Guest Post: 15 Free Math Resources for Students and Teachers

Learning math can be a struggle, but there are lots of online resources that can help. The web is full of tools, games, and websites that can be used to practice math problems. Here is a list of 15 math resources for students and teachers.

Illuminations - Illuminations is a free website from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The site offers more than 100 interactive math activities for kids, 500+ lesson plans for teachers, and web links to other online math resources.

NumberNut - NumberNut is a fun math site for people of all ages. It works like an interactive math textbook: it teaches a concept and then provides two activities to reinforce learning. NumberNut includes learning resources for basic math and advanced math.

Arcademic Skill Builders - Arcademic Skill Builders are entertaining educational games that can be played online. Game options include addition and subtraction games, multiplication and division games, and fraction and ratio games.

Math Playground - This website was created specifically for elementary and middle school students who need help with math. The site offers fun games, math videos, and logic problems.

Tutpup - On the Tutpup site, students can compete in educational math games with other students all over the world. Competitors race against the clock to solve math and algebra problems.

Math Arcade - Funbrain's Math Arcade provides access to 25 free math games that can be played online. Returning users can enter a password to try to beat their own high score.

Lure of the Labyrinth - For kids who like to game, Lure of the Labyrinth is the ultimate way to learn math. This online game guides players on a mythological quest to retrieve a beloved and lost pet.

Mathway - At first glance, Mathway looks like it is just a math problem solver, but it so much more. Mathway shows you how a problem can be solved so that you understand how the answer was calculated.

Multimedia Math Glossary - Harcourt's Multimedia Math Glossary is a fantastic resource for teachers and students who want to see visual definitions to math terms. Simply select your grade at the top of the page and browse through the list of terms to find what you need.

Ambleweb Addition Machine - The Ambleweb Addition Machine provides excellent practice for students who are learning addition. Students can choose their skill level, answer the question that pops up, and check their answer to see if it is right. The machine tracks scores so that students can compete with themselves or each other.

ClassBrain - ClassBrain provides a wide range of math games for students of all ages. All of the games are interactive and many can be used with a projector or interactive white board so the whole class can participate at once.

Teacher Led - Teacher Led offers a large collection of interactive white board resources and games for math teachers.

Crickweb - Although this website was created for UK students, it does provide a number of interactive math games that would be useful to any student. All of the games were designed for use with an interactive whiteboard and include fun activities that will reinforce learning in the classroom.

Math TV - Middle school students who are having difficulty solving complicated math problems will love Math TV's helpful videos. Math TV works especially well with projectors and interactive whiteboards.

iknowthat.com - This website offers a wonderful collection of math tools for teachers and students. The site hosts an arithmetic workshop, math stories, math videos, games, and other resources--most of which can be used with an interactive white board so that the whole class can participate at once.

Guest post from Karen Schweitzer, the About.com Guide to Business School. Karen also writes about online college courses for OnlineColleges.org.

Check out: Interactive Student Activities | Mini-Movies for Your SmartBoard | Everything Geometry

A Test

This is an email to myself.  

Take Your Students Around the World

Picked this one up from AngelaMaiers on Twitter. Panoramas.dk lets you travel the world in 3D by providing full screen virtual panoramas of REALLY COOL PLACES. Obviously we cannot take our students to the top of Mt. Everest, or the Grand Canyon, or to see the Barringer meteorite crater in Arizona; but we can project a virtual panorama of each of these places and let the kids experience them. Would be particularly cool on a SmartBoard!

panoramas, learning, travel,

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Teaching Big Ideas

I've been thinking for a while now about how important it is to teach big ideas. When I speak of big ideas, I'm referring to the enduring concepts that transcend grade level and subject area. Throughout each subject area--science, math, social studies, and language arts--it's possible to take several content standards and group them into a theme-based unit, supporting the learning of a big idea (and creating a highly engaging project-based learning experience).

One of the big ideas that comes to mind is photosynthesis. It's probably not a stretch to say that most elementary educators don't give photosynthesis its due. All the way up to last year, I sure didn't. But consider all of the science concepts connected to what is easily the most important process on Earth, and its significance as a big idea becomes easy to grasp. (Don't believe me? Check out the book Eating the Sun by Oliver Morton). Consider that food chains begin with plants and they get their energy from photosynthesis. The fall leaf change occurs because leaves stop the process of photosynthesis and begin to lose their chlorophyll. Of course, this takes place because of changes in the hours of daylight which means you can teach about Earth's orbit around the sun and its effect on the seasons.

In social studies, westward expansion/progress is a theme that necessitates the teaching of several other big ideas: changes in transportation, settlement, treatment of Native Americans, exploration, the Gold Rush, Oregon Trail, etc. Because they fall under the umbrella of westward expansion, you can teach all of these concepts as part of a theme-based unit and have students create a nice project at the end.

So what are some other big ideas that you think are important to teach? Here's a list that I thought of with some of the other concepts that are connected to them:

• Scientific Inquiry (scientific method, developing experiments, identifying variables, scientific communication)
• Resources (renewable energy, fossil fuels, design process (have kids build wind turbines), earth science)
• Tessellations (polygons (interior angle measures), regular polygons, similarity, symmetry (transformations)
• Patterns & Functions
• Fractals (multiplying fractions, similarity, patterns, functions)
  
• Rivers (transportation, growth of civilizations, growth of cities & economies)

Technorati Tags: education| learning | teachers

Check out: Symmetry in Nature | Alphabet Geometry

Testing out Twitter

Where do people find the time? My newsreader is full and I can't post to my blog. So I'm giving Twitter a try. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/jtubbs. Now every time an idea comes to mind, I can tweet it! I find a link, it's on Twitter.

Take the Pi Day Challenge

"March 14th is a fantastically mathematical day.

