Odd One Out

I can't remember the last time I read, viewed or thought of something without automatically wondering how I could include it in a lesson.

The odd one out game we were given for Christmas was no exception, so here it is, a Maths version of Odd One Out. The aim is for it to be used with ABCD cards either as an icebreaker or 'filler' at the end of the lesson. It enables students to use their knowledge outside of the context of the lesson on a specific topic, and involves all pupils as it is self-differentiating - each pupil can look for a different level of difference between the choices. On pressing REVEAL the odd one out and its reason is given, but naturally there are often perfectly acceptable alternative reasoning that students could come up with, making it very interesting to see the different ways in which pupils are thinking.

Questions are levelled from 1 to 5 by content (5 is A Level), with the 'questions' tab giving the list from which the game draws. Some of these questions look at the 'lists' tab to randomly select an option, keeping the questions fresh.

The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Getting back onto Flipboard

Having recently shared my flipboard magazine with a colleague, I was back on quest to find a way of Google Readering without Google Reader. Although my Google Reader feed is still active, I can't add to it and I can't remove feeds from it.

Sure, it's easy to type an RSS feed into flipboard and subscribe to it individually, but when in Google Reader I was subscribed to most of David Wees list of maths and education blogs, plus a few additions, so it would have taken me some time to add them + given me over 40 pages of flipboard tiles.

The answer: RSS Mix
Simply paste the RSS feeds into the textbox (maximum of 100), click create and you'll be given your own rssmix URL which can be read as a single magazine in Flipboard. To do this click the search button in the top right hand corner of the Flipboard menu page, and paste the URL (I'm using http://www.rssmix.com/u/3861797/rss.xml).
If you want to add blogs to this list, you can simply RSS Mix the feed above with some of your own, then create a new feed mix. The RSS Mix feed above and any you create can be shared with others by simply giving them the feed URL, which they can import to the RSS reader of their choice.

The drawback of this is that deleting blogs from the list means going back to your original spreadsheet, then re-creating the RSS Mix, then re-importing into Flipboard, but you'd hope this wouldn't happen that often.

The solution isn't perfect, but it's a start until Flipboard allow synchronisation with a Feedly account or similar.