Earliest recommended Year group: Year 13. Pupils are given different segments of circles and asked to calculate their volumes of revolution. They all have the same volume. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

A free online Autograph Player activity that challenges students to predict the number of distinct planes of symmetry of this cuboid. Can they then discover the equations of these planes? 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.

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 10. Discovery of two circle theorems. Pupils mark out angles on a chord and cut them out and compare. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 11. Four crescents are drawn around a rectangle. All rectangles are different and the area of the crescents is equal to the rectangle. Surd (area = 1) and non-surd (area = 900) versions available. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 12. Given certain facts about a parabola the pupils have to determine its equation. Then they need to integrate the function to work out ratios of areas. There is a neat solution that makes it very easy to do - which you can show them at the end. A further extension is to challenge them to do it without integration. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 12. Pupils need to work out the equation of a cubic and draw a tangent at a specific place. All tangents should go through the first root. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

An Autograph Player activity where students can investigate a dynamic illustration of one of Euclid's Elements. 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 56th in Mr Barton's Autograph Video tutorial series. The Transformation of Functions Trilogy comes to a close with this final video all about how you can use Autograph to play “Follow the Point”. Being able to predict the co-ordinate of a point following a transformation is increasingly becoming a popular exam style question, and is a really useful skill for the students to develop, and it can be examined thoroughly using Autograph’s dynamic features. Clicking on the web-link you can see all the videos in this series.

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?

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.

An Autograph Player activity designed to help investigate the transformation of matrices. 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.

A cube in 3D. This could be used to introduce 3D Pythagoras or trigonometry. 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 first of the Trigonometric Trilogy! In this week’s video we take a look at a clever way of using Autograph to practice working out the length of missing sides using Trigonometry (sin, cos and tan) and Pythagoras. We begin by constructing a right-angled triangle, and then use a sneaky technique to cover up a measurement. The finished article can then be used in class or at home for infinite trigonometry practice! More on this next week!

Douglas Butler, the creator of Autograph, has produced 7 high quality tutorial videos to help you get the most out of the software. This tutorial video looks at using Autograph to introduce the straight line and its gradient (slope), and the quadratic and its various transformations. Also available on TES are my own weekly set of Autograph videos, and lots of Autograph Player Activities that don’t even require Autograph to be installed!

Douglas Butler, the creator of Autograph, has produced 7 high quality tutorial videos to help you get the most out of the software. In this tutorial we have a look at Autograph's uniquely useful onscreen keyboard: for controlling Autograph, entering mathematical notation and changing languages. Also available on TES are my own weekly set of Autograph videos, and lots of Autograph Player Activities that don’t even require Autograph to be installed!

A free online Autograph Player activity that challenges students to investigate a very interesting property of quadratic curves. Can your students prove this? 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.

A free online Autograph Player activity that allows students to discover the rules for finding the gradient function of quadratic equations. 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.

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 13. Given the 3D coordinates of four points what is the volume of the tetrahedron that is formed by joining them with line segments? This brings together just about everything they need to know about vectors and so is a good revision task. Using the triple product to solve it takes some of the fun out (hence suitable up to C4). Of course, the volumes are all the same.... but why? This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

Earliest recommended Year group: Year 7. Get pupils to draw a quadrilateral that they think will not tessellate. Then reproduce it using the Geogebra file and show that it does. Then show a picture proof. This is from the “Something in Common” collection of resources by John Burke. They allow consolidation of key skills, prevent students from copying each other (as all the questions are different), make marking and assessing easy for the teacher (as all the answers are the same!), and provide a lovely extra challenge for students as they try to figure out exactly what is going on! To access the full collection, and read John’s background notes, please visit: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/common.htm

An Autograph Player activity where students investigate reflections by playing golf. 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.