Pi Day. Accept the challenge. The Pi Day Challenge is a series of puzzles that are logic-based. A team of logicians adapted or created these puzzles – some require research, some require mathematics, some require pure savvy. Keep in mind that for some puzzles, finding out what you are supposed to do is part of the puzzle."

Also, check out Learning about Pi from misterteacher.com.


Technorati Tags: education | learning | Pi Day

Mini-Movies for Your SmartBoard

Using Google Map Mashups for Social Studies Projects

I just assigned a social studies project to my fifth graders this week on Westward Expansion. It's a collaborative project that requires them to take the role of a character (a prospector, a settler/pioneer, or a mountain man) and describe a trip west that this character would take during the 19th century.

While researching routes, one group decided to use Google Maps to see if they could find the Oregon Trail. I thought this was a cool idea and wished that I had thought to include that web tool in the project. Since then, I've been thinking of ideas for how I would have used Google Maps with this project. Unfortunately, the power of the software I think is creating your own maps & Google requires users to create an account to do that. A Google account offers a few too many features (since it provides an email account, search history, and more) than I feel my students need.

There are however quite a few Google Maps mashups on the Internet that teachers can use in place of Google Maps itself. They also require an account, but to get one students would only need to create a fake email address and username and password. After searching through my bookmarks, I found a couple that I think would work very well in a classroom environment.

• Quikmaps allows you to perform many of the functions that Google Maps does: add markers, connected lines, and text labels. I created a map below using every function available except for scribbling. Click on the markers for descriptions.
  

I could easily envision having my students create a map for social studies. A number of topics in history would lend themselves to a similar type of map as the one above: The Underground Railroad, The Trail of Tears, Westward Expansion (trace the path of the famous wagon trails, Age of Exploration (trace routes of famous explorers like Magellan), and much more. What a cool way to integrate geography with history!

I can also see using these maps on my SmartBoard. I'm wishing I would have created one when I taught my students about the Erie Canal. An interactive map in the front of the classroom that traced the route of the canal--complete with markers--would have been extremely helpful to my students.

• Wayfaring is another Google Maps mashup that I've tried out. This one provides essentially the same features but in a different manner. After signing up, you create your maps in a series of guided steps. Whereas Quikmaps provides the tools (map in the center, markers to the side, etc.) with little guidance, on Wayfaring you must use a map editor that directs you through a series of steps to create markers and routes.
  

I prefer learning to use the mashups without the guidance and I think my students would have no problem figuring out how to use them. As a result, Quikmaps seems like a better fit for the classroom.

Technorati Tags: Google Maps | learning | Quikmaps | Wayfaring

Delivering the Presentation of Your Life

Creating effective presentations seems to be all the rage right now. Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen blog are incredibly popular and the Slideshare website has thousands of presentations (many of them on presentations) and a large community of users sharing them. With all the SmartBoards in classrooms now it's become very important that teachers jump on the bandwagon and learn how to create presentations that are memorable and easily understood. I've been riding the wagon for a few years now and this past February I delivered my own presentation on the topic. You can check out on Slideshare or just click through it below. Let me know what you think.

Delivering The Presentation Of Your Life

View more presentations from Jamie Tubbs. (tags: teachers education)

Technorati Tags: education | learning | presentations | Powerpoint

Check out: Mini-Movies for Your SmartBoard

Mini-Movies for Your SmartBoard

By far the most popular site on misterteacher.com is Alphabet Geometry.  The mini-movies there attract a large number of visitors.  What is a mini-movie? It's a Flash-based animation, often interactive, that lasts just a few seconds. The mini-movies on Alphabet Geometry make geometric concepts alive by showing how they relate to letters of the alphabet. 

It dawned on me the other day that the mini-movies that appear on AG are the same type of movies that SmartBoard users can insert into their Notebook files. So I decided to make the mini-movies on AG available for download so that teachers can grab them and use them offline.  They are free and as long as they are used for teaching lessons in the classroom, you can use them without restriction. 

I've been looking around the Internet for a site that offers something similar, and I have yet to find one.  Teachers Love SMART Boards has a page that links to SmartBoard Web resources, and those resources have Flash-based movies, but it appears that one must be online to use them. I can't believe that nobody has thought to provide movies that teachers can download and use without going to the Internet.

Check out the mini-movies here: Mini-movies for Your SmartBoard


Check out: Alphabet Symmetry | Symmetry in Nature | Teaching Resources

Smartboard, education, teachers. learning, Flash

Smartboard and Inspiration: A Perfect Match

Do you have a SmartBoard? Do you use graphic organizers? Want to combine the two? Then it's time to begin using Inspiration on your SmartBoard. If you want to see student engagement soar (even for a lesson involving the interactivity of a whiteboard), open up Inspiration and have your students create a bubble map (as they are known to my kids).

During my first years of teaching, Inspiration was a tool that I used all the time. Over the past few years I rarely used it at all. Last year I switched to a room with a SmartBoard and rediscovered the program. Not only does it engage my students, but it forces them to think and apply their learning. Below is a completed example of a concept map that my math students made on measurement. It was not this neat when I first projected it. The bubbles were scattered across the screen and there were no connections. Over the course of about 15 minutes, my students came to the SmartBoard, organized it, and made the connections. There were some mistakes and it was pretty cool to watch the kids correct them.


In science, I had my students construct a complex food web with a dozen animals. I'm not going to post it here because I took all of the photos from the Internet (you can copy and paste photos to your maps), but below you'll see an example of a food web made with the program:

Check out the Inspiration website and download the 30-Day trial. The site is also full of lesson plans and other resources.


Check out: Alphabet Symmetry | Waves of Immigration | Slavery in America

Technorati Tags: education| learning | Inspiration | technology