Magma is all about promoting students sharing their workings rather than just sharing the answer for each question. One of the features to encourage this is called Live Activity.

To start this, I’m simply going to go onto the active assignment in my class. Rather than looking at the Heat Map, which is great for me but not so engaging for students, I’m going to tap onto Live Activity at the top. This brings up a really fun and colourful screen that you’ll want to have on the projector at the front of your class.

What you can see here are all of the students and the great workings that they’re sharing. At the top you’ve got a progress bar with two different metrics. There’s a green one which shows all the correct answers earned. But the more important one is the orange thumbs up – these are correct answers that have also shown good workings in Magma.

Now, whilst you can see this screen on my iPad here, I’m actually frantically answering questions on behalf of two students at the same time. You’ll notice that as those answers come in, not only are the progress bars moving, but also the great workings are showing up in the middle of the screen. Imagine you’ve got a whole class – how exciting would it be for students to see their work on the board for that brief moment before the next one comes along?

This is a really fun feature that encourages students to show their best workings in the questions. And you’re probably thinking, “Well, Jacob, this is great, but unless there’s a dancing cat, my class simply don’t care.” Well, you’re in luck – because when you hit milestones in Live Activity, your class gets fun little gifts and celebrations to mark the moment. Of course, they don’t last for too long – you want to get back to the maths after all.

The final thing to mention about Live Activity is that you can have it on your screen without showing student names if you don’t want to. You can press the Anonymise button in the top right corner, and then you’ll just see the work.

If you haven’t tried Live Activity with your class yet, I really would encourage it. Maybe you won’t use it for an end-of-term practice paper, but for lots of activities it’s a brilliant way to motivate your students to put in as much effort as they can and to be as creative as possible with their maths.