Teacher’s Personal Information Manager

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I am a teacher that enjoys being as organised as possible. I have a laptop on my desk find the Teacher’s Personal Information Manager (TPIM) invaluable. It provides weekly and daily planning sheets for each class you enter. It will also let you keep class lists with attendance register and grades. You can also make private notes about each student which could be incidents that need recording or just noting something smashing they did that lesson. There is a calendar feature which could be great for entering exam dates, parent teacher meetings, report deadlines, staff meetings, the list goes on.

TPIM allows teachers to schedule their lessons in advance for quick access later

This will do pretty much everything you wish to do, if you enter your timetable and lesson timings then you can also choose to enable the feature that will pop up and remind you to issue the homework. Your students may not thank you but I’m sure the parents will.

I use the system to plan a term at a time but you can do it on a weekly or even daily basis as it suits. Then each morning I can print out a summary of my classes for each day. Your plans can either be a couple of sentences or detailed (starter, plenary, objectives, resources and all the timings involved). If you have to be out of school, either because of illness or on a training day, then this will produce a cover sheet, including class lists, seating plan, work to be done, homework etc. This can be done in a second rather than being at home ill and having to starting thinking what can be done. You can export your lesson plans for each class into a Word or Excel document very easily so you could print these or upload them to a class website. I know parents find them very good for making sure what has been set for homework or for a student to see what they’ve missed if they’ve been off school.

The product costs £40 (a one off fee) but the time saved and also the money saved on diaries etc more than makes up for this. However, a free trial which allows time for testing and making a decision about whether you will purchase the full version, is also available. I know all of us as teacher find time precious, and while this might take a little time to get used and set up to during the initial stages, future years are made simpler due to features software. I got it up and running in an afternoon but took longer to fully appreciate all it could do for me.

I really can’t recommend this product enough. The only limitation is the grade section which doesn’t really do as much as I’d like. If you are interested in a more comprehensive grades package then please read the upcoming review of Gradekeeper. TPIM is available from www.csfsoftware.co.uk/TPIM_info.htm.

Learn material with flashcards

Love them or hate them, flashcards are useful for learning key vocabulary, concepts, or content. Whether you need to learn basic French or advanced political concepts, they’re helpful for cementing information in your mind. Writing them on bits of card or paper is all well and good, but like most things, there’s a computer equivalent which has the benefit of being easily accessible and editable, and far less likely to be lost or damaged. Both Anki and Quizlet provide online alternatives to risking damage to your dainty hands by using a pen and pair of scissors.

Customising some flashcards with Anki

Anki is the downloadable software option, as opposed to Quizlet, which is housed online. Anki has a pretty large number of features, but this is also its downfall in some ways because it makes it confusing at times. It’s got a pretty advanced editing interface, but it’s not simple enough to create flashcards. Although the ability to add such things as sound or video clips, equations, and images to flashcards may prove very useful for learning or teaching concepts which go beyond text.

After creating a set of cards you can begin looking through them. Options appear after viewing each card which ask you how hard you found the card. Your answer to that will change how often the card comes back up. If you said you found it hard it will come back more often, whereas if you choose easy it will appear less often.

The software will also create graphs to show your progress and the amount of time you’ve spent on sets of cards. These seem awkward and clunky and of little use due to seeming like they’re going a bit over-the-top in trying to provide an in-depth analysis of your learning habits. Therefore the graphs looked out of place and confusing when I tried to get my feeble mind around them. There’s also an online section to Anki which allows you to view and edit your flashcards online, but this feature also seemed to be poorly implemented and awkward to use.

In addition the flashcard shown here, Quizlet also provides other ways to learn materials

Quizlet, on the other hand, struck me as being a bit more smashing. Flashcards are simple and easy to use – text is displayed, followed by the answer when the button is clicked to reveal it. I think Quizlet should consider implement a similar system the one which Anki uses – being able to choose how often the card shows up would be  useful addition to prioritise your learning more efficiently. In addition to the basic flashcard feature that you’d expect, it’s also invents other ways for you to learn the items – including a test, and more interestingly, games. These are simple games which place the focus firmly upon the vocabulary rather than getting too caught up with creating masterpieces of Flash.

By far the most impressive feature of Quizlet is the ability to search through a plethora of sets of flashcards which other users have created. A search for just about anything will probably yield some cards which are related to the topic you want to study. When you create your own these are shared with other Quizlet users to help them with their learning. Whilst most public card sets can’t be edited by other people, you can use the ‘Reuse these terms’ feature to add the cards into your own deck which you can edit and add to. Another smashing little feature is the ability to export the cards as text. This could prove useful for printing out notes which you can read over when you’re doing revision or studying without the benefit of access to a computer.

Overall Quizlet seems like a much stronger contender, and I’d suggest it was a better option to Anki if you’re planning or learning using flashcards. You can access Quizlet from www.quizlet.com, and download Anki from www.ichi2.net/anki.

LiveMaths discount

Just a quick update to the LiveMaths article that I posted a little while ago. One of the administrators of the website was kind enough to provide a discount code which will get you a £5 discount off the usual price. Use the voucher code BPTR09 at the subscription page on www.livemaths.co.uk to take advantage of this offer.

I’m also informed that worksheets have now been added to supplement the video guides.

Online maths tutoring with LiveMaths

Get a £5 discount on a LiveMaths subscription if you use the voucher code: BPTR09 at the subscription page.

I’ll freely admit that I’m not a fan of maths: numbers have never been my strong point. The lack of open-ended answers scare me: I’m more a fan of being able to babble on about a load of twaddle in the humanities subjects: English and History in particular . That’s the reason I do all I can to be less awful at maths in order to muddle through my examination. One of the ways I do this is using a dandy little website called ‘LiveMaths‘.

An example LiveMaths how-to tutorial.

There’s plenty of revision websites out there, but this one is a little bit different: rather than just text, images, and maybe an occasional diagram, it has a video walking you through the steps to complete various different maths problems you’re likely to encounter if you’ve been unfortunate enough take GCSE Maths or foolish enough to take it for A-Level. It uses short but in-depth videos to make it clear how problems should be tackled in the exam.

You’ll find an incredibly wide range of topics, but if you are such an intrepid explorer that you find a missing topic, you can always contact the people who run it. Both of which are long-term secondary education maths teachers. I think my only suggestion for improvement would be for the site to also include webpages or worksheets with steps for solving the problem and sample questions for each topic which could be printed and used if one does not have access to a computer at the time. I must also say that the narration on the videos greatly resembles that of a robot programmed to patronise! The rates are pretty cheap: a GCSE subscription comes to the cost of about two private tutoring lessons. Have a look at the free samples to see if it’ll be helpful for you. Poddle off to www.livemaths.co.uk if you’re interested in a further browse or subscribing.