.

Look out for the ‘Going Deeper’ questions on each PowerPoint presentation. They were designed to get students thinking about calculator computations, the order of operations and why these are important, particularly when it comes to answering exam questions.

The story behind the resources

Joely told us the idea for these resources came about when, in a past departmental meeting, it became clear that calculator proficiency was lacking among the school’s students and something had to be done about it.

She then got in touch with us to discuss what supporting materials were available for the new ClassWiz range and how these could be expanded to really focus on calculator skills and functionality.

This led to the worksheets you can now access online, which put the various capabilities of our scientific calculators into context through exam-style questions and classroom activities.

“The goal was also to make it easy for teachers to learn about calculator features that can be really helpful, which they might not even know about yet,” Joely said. “There are questions that involve going into the catalogue and finding different functions and modes, so teachers and students can really experience the full breadth of the calculator’s functionality.”

As far as lesson planning is concerned, these resources should prove useful thanks to their depth and detail.

Each one could quite easily sustain an entire lesson, with Joely pointing out that they’re not designed to be quick activities, but rather to get students thinking and exploring their calculators.

The worksheets also require a certain amount of written working and demonstration of methods, with the calculator providing support. The idea behind this is to help students prepare for how they will have to work in exams.

Deeper understanding and investigation

We also had the chance to ask Joely about her thoughts on calculator use in general.

She made the point that, once students have a strong foundation of vital numeracy skills – understanding multiplicative relationships, for example – calculators can help to reduce cognitive load and open doors to more complicated topics.

In a lesson focusing on graphing quadratic equations, for example, being able to solve the equation on a calculator could free up time for the class to explore how it appears on a graph and how this enables further investigation.

Using a calculator for routine tasks and operations can also give students the time and mental space to explore the theory behind their answers.

“It’s one thing to be able to do the maths, it’s another thing to be able to explain why your answer is correct,” Joely said. “It’s really important for students to have that deeper mathematical understanding and reasoning.”

Other than the five new resources now available on our ClassWiz help page, there are many other ways to discover and explore our scientific calculator range.

You can sign up for a training webinar, watch our quick-start video or browse through the ClassWiz playlist on our YouTube channel. If you have any specific questions about our calculators or how we might be able to help meet your school’s technology needs, don’t hesitate to contact us