Educational Software Resources

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.