This is an issue which faces thousands of parents and teachers in secondary schools every day. And one school thinks it has found the answer.
Julie Ann Lloyd is the Advanced Skills Teacher for Shropshire and a maths teacher at Idsall School, a mixed comprehensive school in Shifnal, Shropshire with over 1,200 children aged 11 to 18.
Julie Ann was looking for a new way to teach maths and decided to experiment with an on-line teaching service, ConquerMaths. Two of the maths sets in the school, a total of 56 teenagers, used the materials while the other classes did not. It was, in short, a typical scientific test.
Everything went well; GCSE grades went up and the school is now preparing to move all its students over to the on-line service.
As part of the ConquerMaths programme the on-line service provides reports on what work each student has undertaken. Julie Ann hit on the idea of sending these reports home on a weekly basis, allowing the parents to see exactly what work had been done and what progress was being made.
What happened next was that Julie Ann noticed that both the parent and the teenager were logging on to the service and doing more of the on-line work at home.
http://www.conquermathsschools.com/
Tel: 0191 240 1990
