Shared Sharing Practice

Revising stats on an interactive whiteboard

introduction

Andrina Inglis teaches maths at Bathgate Academy. She has had a SMART Board in her classroom for a year as part of a West Lothian pilot scheme. After a very positive response from Andrina and from her pupils, the school now has seven SMART Boards, which are used by different departments in the school. Today Andrina is revising statistics with a fourth-year credit class; the revision is based around questions on the SMART Board.

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the school

Teacher and school profile

Andrina has been teaching maths to S1–S6 pupils at Bathgate Academy for eight years, since she qualified as a teacher. She has always had an interest in computers and is just finishing an MSc in computer enhanced mathematics education, with specific reference to distance learning. 

Andrina has acquired her ICT skills mainly through day-to-day use. She now uses the SMART Board in every lesson and is very much hoping to get the projector ceiling mounted soon – it is currently on a trolley. Her classroom is ‘reversible’: the blackboard is still at one end, so other members of staff teaching in the room can choose to use it if they wish. Andrina also makes use of the internet (for example the BBC weather site for temperature topics), CD-ROMs (for mathematical games for the whole class or for interactive activities for small groups) and graphics calculators when appropriate. 

School profile

Bathgate Academy was established over 150 years ago with money donated by a local man who had made a fortune as a plantation owner in the Caribbean. The school moved from its original imposing building into a modern purpose-built building in the 1960s. 

Bathgate is 18 miles south west of Edinburgh and Bathgate Academy’s 898 pupils come mainly from the rural area round about. 163 pupils have free school lunches and 129 are registered as having special educational needs. None of the pupils speaks English as a second language. 

Bathgate is a ‘Mac’ school and has 300 computers and several ICT rooms. However, Andrina has a PC with her SMART Board because a lot of useful software is only available on PC. There is an ICT coordinator at Bathgate Academy, but this is not a full-time post. ICT training for staff is via West Lothian Council.