How are you coping with the change?
New term, new calculator for Christmas?
I have not blogged in a while, mainly because I have been doing some blogs with Casio.
Casio blogs are on my home page.
Meanwhile it is the new year and whether you like it or not I am now seeing classrooms that are beginning to have more and more of the new classwiz calculators in them.
This of course causes a lot of frustration in schools with teachers now having to discuss different techniques with different calculators. Some of us are having flashbacks to when the SD button first appeared and remember going through this before and no doubt it will happen again.
This week I was holding a Heads of Maths network meeting in Norfolk where I live, and one of the Heads of department was talking about how they were running a swap and upgrade scheme in their school for calculators.
They had made the decision that Year 10 and 11 needed to keep the older style Casio and KS3 would advised to get the new classwiz. As a school they had then bought in some of the new classwiz calculators and were offering pupils a swap/trade in of their older Casio for the new one. This meant that they were building up a stock of calculators that could be used by the exams officer, in KS4 classes for the next two years, or could be purchased at a discounted price by students currently in Yr 10 or 11 to replace lost or broken ones.
The following year it would only be year 11 with the older style so that in 2 years time they would move fully over to the new style calculator.
I thought this was a really interesting idea and one that I would share.
I wonder if any of you are doing something similar?
Meanwhile, the rest of use will have to juggle what we are teaching. However, remember that the emulator is web based on classpad.net. You should be able to get a free 1 year licence here, although if you buy one of the new classwiz calculators the licence comes with it. ClassPad maths allows you to switch between the two versions of the calculator. Being web based you can have two tabs open at once so you can have one on each tab.
If you want all of my calculator how to cards they can be found at the following links. The fx-83GT CW cards will continue to be updated as I find out more.