Active online learning: using shared digital whiteboards to make Year 7 maths visual
Having a visual way to explore equations makes a world of difference for a student’s confidence. With online Year 7 maths tutoring, they do the work live on a shared screen instead of watching someone else do it.
A lot of Year 7 maths is about shape: angle relationships, the properties of triangles and quadrilaterals, length and area. These ideas are about what changes and what stays the same, which a still diagram in a textbook struggles to show.
How a shared screen takes the stress out of geometry and shapes
The NSW Department of Education’s sample Year 7 program includes units on triangles and quadrilaterals, and on length and area. These are the topics where a moving picture does the most work.
In our sessions that usually means Desmos, alongside a shared digital whiteboard where the tutor draws and your child writes.
| What we show live | What your child sees | The idea it locks in |
|---|---|---|
| Drag the corners of a triangle | The three angles change, but their total stays at 180° | The angle sum of a triangle, and why it’s always true |
| Slide the top edge of a parallelogram sideways | The shape leans, but its base, height and area stay the same | Area = base × height, and why the slanted side doesn’t count |
| Cut a triangle off one end of a parallelogram and move it to the other | It becomes a rectangle with the same area | Where the parallelogram area rule comes from |
| Resize a rectangle that always has a 20 cm perimeter | A 1 × 9 rectangle has an area of 9 cm²; a 5 × 5 square has 25 cm² | Perimeter and area measure different things |
| Tilt a line crossing two parallel lines | Matching angles stay equal as the line moves | Corresponding and alternate angles |
Each of these replaces a rule to memorise with something they’ve watched happen. When the rule comes up in a test, they can picture where it came from.
Working together on practice questions in real time
Sessions run on Google Meet with a shared digital whiteboard open inside the call. Your child can write on an iPad if they have one, or type and draw with a mouse on a computer.
Your child drives. They move the slider, sketch the diagram and write each line of working, while the tutor watches it appear and steps in at the exact line where it goes off track.
Every student also has a shared Google Doc that holds the notes from every session. Your child keeps working in it between sessions, and you can open it any time to see what’s been covered.
What a one-hour session looks like
- Check-in: how they’re feeling and what’s come up since last week.
- Set the focus: based on upcoming assessments and anything from previous sessions that still needs work.
- Work through it together: new ideas shown live on the whiteboard or in Desmos, with your child driving the practice.
- Review and next steps: a quick recap, written into the shared Google Doc with what to practise before next time.
Why rereading notes and heavy textbooks leave students feeling stuck
A major review of ten common study techniques rated practice testing and spreading practice out over time as the most useful. Rereading and highlighting, two of the most popular, were rated low.
Rereading feels productive because the page looks familiar, but recognising a worked example is much easier than producing one. So each session ends with a quick review where your child does the recalling, and anything that didn’t stick comes back the following week.
How you’ll know it’s working
- They can explain why a triangle’s angles add to 180° without looking it up.
- They redraw and label the diagram from a question themselves.
- They start unfamiliar questions instead of leaving them blank.
- The same mistakes stop showing up in their school tests.
You don’t need to wait for a report. The shared Google Doc has a tracker page at the top with recent marks, tutor comments, confidence and the answers from each term’s check-in interview, and you can open it whenever you like.
Sources
- Mathematics 7–10 units and assessments, NSW Department of Education
- Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques, Association for Psychological Science