The following is a Guest Post from Elias Cortez, who is a freelance writer and editor.
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Integrating technological resources for math courses will make lessons and activities exciting for students. They can utilize the internet, computer programs, real world projects, and calculators to create charts, complete math problems, and convert their measurements using the Metric system and Standard system. Technological resources will enhance and enrich the classroom experience no matter what the grade level. There are fractions sites related to each concept with an explanation, practice, and challenging games, real world projects, software, technologically influenced lesson plans, graphing, math practice, problem solving, graphing projects, JAVA tools, as well as math portals, computer sites with math experts available to answer math questions, literature links, as well as sites and software dedicated to differentiating and learning to tell time especially for early childhood math students.
The first technological resource for math is TeacherVision widgets. These widgets are free applications which can be added to social networking sites like Facebook, personalized homepages such as iGoogle, as well as blogs. These feature different content for each day, specific to different math grades. There are calendar widgets which include math related holidays, significant dates, lessons, worksheets, resources, and activities. There are also daily math printable widgets which offer a different printable activity for different grades. For the fourth grade, the math concepts include number puzzles, reviews of fractions, addition, word problems, subtraction, decimals, multiplication, place-value, division, statistics, as well as measurement. TeacherVision offers RSS feeds as the second technological resource which provides daily math warm ups sent to the individual’s desktop, related to each grade. They are free of charge and include an educator’s calendar and daily math warm ups for elementary grades.
The third technological resource for math includes the online converting measurements activity meant for fifth and sixth grade. The objectives require that students utilize the internet to locate distances between two objects, then convert the units of length and finally solve math problems through multiplication and division of whole numbers. This uses the distance calculator on sites such as Google maps or http://www.teachervision.fen.com/maps/resource/5104.html.
Standards correlations are meant to develop a student’s multiplication and division fluency as well as their ability to carry out unit conversions in a specific system of measurement. This uses technology to locate, collect, and evaluate information for solving real world problems. Drawing conclusions from incomplete data is the third technological resource for math. Students will look at six photographs which can be found on the VoicesofYouth website. There are parts missing in each photo and the students should fill in a worksheet listing a description of each photo alongside the caption and then the students can discuss what is missing from the photo and how they are still able to conclude what is happening in the photos.
The fifth technological resource for math includes star magnitude graphing, which is intended for fourth through sixth grade. The students utilize a spreadsheet for this project to record star data and then convert the data to graphically represent the stars through their location as well as their magnitude.
About The Author: Elias Cortez is a freelance writer and the editor of www.topnetbookpicks.com – a website which provides detailed reviews and information for mini netbooks. You can learn more about the best netbooks on the market at his website.