Combining Questions from Different Books

Hi there, it’s Jacob here, and in today’s video we’re going to have a look at how we can create some slightly more complex assignments using Magma Maths, and we’re going to try and incorporate some questions from different sources.

So, I’m going to create an assignment just like normal, and we’re going to navigate to where we want to start finding our questions from. For this example, I’m going to use the Year 5 White Rose Maths scheme, and I’m going to go to the first lot of lessons from the autumn term, all about place value.

Now, I want to do a kind of end-of-week assignment here, and I’m going to start off by looking at some place value to 10,000 questions. When we go on to this section, we can see the three categories of fluency, reasoning, and problem solving. And just like when you make a normal assignment, you can pick as many questions from here as you like. Don’t forget you can scroll down as well - there are more questions hiding there.

Because I’m going to use multiple question sources, I don’t want to grab too many here. I think just a few will be enough. Then, at the top, where I’ve got that kind of breadcrumb trail of where I’ve been, I’m going to jump back a step to that place value unit.

From here, I can choose questions up to 100,000. Just like before, I can then select whichever questions I want my students to have a go at answering. As I’m doing this, if you look at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see those blue segments appearing. Each of these segments corresponds to the different section of the book that I’ve got questions from. Of course, I can tap on them to jump back to that section to edit the questions if I want to.

You might be thinking, “Gosh, Jacob, this is cool, but I bet you can’t add three different sections.” Well, of course you can. In fact, there’s no real limit to how many different sections and chapters you can pull questions from - although I guess the length of time your students may be working for is a factor. They’ll probably want a break eventually!

I’m going to jump back a level once more by using that breadcrumb trail at the top of my screen, and I’m going to choose Roman numerals and add a few more questions from there.

I’ve now got three distinct sets of questions, all in one assignment.

But wait - there’s more. As things stand, the questions that we’ve added are in the order we added them, which I guess is logical. But for an end-of-week assessment, or an end-of-unit assessment, we want to mix things up a little bit.

So, next to those segments at the bottom, I’m going to tap the pencil icon. From here, you can see I’ve got three different ways of organising my questions. The bottom one will actually randomise them for me. Then I can simply drag and drop to rearrange them into the exact order I want. I think I’ll just mix these up a little bit more… perhaps put that question there… yes, I think that feels quite good in terms of flow.

I can use that little down button at the bottom and the up one at the top to navigate through the questions and simply drag and drop to relocate them. Then I’m going to press Save to go back to my main assignment screen.

Now, I can start customising my assignment settings, just like you normally would do in Magma. I’m going to use the quiz setting here. That means that my students won’t get told how they’ve got on - they won’t be told if it’s correct or not - and they can’t have multiple goes at answering each question. A little bit like doing a practice test paper, perhaps.

But there’s actually one last question I want to add to this assignment. So, I’m going to go back to my full library of books. At the top, I’m going to go to Add More Books. I’m then going to search for whiteboard, and you’ll notice there’s a whole book simply called Mini Whiteboard.

When you tap onto the Mini Whiteboard, you’ll notice that there’s a whole bunch of questions that all look exactly the same. In fact, they’re all completely blank. And you might be thinking, “What on earth is this for?” Well, it’s actually a really handy and flexible feature.

For example, you could assign a blank mini whiteboard to your whole class, and as you’re modelling a lesson on the board, you can then see in real time all of your students working on it on their iPads without having to set up questions beforehand.

For me, I’m going to use it to get some feedback at the end of my assignment. To do this, I’m going to make sure it’s the last question in my quiz. As I introduce the quiz to my students, I’m going to let them know that at the end, on that blank mini whiteboard, I’d like them to reflect a little bit on the week’s learning - perhaps share something they found trickier or something they’ve really enjoyed - just so I can get some feedback at the end of my assignment.

Okay, we’re set up and ready to go. I’m going to press Create, and my assignment is there, ready on that list of assignments on the home screen. Because we’ve made a quiz, we have the option to start this whenever we want to. We’re not going to launch it at different times for different students - we’re going to be in the lesson, ready to start - and I’m simply going to tap Start on the screen here, just like this.

At that point, all of the students can access that quiz on their devices and start working through. For me, I’m going to jump onto my second iPad and pretend to be Mia, and I’m going to work through some of those questions myself.

When I tap onto the name of the assignment on my teacher iPad, you can then see that Mia is frantically writing away to answer those questions. Obviously, I’ve sped this up quite a lot - I’m not actually a maths whizz quite at this speed!

But now what I can do is see that last question, Question 10, and when I tap on there, I can see Mia’s (or my) reflections on that particular week’s learning.

And just like that, you’ve created a multi-pro assignment using different sets of questions and books. You’ve sent it out to your class as a quiz, and you’ve even found out that Mia found Roman numerals tricky. Not bad for a few minutes’ video, right?

Go and try this in your class and start creating some assignments for your students out of multiple question sources. I’ll see you next time for another Magma QuickTip.