TeacherTechnologies.com

Adding Indices in Easiteach

This week, a teacher left a really interesting question for me through the contact form on the site.  The person in question was a secondary maths teacher, who wanted Easiteach to let him have indices and powers in his files.  He had been creating their maths formulas in word and were then trying to copy them into Easiteach.  At that point, Easiteach kept misunderstanding what it was being asked to do and anything that should have been appearing as a sub or super script was, instead, being reformatted as standard text.  Not what you want when you’re trying to write 34² on your maths resource!

Unfortunately, Easiteach doesn’t come with the option to just add in these indices – even with the maths tool bar.  In fact, even in it’s symbol menu, neither does Inspire.  The menu, accessed when you create a text box, contains a wide range of

Symbols in Inspire

symbols but, unfortunately not the indices and subscripts. Smart is the only IWB software to have this feature built in.

Adding Indices in Smart

There is a solution however that will work no matter which software you are using (whether that be on your IWB or not).  Every windows machine is programmed to print symbols when you hold down the alt key and then type in a number.  These symbols include the hearts ♥ and musical notes  ♫ ♪ that you sometimes see in Face book and Twitter posts, as well as more academic symbols like Indices and Subscripts.

To access these symbols:

• Make sure that the “Num Lock” key has been pressed so that the numeric keypad on your keyboard is activated.
• Push down the Alt key.
• Whilst you’re pressing the Alt key, type the proper sequence of numbers (on the numeric keypad) of the ALT code from the table below.
• Now stop pressing the Alt key, and the character will appear.

If you’re using a  laptop that doesn’t have a number key pad you don’t have to miss out.  Usually, your keyboard will have a number pad on the letter keys. You’ll see them there printed as a subscript on your keys. These can be activated using the FN key.  So, instead, press down the Fn (function) key, and the Alt key, then the numerical code sequence.

Here are some of the standard Math’s codes:

A more complete list of maths symbols can be found here