“Offering ‘outstanding’ education (as judged by ISI), The Park School prides itself in being at the forefront of technology innovation, adopting and using the latest curriculum educational aids to release maximum potential for its students. “
This is the opening paragraph in Casio’s Education Marketing Brochure, just published in time for the British Education and Training Technology (BETT) fair at Olympia in London over the weekend of January 11-14th. We are proud to say that following Casio’s very successful trials with the calculator in our school, Ms Liz Berriman, our Head of Mathematics, is working at the fair, taking two sessions with the public on Saturday January 14th.
The article in the brochure continues….
Liz Berrimann, Head of Maths Department at the school, describes the school ethos in detail. “When I arrived at the school, I was thrilled that it embraced the vision to allow its sixth form Advanced Level (A Level) students the ability to embrace the latest technologies to facilitate their further maths studies. This materialised with the adoption of graphical calculators within the syllabus. These calculators broadly differ from mainstream advanced models in that they allow students to interrogate statistical tables and matrices with inbuilt pre-installed geometry features, and as it now emerges, a whole load more besides!”
Student and teachers are unanimous on one point – total ease of use. Primarily, the Casio fx-CG20 features an easy to use navigation button that allows easy movement around the menu buttons together with an auto back feature that allows you to seamlessly revert back to what you were doing before, without tedious scrolling through menus and submenus. Students can easily move from one application to another and a simple but effective exit key allows students to go back one level at a time.
Student acceptance and the ease of use was so compelling in the trial that the Department decided to fully embrace the Casio fx-CG20, not just for Advanced mathematic studies, but throughout the entire upper school together with the integrated Teachers’ Kit, to really bring lessons to life and facilitate group learning.
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Liz elaborates. “The fx-CG20 really has meant that the manual has stayed where it belongs, in the box. For instance now in a complex distribution calculation, I simply need to fill in the data asked for. You do need to understand the concepts of each distribution but once that is mastered there is no need to use tables anymore; in the normal distribution you are even given the standardised variable. Complex Number mode is easy to use, just turn it on and get going. Graphs and tables work seamlessly together.”
Liz summarises, “Each time I pick up the calculator I am increasingly impressed by what it can do; from the first time I used it I was aware I held a powerful piece of technology and each time I use it I find out a bit more about just how powerful it is.”