Welcome & Rationale

Welcome to the Interactive Math blog. Here you will find resources for interactive math on the web. My goal is to provide links to the best interactive math sites (see next paragraph) on the web as well as provide information on how to create your own interactive math resources and how to best utilize them in the classroom. Please feel free to contribute links, ideas, and discussion through the use of the comments feature.

To begin with, I feel like I need to define what I mean by "the best interactive math sites". I am primarily refering to Virtual Manipulatives, which usually take the form of Java or Flash Applets. I will not provide links to resources that are not truly interactive. For example, pages that provide click-to-check practice will not be discussed here unless for verbal derision (see http://www.aaamath.com/). Additionally, the world has no shortage of static math textbooks and so static math webpages hold no interest for me (See http://www.purplemath.com/modules/index.htm). This may all sound very harsh, but I truly believe that if we are going to use the internet to educate math students we should be using the very best technologies that the web has to offer in order to provide learning experiences that students would have no other way of experiencing.

The examples listed above may be useful to some people in some cases and I don't mean to offend the people who have invested countless hours in creating them, but I believe they represent the past of internet-based math instruction. The future of internet-based math isntruction is all about student interaction with content for experiential learning through (computer-mediated) physical interaction and modeling. See the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives or Explore Learning (pay site) as positive examples of what I will be featuring on this blog.