EDUC4105

www.mathforum.org/teachers

The following website has been established by Drexel University and is a very valuable resource. It has a large variety of teaching methods, proofs and other important information provided for math teachers by math teachers. With over 900 threads this website provides answers and ideas to accommodate much of the curriculum.

With threads dating to over 10 years old this website gives a feeling of being well established. Because of this many of the threads are well discussed among teachers providing further insight and answers for each thread. Those who use this site feel that any queries they put forth will be viewed by many fellow teachers and therefore receive input very quickly.

This site lacks the flashy look most commercial sites need in order to attract this customers. It makes up for this by its usefulness and long standing reputation.

http://illuminations.nctm.org/index.aspx

This site provides lesson plans and activities for students in the math classroom. The site is very well organised and has a professional feel to it unlike the previous site. Everything is very uniform. Every lesson plan is structured in the same way.

The mathematics activities were predominately java programs. One program explored the quadratic (a+b)^2 and how it relates to the area of a square. This program and many others would work very well on the smartboard. With 102 of these programs this site provides a great variety of interactive lessons.

With 515 lesson plans this site provided a great variety of lessons that did not rely so heavily on direct instruction. Some lesson plans also referred to the java programs provided on the site and worksheets.

The previous site is a collection of threads from different teachers. This strength of this site is its diversity. The illuminations site is very well structured and easy to understand and follow. It is recommended that teachers first check the illuminations site to get an idea for the outline of a lesson. The mathforum site is useful for teachers who wish to explore further ideas in order to improve the quality of the teaching.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 3:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.