Wootube
One of the best ways for an aspiring teacher to learn, is to observe an expert teacher (Marzano & Boogren, 2010). Wootube is a multi-site repository of quality mathematics teaching resources, containing, among other things, numerous recordings of real lessons in real classrooms, taught by expert teacher Eddie Woo (Woo, 2020).
This resource is invaluable for meeting focus areas 2.1, 2.2, and 2.5, especially for early career teachers who are unsure how to present a new topic or structure a learning sequence.
However, Wootube’s videos are hosted on YouTube, a platform which has been the centre of countless ethical and moral disputes; often criticised for allowing radicalising, extremist, pirated, disinformational, and explicit media to be distributed (Basu, 2020)
Furthermore, YouTube is renowned for its copious advertisements. It must be asked whether any use of YouTube is tacitly promoting an unhealthy platform.
For Wootube, all the videos are un-monetised; no ads are displayed. Additionally, this is a resource which is primarily for teacher development outside of the classroom, so students needn’t be encouraged to use YouTube for themselves. Purely through the lens of enhancing teaching and learning, this resource is highly effective and ethically permissible, though this should be periodically reviewed as YouTube and its community guidelines continues to develop and change.
Desmos
Desmos is an extensive suite of interactive mathematics tools and resources (Desmos Studio PBC, 2024). The suite meshes well with focus area 2.6, providing many strategies for meaningfully implementing ICT in lessons across the curriculum.
The Desmos suite is best used as an aide for a skilled teacher, who thoughtfully selects visualisations, demonstrations, and activities which enrich the learning by helping students move to depth of understanding. Mathematics is fundamentally about patterns and relationships, so visualisation tools can facilitate the transition from knowledge to understanding by providing a novel means of representation by which patterns and relationships become recognisable (Gates, 2018).
One of the best ways to help students to depth of understanding is a discovery learning process, where students are encouraged along a journey which precipitates moments of realisation (Kroeker, 1967; Shieh & Yu, 2016). Desmos is a great tool in this realm, since students can be set a task to investigate, for instance, a family of non-linear relationships, tweaking parameters and uncovering truths.