‘Lumio’ (formerly known as SMART Learning Suite Online), is a digital learning tool for today’s changing teaching environments. This web-based software helps to create engaging lessons that students can interact with in class, remotely or on their own time all on their own devices.

Now that we can once again book devices in the classroom, we can use Lumio to create engaging and interactive lessons.  All lessons can be enhanced using the customisable components including games, collaborative workspaces and much more. The customised activities and games provide automatic feedback to keep learning on track. These can then be delivered to student devices quickly and easily, all from a browser.  Using Lumio, students can take ownership of their learning independently and the game-based activities, keeping students motivated and actively learning through interactive content on their own devices. 

All learning is visible to the teacher and the class with a dashboard master view of each piece of work.

The example shows an interactive activity ‘Rank Order’ where the students are ordering solutions interactively from smallest to largest.  Immediate feedback supports learning.  Pupils can then work through other pages at their own pace so that no time is wasted.  This is also an example of teaching for mastery.  The activity makes pupils think mathematically about the size of the answer.

In our weekly functional skills lessons, year 10 use Lumio for a range of activities to improve their working memory, helping them to recall key facts and formula alongside working interactively.  Students also answer functional skills questions using ‘Response’ so that I can identify areas of weakness to target during the following weeks or target misconceptions and improve exam technique.

The word search is a great tool for recapping key words and an additional sheet is used to match the definitions.     

More recently, during our ‘Drop down day’, our buddy group made Christmas cards collaboratively using Lumio for our community project .  These are going to be printed out and sent to residents in our local care homes.

Mrs S Bennett (UK Smart Ambassador / Assistant Maths Hub Lead for Abacus NW) 

As part of their learning journey, students in Year 7 and Year 8 have been taught about calculating with negative numbers using double sided counters. These manipulatives have been really helpful in making this topic visual and interactive, so the pupils understand how, and more importantly, why we arrive to a particular answer.

Pupils were first introduced to the concept of a ‘zero pair’, which is a pair of numbers than when added, equal zero. For example, we have that 1+ (-1) = 0.

Pupils then completed different calculations involving negative numbers using the counters.

Here is a comment from some of the pupils:

‘When I first saw the questions, it looked really hard at first because of all the negatives and positives- it was very confusing! After using the counters, it helped me visually see the calculation I was completing, making it a lot easier to understand.’ (Year 7 student)

‘I have seen calculating negative numbers before in Year 7, but I found it really hard. After seeing the topic again with counters, it has been much easier to understand, I can use the counters in lessons to help me understand how to add and subtract negative numbers.’ (Year 8 student)

Miss Hasan

Maths Department