Primary Mathematics Capitalising on ICT for Today and Tomorrow

Mr Brookes held his grand-daughter's hand and proudly walked into her Year 4 classroom. It was Grand-Friends Day, and he was looking forward to seeing what Bonnie was achieving – particularly in mathematics, his favourite subject while at school. He remembered the feeling of achievement when his page was filled with a column of ticks.

Mr Brookes looked around the room, and already he was feeling a little uneasy. On one wall he saw some contextual addition problems with different techniques such as a jump method, split method and compensation method. He thought to himself, ‘What is wrong with lining up the two numbers, beginning with the units column, and borrowing and pay-back?’ Next to the strategies that were already disturbing him, he saw the formal strategy with which he was familiar; however, it was labelled with words such as ‘trade’.

On closer inspection, he observed that the students had previously made their own metre rulers, were tracing around feet on grid paper and using string to find the perimeter, and were building as many different rectangular prisms as they could with 24 small cubes. There were group results on the wall of throwing dice and tabulating the results, and strips of paper used to find the average of the class by breaking the strips into pieces until they were approximately the same length. In another display, he saw patterns being explored on the 100 chart. He couldn't believe his eyes when he saw times tables presented next to rows and columns of dots.

Mr Brookes was about to ask Bonnie whether he could look in her exercise book when he noticed an electronic board of some kind on the wall where he expected to see the blackboard. On this board – which Bonnie called the interactive whiteboard – a group of children were predicting the shape that would be made when they cut an object at particular positions. After choosing the shape, they cut the object with a virtual knife and checked their solution. On another table, two children were sharing an iPad, creating as many different four-sided figures as they could, and were exploring everything else they could find out about the shapes.