PowerPoint Reports Years 7 & 8 Settlebeck High School, Cumbria, UK Students at Settlebeck are taught in mixed ability classrooms. The two maths teachers in this small rural high school (200 pupils) have different teaching styles but both base their teaching on encouraging kids to talk mathematics. Skilful differentiation, personal mathematical journals, and probing questions with a detailed understanding of each student's strengths and weaknesses, supported by plenty of hands-on practical material, seemed to work well for all. John Hibbs, HMI (ret.) reporting on a visit to the school in his Maths Blog.

Painted Cubes, Task 160, in use at Wade High School, NSW.

Through this atmosphere, John Hancock (HoD) is encouraging students to learn to work like a mathematician which includes finding out through research that mathematics was, and is, created by real people and encouraging students to publish reports of their investigations for others to understand.

A tool of choice for this publishing process is PowerPoint and students are expected to present their work to their peers for critical review as part of the publishing process. The sample here (one of many from the class), based on the investigation Painted Cubes has been through that process, but not a teacher correction process. In that sense, it is presented 'warts & all'. None-the-less it demonstrates both the quality of work possible from Year 8 students and the richness of the Settle beck classrooms.

• Becky & Lydia's report on Painted Cubes.
  One of the wonderful things about this report is the attempt, near the end, to generalise the problem.

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