There are a wide variety of Digital Tools that can be used in the classroom to compliment provincial math curriculum that should not be ignored. They can help build engagement, and offer an alternative way of framing problems outside of visual representations and manipulatives. A panoply of websites are mentioned in Chapter 7 of our textbook Elementary and Middle School Mathematics. In this blog I will explore and review a few a sites that are new to me!
EdmodoThis site is like a cross between Twitter and Classroom and Pinterest for teachers. Teachers share their lesson resources. You can create assignments, surveys, and quizzes for you classes. You can discover materials by following certain hashtags. You can save other people’s attached lessons in your library.
Kidspiration Kidspiration’s math portion has images of base-ten blocks that can be manipulated by the children, if they have computer access, to work on math problems. They can group, compare, and create equivalent representation. The advantage is, there is no cleanup for these digital manipulatives!
AAAMath The graphics for this site are dated, and there are a lot of adds that are distracting and easy to click on by accident. However, there are a lot of activities for many different units in Elementary math. I could envision using this in the afternoons for review of various lessons, or as a substitute, it could come in handy, if students each had access to a PC.
World Book I remember the physical World Book Encyclopedia collection being an important tool in my home when I was attending middle school in the 1990’s. We didn’t have the internet in our homes and this collection was an inspiration for research projects. I didn’t know it existed online today ! I tried to sign up to access but… no luck. I watched an online tutorial… unless the school has a subscription to this resource, it would seem one cannot access it.
Ask Dr. Math I like the child-centred approach to this site. Students write to Dr. Math. He ponders their questions and offers detailed explanations with relevant examples. There are sections devoted to Elementary, Middle, and High School as well as College and beyond. This site has been around since the 1990’s so the graphics are true to that era. Many of the posts go back a couple of decades. A classic!
It is important to note that the textbook suggesting these resources was first published in 2011, although I was reading the 2018 edition. A few of the other sites I looked at didn’t seem so user friendly. I am sure there are a lot more sites out there that are useful for math-teaching. Feel free to let me know if you have any to recommend!