Mastering the Heat Map

Hi, Jacob here - and in this short Quick Tip video, we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into the heat map in Magma Maths.

I can access the heat map simply by tapping onto any assignment on my homepage, and then you can see straight away all of those colourful squares come up. We’ve had a look at the heat map in a previous video - so if you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at, do go back and check that out.

But today, I want to share a couple of features to go a little bit deeper into the heat map. The most important basics of the heat map, however, are that every single square represents a problem that’s been solved by one of your students. Obviously, they’re coloured green or red depending on whether the solution was correct or incorrect, and I can then tap onto any of these questions to view my student’s workings.

I can even press Play in the bottom corner to watch that action happen in real time - to replay what they’ve been doing on their screen to try and better understand where they’ve perhaps got muddled up. And we can see straight away here that William needs to work a little bit more on his fractions.

Let’s go back to the heat map itself and we’ll choose a different student. Let’s go for Luca this time. Now, Luca’s done a good job here - he’s answered some questions correctly and some incorrectly. But what I’m going to do is use Magma’s AI tools to get an overview of how this student is getting on, and - importantly - where they might need some support.

All I’m going to do is tap on View Pupil Summary and give it a moment for the AI to work. And just like that, Magma AI has looked at the answers given in this assignment and it’s given me - the teacher - some feedback to help me out. I can see that his addition skills are really strong - problems one and two, done. But actually, it’s starting to show some areas for improvement as well.

For example, it’s saying that on Problem Number 3, this student needs some help looking at subtraction when borrowing numbers. In fact, if we scroll down, we can see Question 3 - and we can see that, yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened here. So, I can then start putting a plan in place to support Luca with that particular issue.

This is a really powerful overview of my student’s learning - and it then means, as a teacher, I can quickly see areas to work on, whether that’s with individual students or with my whole class.

In fact, speaking of the whole class, let’s jump back to a particular question and we’ll go on to Problem 7. Here you can see a real mixture of different answers - correct and incorrect. What I’m going to do is use the pin icon in the corner to select a few examples that I want to work through and model with my class.

I’m going to choose a correct one that shows some interesting workings, and a couple of incorrect ones as well. Then what I can do is tap on the Pin icon in the top toolbar, and now it’s going to filter and just show those ones that I’ve selected.

However, right now it’s very obvious which ones are correct and incorrect - and also which students have done it - which is not really fair to share on the whole board. So, next to the Pin Filter icon at the top, I can also anonymise these answers so it won’t tell you the student’s name anymore. And I can also hide whether they were correct or incorrect - making them all purple.

This opens the door for some really powerful learning conversations in the classroom - because now we’re not just looking at which answer is right and which one is wrong. We’re looking at the workings - the journey that each learner has taken to get there. And even though the answers are different, we can then analyse these different approaches to figure out the right one - which should lead us to the correct answer.

And if we want to model it further, all I have to do is tap on the Solve button, and it will open up for me to use on my whiteboard to demonstrate to the whole class.

So hopefully I’ve proven to you that the heat map is more than just a bunch of coloured squares. And there’s even more to Magma Maths - we’re going to have a look at the skills and the stats wheels in the next videos. So, make sure you check them out - and I’ll see you next time.