Today I am going to show everyone a few
educational software resources that I have found to be very useful in my
teaching. This list is split up into
eight software categories with the resource I find most useful listed. I hope you get something out of it.
Drill
and Practice - http://www.brainpop.com/math/
Brainpop
offers all sorts of drill and practice games and activities for learners of all
levels of math. It can help students to
reinforce skills they have just learned or brush up on things they may have
forgotten and give “instant feedback”. (Roblyer and Doering, p 84)
Tutorial
- http://www.yourteacher.com/
Yourteacher.com
has videos that walk students through how to do different math problems. You also have practice problems with solution
and take assessments to test yourself.
Simulation
- http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/
This
is a collection of all kinds of web applets that will help students better
visualize and understand the math that is going on in a given problem.
Instructional
Games - http://www.math-play.com/Geometry-Math-Games.html
Here
you will find a collection of different geometry based math games. This helps to solve the “Learning verse
having fun” (Roblyer and Doering, p 97) problem. It is a great way to have students learn math
and have fun while doing it.
Problem
Solving - http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/high-school-teachers/807
CriticalThink.org
is a great website for teachers to help get students to learn how to problem
solve. The first step to solving a
problem is to critically think about the given problem, and this site help
students do just that. One benefit of
this is “improved interest and motivation” (Roblyer and Doering, p 100)
Integrated
Learning Systems - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/
Microsoft
Office is the standard collection of integrated learning systems that “allows
collaboration on documents” (Roblyer and Doering, p 119). It includes Word for word processing, Excel
for creating spreadsheets, and PowerPoint for creating presentations.
Software
Support Tool 1 - http://www.pdfforge.org/
This
is a free PDF creator and Converter. You
can create PDF from Word documents and more importantly, convert existing PDF
files into Word.
Software
Support Tool 2 - http://www.wikipedia.org/
Wikipedia
is a free, vast online “research and reference tool” (Roblyer and Doering, p
141) that is user generated. I have
found it to be more accurate than any other encyclopedia due to the fact it is
constantly being updated. Just make sure
you check the sources.
This
is by no means a complete and comprehensive list. There are so many great resources out there
with new ones being added everyday. As
my list changes I will let you know.
