Below I review two media resources that are well worth a listen, for teachers, interested adults, and perhaps older students. These are not resources in themselves, but I am sure that educators will find stories and examples in these programmes that can have direct application in the classroom.

Cosmic Quest

Cosmic Quest This fabulous narrative history of human understanding of the Cosmos tells one of the greatest stories in the history of ideas. It is pleasingly compact, and easy to listen to. All the episodes are available to listen to from the BBC website.

In Our Time - Probability

Melvyn Bragg’s excellent In Our Time broadcast and podcast on probability last week was an excellent discussion of the history of probability with, among others, Prof. Marcus du Sautoy, who is always worth listening to! The podcast can be found here.

At University I was introduced to a really interesting CD called Problem Pictures. It had some fascinating images that all had some mathematical significance. I printed out about fifty and they made the walls of my classroom bright and appealing. It also had questions related to each photo, but I found that I rarely used them, preferring to create my own questions and ideas.

Enter Flickr, a great online photo sharing tool. Though you will not get questions related to each photo, the database is huge. Typing into the Flickr search engine ‘geometry’ turns up 10,810 photos at the time of writing. Most of them are really relevant; some of them are utterly spectacular. Here is a random sample:

I have found that putting an image full screen on an interactive whiteboard when students come into the room is a great way of capturing the students’ attention straight away.