Once your students have completed an assignment in Magma Maths, we can then use the data given to us to automatically assign activities to help them improve in areas they’re finding trickier.

Jumping onto the Heat Map from an assignment that’s been completed will give us three different tabs at the top. The middle one – Skills – is where we’re going to be looking in this video.

Tab one here is not going to show you one column for every question. Rather, it’s going to be one column for every skill covered in that assignment – for instance, adding three-digit numbers up to a thousand or dividing within 100. From here, we get the same colour code as the Heat Map – green, red, and yellow – but now we’re looking at the skills that students are finding trickier, not individual questions.

If I find a skill I want to drill down into – for example, adding fractions with unlike denominators – I can then see all the different students and how often they got the questions correct or incorrect. If there are students who are getting the answer correct less than half the time, Magma will suggest that we send them a bespoke practice activity based on this skill. You’ll find they’re already highlighted on the list here, like William.

Of course, we can still select more students as well and then press Recommend to send that activity to their accounts on their iPads. We can do this on individual skills and choose different students each time. But actually, in the top right-hand corner of the Skills page, there’s a Recommend All button.

Tapping on here is going to send practice activities to all the students who’ve been getting less than 50% correct on any given skill. On this assignment, we need to be careful because some students might get eight different activities sent to them, so we might want to be a little more selective. Or, if we want to send to all the students and then manually change it afterwards, we can do that as well.

In fact, I’m going to do that now. I’ll press Recommend and send those activities out to my whole class.

Now, let’s switch over to a student’s iPad. On the homepage, you can see at the bottom there’s a little notification badge on Practice. Tapping on here will show the latest activity their teacher sent. In this case, it’s interpreting fraction multiplication. Or, they can press More Recommendations to see all the activities their teacher has sent.

Now that student is empowered to choose whichever one they want to practise, knowing that it’s come directly from me, their teacher. It’s not some random assignment from nowhere – this is bespoke practice for them based on a skill they need to improve.

Of course, tapping onto any of these activities will take the student straight into the solving mode of Magma, where they can work through those questions in their own time.

And just like that, this student is one of 30 in my class who has bespoke practice questions off the back of the assignment they completed earlier. For me as the teacher, it’s taken barely a few seconds to do that, and I know the activities being sent are relevant to each student.

And that’s the Skills tab in Magma Maths.