EdTech Hubs - Maths and Technology

Supporting Effective Maths Teaching
with Technology
at LEO Academy Trust

Watch expert panel discussion

Expert Panel Discussion

Reflections from the Maths focus study tour

The panel discussion featured an expert panel from LEO Academy Trust to explore the role of technology in the effective delivery of the maths curriculum; it covered the following themes:

Digital Strategy and change management
What is effective maths teaching and learning?
Understanding impact
Supporting staff
Getting the pedagogy right

Maths Focus Study Tour - Cheam Common Junior Academy

The LEO Academy Trust hosted a Maths focus EdTech Study Tour on the 27th Feb 2023, inviting visitors to experience their approach to using technology to enhance maths teaching and learning across all schools in the trust.

Further insights into how the LEO Academy Trust use technology to deliver high quality teaching and learning

How does technology help pupils learn more effectively when studying maths?

'I think outside of lesson time pupils and teachers can work really harmoniously together with embedding maths outside of school. For example, a teacher recording themselves, modeling something that the child can watch back at home. You're no longer reliant on parents having to explain to the child, you can just have a video that the teachers prerecorded. It allows children to work at their own pace.

I think it also helps with if children are working on maths at home and you have those digital manipulatives and those digital resources, it doesn't matter what they have at home because they have them digitally and they can use those same resources that they used in class at home.

And I think that is massive in terms of levelling the playing field and really upskilling children who need some more exposure to maths outside of the maths classroom.'

Natasha Dolling - Director of Maths, LEO Academy Trust

What role does technology have in delivering the maths curriculum?

'The input you have to put in is carefully constructing the activities, the crack, questioning, choosing what manipulatives you want the children to use. That's where you spend the time. It's not in marking endless worksheets, marking incorrect answers, getting the same children to come back and mark the same errors that they make. It's done in the lesson. And your teaching is specifically targeted to those errors.'

Natasha Dolling - Director of Maths, LEO Academy Trust

How did you use technology to enhance teaching the concept of money and value in Maths?

'I could target specific children instantly based on what I could see on the board, which was a summary of what all the children were doing. At the same time, I could also see that there were some children that were being much slower to drag the correct coins into the purses. And in the same way, I could go over and target those children instantly rather than wait until the end of the lesson to find that they had struggled and had needed more help.'

Natasha Dolling - Director of Maths, LEO Academy Trust

How can T&L be supported outside of school time using technology effectively?

'There's so many different ways that technology can help you if you're stuck in maths, from prerecorded videos you can watch back something being modelled as many times as you need it, even rewinding to watch back something that you missed. There's also different ways you can record your learning.

You don't have to write everything down, you can speak it, you can screencast where you're moving the resources on a page, which sometimes I think is much more useful than writing down an answer. It's a great way to show you're calculations without just writing an answer in a box and then having to wait to the end of the lesson to find that out and then having to go back and revisit it'

Natasha Dolling - Director of Maths, LEO Academy Trust

Examples of technology use in everyday maths teaching

'So using things like Mathagon, where you can actually have an unlimited amount of resources to actually use that, rather than always trying to find that bit of resoure that you haven't got quite enough of, having those in a digital form has really helped us.'

Emma Potter - Vice Principal, Cheam Park Primary School

What advice would you give to maths teachers in the use of technology to enhance their teaching?

'I think that was something that I had to understand as a teacher, that actually, just because you've got a Chromebook in front of them doesn't mean that that's going to automatically make the lesson better. Have I chosen the right technology that's going to support them? And are they using it in a way that's actually going to move them forward?'

Emma Potter - Vice Principal, Cheam Park Primary School

What advice would you give to an already successful teachers but one that does not currently fully utilise all that technology can offer for maths teaching?

'So we've seen a drastic impact on our teacher workload that actually they are being freed up now to really personalise learning for children using technology, rather than getting bogged down with having to look at lots of different resources. And so it makes a big impact on that for them'

Emma Potter - Vice Principal, Cheam Park Primary School