How to Use Practice Mode

As well as creating assignments for our students to learn from, Magma has also got a built-in Practice mode, which can either be set automatically by Magma AI, or it can be set by the teacher. In fact, students can even choose to practise areas they want to improve on.

This is a really powerful feature - and it’s really simple to use as well, which is a pretty sweet combination. So, let’s have a look and see what’s going on.

We’re going to start off by using the student account for Mia. Here, you can see that Mia’s tapped onto her Practice tab, and you can see at the top that there’s a recommended activity which has been assigned by the teacher. Of course, Mia can start and complete this activity whenever she wants to, or, if she closes that popover screen, she can see her whole Practising Pathway.

The way this works is really lovely. At the top of the screen are the recommended practice activities - we’ll come back to those in a moment - but then Mia can swipe down her screen, and you can see all the different practice levels and practice questions, and you can earn stars on each one. It’s quite a nice gamified way of doing some practice.

And what’s really awesome is that if you go back to the same set of levels again, the Magma AI is going to give you different questions for the same topic of revision. It’s really quite clever.

There’s also a map available in the top-right-hand corner, which gives the student an overview of all the different areas they can practise and lets them quickly jump to a certain area - for example, division or time.

At the very top of the screen, let’s go back to that recommended section, and I’m going to tap onto More Recommendations. In the corner here, you can see two distinct sections: recommendations from the teacher, and recommendations from Magma.

We’ll have a look at how these teacher ones are assigned in a minute or two, but the Magma ones are intelligently chosen based on the questions that the student is getting wrong, or perhaps the ones they’re struggling with more than others. And just like before, the student can tap onto any of these and get started straight away with some practice.

When they do choose a topic to practise, many of these have built-in tutorial videos to give that student a helping hand and guide them in the right direction when they’re learning.

Okay, let’s leave Mia to do some practice and we’ll jump back to the teacher side of things in Magma Maths.

For me, as the teacher, there are two main ways that I can set practice questions: I can manually select ones that I think my students need to work on, or I can use results of assignments to automatically suggest ones for me.

I’ll start off by tapping the Practice tab. Here you’re going to see all of the different practice activities available for my class. Of course, I can scroll through these and select any ones that I want, and then press Recommend to send them to my students.

At the moment, we’re looking at the whole class, but I want to focus on just Mia for now. So, at the top, I’ll use this filter menu and just choose the student I want to focus on.

Now I can actually see the student’s progress on these practice questions, and I can choose which one I want to assign to her next. I can do this simply by scrolling down to explore, tapping on the set of questions that I think would benefit her, and then pressing Recommend. Just like that, Mia will have those questions on her iPad.

Now I’ve set that activity for Mia, I actually think that probably my whole class would benefit. So, I’m going to use that filter toggle again and choose All Pupils. Then, on the recommended section of the Practice tab, I can now see the activity that I’ve sent out.

Here you can see it’s just been sent to one student, but when I tap on there, I can then recommend it to all of my class. As simple as that, I’ve now assigned some personalised practice to my learners.

But I’ve still had to go through and manually search to find that practice set of questions. If only there was a better way. Oh - hang on - my notes… Yes, of course there is!

We’re going to go back to the Assignment screen, and we’re going to choose an assignment that’s either currently being worked on or that’s complete. I’m going to go to Archive and use this end-of-unit assessment.

When you tap onto here, you simply press the Skills tab at the top. Don’t worry - we’ll come back to this in a future video, because there’s tons to unpack here.

On this screen, Magma is going to look at which questions my students have been struggling with, and it’s going to intelligently recommend certain practice activities to help support my learners.

When I tap on Recommend All in the corner, it’s then going to decide what activities should go to which students, and it’s going to deploy them for me. That means that every learner has got their own personalised support package of practice questions that they can work through - when they finish assignments in class or when they’ve got a little bit of free time.

And now, when I go back to my Practice tab in Magma as the teacher, I can see all of the different activities that have been assigned to my class. I’ve only had one student complete this assignment, so I’ve only assigned things to Mia. But if you have a whole class, it will automatically assign practice activities to any student who got below 50% in a certain skill.

Then I can tap onto any of these practice cards, go onto my student, and I can see the answers that student has submitted. And if I wanted to recommend this activity again - or if the student just wanted to do it for a second time - we can both be happy in the knowledge that the topic will be the same, but the questions will be new and fresh each time the student does it.

That means they can really support their learning, they can build those skills, and the next time they have an assignment - they’ll smash it.

And that’s it for now. I’ll see you next time, and we’ll explore some more of the clever features in Magma Maths.