The 12th in a new series of videos where each week I visit my favourite mathematics websites. I am always on the look-out for short, snappy activities that are related to things going on in the real world to hammer home the relevance of maths to my students. Well, for that aim this amazing website is simply a Godsend. Each day new activities appear based around current news stories. Whether it be tennis, the new host of Countdown or the destruction of the Brazilian Rainforest, you can be sure that MathsFlash has a starter activity lined up for you. Enjoy.

An Autograph Player activity to practise sketching quadratic graphs. You can use this activity on the interactive whiteboard, or for your students to investigate on their own. Autograph does not need to be installed to use this activity (so your students can even use it at home), but you will need to install the free Autograph Player add-on (instructions given after clicking the link). For a full list of Autograph Activities, please click on the other web-link.

An Autograph Player activity to practise sketching quadratic graphs. You can use this activity on the interactive whiteboard, or for your students to investigate on their own. Autograph does not need to be installed to use this activity (so your students can even use it at home), but you will need to install the free Autograph Player add-on (instructions given after clicking the link). For a full list of Autograph Activities, please click on the other web-link.

All good things must come to an end, and the same is also true for our Autograph Trigonometric Trilogy! In this final video we go out with a bang by taking a look at how we can use Autograph to test students’ understanding of the classic isosceles triangle questions that seem to be a favourite of the examiners. Can students use their knowledge of sin, cos and tan in right-angled triangles to solve these problems?

It’s that time of year again. Your exam classes have left, reports are written, parents evenings are over, and maybe (just maybe) you can start to relax a little and look forward to the promise of the long summer holiday. But before all of that, you still have some lessons to teach! Myself and the TES Maths Panel have put together the following Collection of resources to help you in these last few weeks of term. If you are up for trying something a bit different in your maths lessons, then hopefully you will find something to tickle your fancy in amongst these ten lovely resources.

The second of the Trigonometric Trilogy! Following on from last week’s work, we take a look at how we can use Autograph to help students practise finding the sizes of missing angles in right-angled triangles using Trigonometry. The advantage of doing this on Autograph is you can easily generate as many examples as you want and quickly check the students’ answers. One more part to come next week…

The website Wordle came to prominence in around 2009, and has been popping up at conferences, lectures and around the display boards of schools ever since. In this video we take a look at how to use the website, and more importantly how we can use it effectively in the maths classroom. Ideas suggested include using it to summarise examiners reports, to capture the key topics that your class find difficult, and then as a starter activity to introduce a new topic. This is only scratching the surface of the potential of Wordle, so if you have any ideas on how it can be used, please share below!

An Autograph Player activity to illustrate the circle theorems involving tangents. You can use this activity on the interactive whiteboard, or for your students to investigate on their own. Autograph does not need to be installed to use this activity (so your students can even use it at home), but you will need to install the free Autograph Player add-on (instructions given after clicking the link). For a full list of Autograph Activities, please click on the other web-link.

MEI has kindly shared the following resources to support the use of ICT in A/AS Level maths. These are practical activities that look at how we can use the TI-Nspire (graphical calculator) to enhance the study of differentiation and integration (calculus), predominantly at AS level. These are ideal for use in a computer room or for students to investigate at home. The pdf file contains full instructions and challenges, and you can download all the supporting TI files by clicking on the weblink.

An Autograph Player activity by Simon Woodhead where students investigate how to model a vase in 3D. You can use this activity on the interactive whiteboard, or for your students to investigate on their own. Autograph does not need to be installed to use this activity (so your students can even use it at home), but you will need to install the free Autograph Player add-on (instructions given after clicking the link). For a full list of Autograph Activities, please click on the other web-link.

The 57th in Mr Barton's Autograph Video tutorial series. An incredibly useful feature of Autograph is the ability to hide a variety of things. These include points, shapes and lines. In this video we look at how to hide objects and then suggest a few interesting applications for the classroom, involving transformations and the equations of lines. Now you see them, now you don’t! Clicking on the web-link you can see all the videos in this series.

The 55th in Mr Barton's Autograph Video tutorial series. Part 2 of the Transformations of Functions Trilogy of Autograph videos. This time we take a peek at a nice way of getting the exact shape function you are looking for without having to worry about a horrendous equation. Clicking on the web-link you can see all the videos in this series.

An Autograph Player activity to investigate the gradients of perpendicular lines. You can use this activity on the interactive whiteboard, or for your students to investigate on their own. Autograph does not need to be installed to use this activity (so your students can even use it at home), but you will need to install the free Autograph Player add-on (instructions given after clicking the link). For a full list of Autograph Activities, please click on the other web-link.

Throughout the academic year of 2011 to 2012, each week I have taken viewers on a very quick tour of some of my favourite mathematical websites. I have tried to find new ways of using the familiar names, and also attempted to uncover some hidden gems along the way. And what a collection of websites they have been! We have seen websites to spice up every conceivable topic, from statistics to algebra, using everything from top trumps to sampling hip-hop tracks. In this video we take a look back at some of the websites featured in this year’s WebWhizz video collection.

Kangaroo Maths is a website that is quite literally bursting with free, high-quality content. In this video we barely scratch the surface, focussing on three excellent series of resources: Bring on the Maths – rich, classroom activities to challenge students’ misconceptions; Convinced – a series of worksheets that push students’ understanding of a topic; and Maths to Infinity – high quality Excel worksheets to generate as many questions as you could possible desire. Thank you Kenny the Kangaroo!

Here is a quick idea for an activity that should help your learners practise identifying the equation of a line from the points that lie on it. A line is constructed, and a point attached to it, but the line is then hidden! Can your students figure out the equation of the line by moving the point up and down? Can they work out the gradient? You about the y-intercept? Fire up the turtle and test out their answer!

The 20th in a series of videos where each week I visit my favourite mathematics websites. An oldie but a goodie here! Count On used to be one of my most visited websites in my early years of teaching. It has been a while since it was last updated, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t excellent stuff on here. We take a quick look at some of the games before focussing our attention on an excellent analysis of common mathematical misconceptions which could be sued a stimulus for departmental meetings.

The 19th in a series of videos where each week I visit my favourite mathematics websites. Mathematics has one of the richest, most interesting histories of all the subjects, full of sparks of genius and shady goings on, and yet this is largely something that students are ignorant of. The wonderful Mac Tutor History of Mathematics website can rectify all of this, providing a comprehensive catalogues of all the big (and not so big) names in Mathematics. And what’s more, they even have a Twitter feed so you can get updated with the Mathematician of the Day every day of the year!

The 54th in Mr Barton's Autograph Video tutorial series. The first in the Transformations of Functions Trilogy of videos where we look at how we can use Autograph to introduce students to the topic of transforming graphs. We see how to enter the f(x) notation, and how to make best use of the wonderful constant controller to get all the stretches, shifts and squashes that you could possibly want. Clicking on the web-link you can see all the videos in this series.

MEI has kindly shared the following resources to support the use of ICT in A/AS Level maths. These are practical activities that look at how we can use the TI-Nspire (graphical calculator) to enhance the study of e, ln and functions predominantly at A2 level. These are ideal for use in a computer room or for students to investigate at home. The pdf file contains full instructions and challenges, and you can download all the supporting TI files by clicking on the weblink.