Graham Griffiths and Kevin Canning Red Kite

Do you teach entry level or level 1 maths? Have you ever had a student who needs extra practice in just one area of their maths? Do you want some fun colourful engaging activities? Then you need to visit the LLU website www.lsbu.ac.uk/lluplus/interactive and register as a tutor.

In this workshop we were introduced to the interactive games on the website which are a result of collaboration between London South Bank University and Red Kite learning who worked on the technical side. The initial funding came from Central London LSC and they are now looking for more funding to update existing resources and to develop more. Once we had been introduced to the philosophy behind the resources, which are intended to be -a free resource for teachers- interactive -suit various learning styles, we went onto the website and were introduced to the extra dimension that this resource offers – templates for the different games which we could access and adapt to make our own resources. We discovered that we could have our own area where we developed different exercises as well as access to many pooled resources contributed by other teachers. We also set up our own workgroups where we assigned the exercises – the workgroup could be for an individual or a group of our students who can then log onto and access games written for them.

There are some limitations with the system and after some time designing our own activities we were able to feedback some improvements we would like to see in the future. Some of these it seems are feasible amendments to ask Red Kite to do now other developments, e.g. looking at offline options and accessibility issues, need more work - hence the need for more funding. At the end of the session we had all designed at least one new resource for our students; set up a workgroup for them to log onto; and many of us had discovered lots of new resources to explore and introduce to our students according to their needs and learning styles.