Some thoughts on math videos online

By now, most folks in the math teaching world have heard of Khan Academy. Other free video sites for math include Math TV and Brightstorm. I do refer students to these sites for review and reinforcement. In YouTube, these types of instructional math videos get a large number of views, and so they  obviously address a need out there.

However, I am not convinced that these types of videos actually illustrate concepts very well. There are now a wide variety of technologies that can illustrate math concepts and can be interactive. GeoGebra, graphing calculators, Microsoft Math, OCW applets in math (from  MIT), and lots of applets spread throughout the Internet do a great job of illustrating ideas that are hard to do with just chalk and talk (or their video counterparts). But a simple survey of YouTube videos describing their capabilities showed that they attracted far fewer viewers.

Is it just that students are used to wanting something reinforced the same way they've seen it in their lectures? Do they just want to get their (online) homework done? Are these types of resources used often enough in classrooms to illustrate ideas? 

I don't think any of these technologies takes away from basic skills. I think they make conceptual understanding easier  for many students - if they are guided along those lines. Not everyone can make abstract connections solely on the basis of processing symbolic notation. If one wishes to progress to higher level math or use math in other subjects, it is necessary to be able to think about math in addition to the skills, whether at the beginning algebra level or at the calculus level.And many of these technologies that have been around for a while now can make that task a little simpler.

"No Excuses" Software for Math

Just finished teaching a short course on software for use in math classes.It's a course required for math majors, and the objective is to familiarize students with the various types of software to do math.

Way back when, like ten years ago, math software was the domain of licensed software housed in college computer labs. The usual stuff happened - the computers got updated, but the software license did not get renewed. And excuses for not using the software abounded - you could only use the software in the labs, students couldn't afford the software for their home, etc. etc.

Fast forward to 2010. Students bring in their own laptop and WiFi is freely available. I built my software course around free or easily available software such as Wolfram|Alpha, Geogebra, and Excel. Of the three, Geogebra was quite a hit. Students could download the software for free on their own laptops or use the web based applet. And they were up and running without mastering any rarefied syntax.

Wolfram|Alpha was a close second. There was some frustration that the "natural language" interpretation of W|A was not so natural! Nevertheless, the students did find W|A to be a good tool for doing math.

Then there is the lowly spreadsheet. Found basically on every desktop, students were quite surprised you could do actual math in Excel. They used it to model data, forecast trends and examine limits and difference quotients.

I put all the course material on our campus Blackboard. I plan to transfer it to my Moodle account so that the course material is accessible to everyone.

Integrating math technology easily - no licenses, no fees, no excuses...

Explorations with Geogebra

I just started using GeoGebra, the open source dynamic geometry software, to create an exploration activity for my Intro to Proofs class. The activity itself was an extension of a discussion in class about the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. It can also be used in a precalc class which stresses concepts.

(Click here to see in a larger window.)




I was surprised by how easy it was to create - no need to learn Java and the user interface for GeoGebra was very intuitive. I plan to do more with this software, given the speed with which I can make some very interesting acivities.

GeoGebra

My latest tool for interactive math is GeoGebra. Just started to explore it. A great resource outlining many possibilities is this wiki page by Dr. Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska.

I'm looking forward to using GeoGebra in my math for elementary teachers course as well as my graduate course for high school math teachers.