Nov. 18, 1999

CI 405

This site begins very dynamically with many links and areas of interest including a Site Map, Student Center, Teacher Center, Math Center and Science Center. I feel as though these features and the numerous others found here would provide an excellent background resource for both students and teachers.

There is a tendency for this site to cater towards the field independent learner. Anyone who needs prompting or guidance as to where they should explore may feel overwhelmed. Also, the fact that there is no update listing to show the currency of this site was a little disheartening, but from the looks of things, this site is very up-to-date. One final thing that I was disappointed with is the unlimited access to each section. Students could easily access the teacher or parent sections and read what they are discussing in these areas. This could be a potential problem area.

This site is obviously geared towards the Chicago Public School system, but I feel as though any science or math class can benefit from the information here. I would definitely use some of the lesson plans and activities suggested in a High School math class such as General Math or Pre-Algebra. We would use this site to learn more about subjects being taught in our own class and pose questions to the online experts through e-mail to Reinforce (Thomas & Boyson, 1984) what we have already learned. Ideally this would be best done in a lab with students working individually or in small groups with the teacher providing guidance on what topics to explore and to discuss in class.

By integrating History and English skills into a mathematical subject, this site can be very beneficial in the typically structured area of Mathematics.

This site contains a lot of information, but it is all about one specific topic. It is very limited in the actual content of the site and requires the teacher to structure activities to expand what is there. I would also like to see more organization into historical order to go along with the topical ordering. As it stands now, students must make a lot of connections as far as which subjects tie-in to what time periods. For any student with field dependent tendencies and those who learn best navigating linearly this site would be very confusing. I feel that a simple site map or a Table of Contents listing subjects in chronological order would accomplish this.

An excellent implementation of this site into a classroom would be a cross-curriculum report. After exploring this site, students would be able to do a report on Mathematical History that pertains to subjects they may be discussing in a General Business class or some sort of Social Studies class. This site would be excellent for Informing (Thomas & Boyson, 1984) students about a subject in Math that is very often just a small information box in the corner of their textbook. Any Math class in the Middle School through High School level can pull relevant information from this site to enhance their knowledge of Mathematical History.

This Web site allows a class to create an online activity or project that other classrooms can join in worldwide. It allows a student’s local project to become more international and creates a tool for communicating with other classes around the globe.

There is also no listing as to when this site was last updated. An improvement that could be made is by changing the requirement of the teacher to set-up activities with the coordinators. This may be a long process that puts a class behind or it may limit what the teacher wants to do if the coordinators don’t feel as though the project is worthwhile. This has its positives, but can also make the site very biased. Many of these projects are from back in 1995, which concerns me, even thought they can still be used in a classroom. However, the technical support and coordination is now not there for these projects.

In order to implement this site into a classroom, a teacher must create a project to do online. My example would be a collaborative project, such as a Webquest similar to Journey North. I would focus my attention on a mathematical subject such as "What is Your Gym’s Seating Capacity?" I would then have each school create a database of information such as school size, location, capacity, etc. and have them post it to the site. Our class would use this information to have the students answer questions in our own class as well as e-mailing other classes within the project to ask them questions about the collected data. This would fall under the Thomas & Boyson Taxonomy as Integrating and Utilizing. They will integrate Math and Language Arts by collaborating online, and they will Utilize the computer to do the simple process of compiling information so students can focus on the interpretation of this information.

This page is a service of MathSoft, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review. It contains puzzles that were previously printed in the journal and is a great place to begin an individual project for each class member in a higher level High School Math class such as Calculus or Game Theory. With all the choices, students could pick a puzzle and find a solution for it and then present it to the class in a report format. Also, teachers may find puzzles listed that directly deal with a topic they are studying, such as Puzzle #31, World Series Odds, being used in a unit on probability. This Web site can easily be accessed in a single computer classroom or in a lab full of computers.

Unfortunately, many of the answers are already posted and any student with access to this page could easily find the listed answer. This page’s formatting is also very simple. For an MIT supported site, the ease and convenience of navigation of this site is pretty unimpressive. There is very little in the way of interactive features and some of the links requires specific software, but fails to inform you of that. For a school with very old technological hardware or software, this site would be of little use.

One of the most obvious downfalls of this site is the advanced level of content. This information would be normally reserved for college Mathematics majors. It also has a lot of interactivity, but it requires the school to have certain software that may be too large for older processors. It is also very excluding to a field dependent learner, since everything is structured in a manner of try-and-do fashion. The only thing that might stimulate the field dependent learner is the sequential order of things, but that is really a minor portion of the site.

This interactive site contains advanced mathematical concepts. It would be used in

a TAG mathematics class consisting of Advanced Calculus students, mostly

Seniors, who are doing some work on subjects that are usually reserved for college

Math students. The class would work independently or in small groups in a

computer lab to learn about a couple of the subjects discussed on the site in order to

expand their learning. They would then present what they had found to the class as a presentation so everyone would get a little exposure to many different subjects.

This site would fit into the Thomas and Boysen Taxonomy level of Experiencing.

Since most of the information listed is reserved for college students majoring in

Mathematics, this site would contain new information to the TAG students.