Welcome to day four of the 2022 Appvent Calendar.
Today we look at and explore a tool that is the perfect edtech companion for any teacher to use to support the teaching and learning of maths and science.
The perfect edtech companion for any Maths or Science teacher.
Equatio is a piece of software that runs either as a desktop app or an extension within your browser that allows you to create, write, analyse and listen to pretty much any mathematical material you may wish to work on with your classes.
Created by Texthelp, the tool is feature-rich whilst still containing all of the great accessibility features you’ll have come to know and love from the Texthelp team.
How might I use it in my classroom?
There are so many ways in which you can use Equatio in the classroom. One common pain point that teachers and particularly children have, is adding equations and special symbols into their digital work.
As you might imagine, Equatio has a fantastic equation editor. Reducing obstacles for teachers is something that Equatio is superb at.
As well as being able to easily insert special symbols or equations into documents, the equation editor also gives powerful predictions which are super useful and easy to choose from as you’re typing in your equation.
Getting it to work couldn’t be easier. Simply start typing your desired symbol such as ‘sq’ of squared or ‘eq’ for equals, and the prediction tool goes to work. For example, if I was to type 2x + 3sq because I wanted 2x + 32 I could easily create that using the equation editor, to then add to my document:
What about graphing?
One of the most popular tools for graphing in Maths lessons is Desmos and so as you’d expect, Equatio has Demos baked right in. You can obviously convert equations to a table of values as well. Everything you know and love about Desmos is in there but those powerful predictions are in there too. Once you’ve created your graph, you can drop it straight into your destination, or if you’ve made a mistake or if you’re live teaching and want to make a change, you can always edit something you’ve already placed into your document. Simply select it, choose ‘Edit Maths’ and it brings it straight back into Equatio. Bonus!
What if my Chromebook has a touch screen?
The handwriting feature is super useful if you have a touch screen. When live teaching, simply open up the handwriting recognition panel, scribe in whatever you want, and Equatio can do the rest!
Improve your digital assessment
In a Chromebook environment, Google Forms and Classroom are staples for many teachers because they’re great for setting work and quizzing learners. Often though, for Maths teachers, these types of quizzes and tests are often limited to you either setting just multiple choice questions or long answer questions where you wished you could see their working. With Equatio, students can easily add their working to their responses using the mathspace feature:
This is obviously great for you as a teacher so you can see their thinking written out in front of you, without, of course, the need for you to carry all those books home, and keep it all under one roof within your Google Workspace. Brilliant!
Grab maths from anywhere
The internet is a tool often used for inspiration, resources and for learning. Using the screenshot recognition tool, you can quickly and easily grab maths from anywhere, as demonstrated below from a YouTube video.
Simply click on the ‘Screenshot Reader’ option, drag a box around the maths you want to use and hey presto, you get the editable maths to use how and wherever you want.
Another great feature here, and pervasive throughout Equatio, is that it can also read that maths to you (or the student you might have set the work for). This makes it eminently more accessible and provides support beyond the classroom too.
On top of that, Equatio even recognises when it finds maths on any web page, prompts the user and then makes it accessible, live on top of the web resource. Equatio doesn’t ever solve anything for you, what it does is it simply and effectively gives learners scaffolded support when they need it, in the moment, whether that be in the classroom or learning at home, helping to make the resources you share to be more accessible which of course, has to help learning.
What about making Maths resources?
Equatio mathspace is a one-stop shop for teachers to create any manner of different resources. You can:
- Bring in images of exam questions and annotate them to show working
- Use slides to create a series of resources for sharing
- 250 shapes you can use and edit
- Interesting manipulative shapes such as fraction tiles, coins, tangrams, base 10 blocks, nets, Venn diagrams and more
- Helpful smart shapes that are adjustable, such as analogue/digital clocks, accurate fractions and angles,
Equatio mathspace also has useful overlay tools built into the smart shapes, such as a protractor so you can accurately solve maths problems digitally.
What about work in Maths books? Can Equatio help there?
My final big win for Equatio is the web-based mobile app that learners can use to capture any maths they may have created, whether digital or analogue. Simply load the app onto their phone, scan the written work in the book (which can be cropped to highlight only the relevant bit of maths) and then simply add it into Equatio for their teacher.
This is useful for a few reasons. Firstly, it promotes students to go in and check their work again. Secondly, it is a great way to make maths more accessible for peer marking in an anonymised way (as it masks a learner’s handwriting). Finally, it’s also a great way to get work submitted in a digitised format. Some learners might prefer for example to work from their book, but their teacher wants them to complete their maths home learning digitally. Sharing their handwritten work via Equatio, either as an image or as maths, makes it quick, easy and possible for this to happen, which of course can then make it easier and quicker for you, the teacher, to close the feedback loop.
To sum up
All in all, Equatio is a really great companion to any classroom, particularly Maths and Science classrooms, whether you’ve got 1:1 devices or it’s just you, the teacher with your sole Chromebook or another device. It really is a Maths or Science teacher’s best friend.
To learn more about Equatio, check out their website here or why not follow them on social media at Texhelp for all the latest news.
// This is a sponsored post
