| Dear Anne-Marie, I am a teacher (of mathematics) to future elementary teachers, and have been investigating the possibilities for open-source software in my classes, and my students' future classes. My conclusion so far: Edubuntu seems to be a collection of miscellaneous pieces that happened to be available. Very little of it seems to have been developed in a unified way, with educational research and objectives at the forefront. GCompris, for example, has lots of cute, "dancing frog" animations that sometimes embody important and interesting concepts. Other times it's just drill on computation facts. (Drill is boring and is low-level thinking. However, drill is perhaps better done by computers than live teachers.) What I use for my future teachers: (These are all useful for the middle grades (ages about 9-14)) * a spreadsheet program (OpenOffice or Excel), for teaching ideas of algebra. (This is a long story of what concepts come out, and what activities to do to bring them out. Very few math educators seem to be using these tools.) * dynamic geometry for both synthetic (no coordinates) and analytic (coordinates and equations) geometry. I use GeoGebra (java, free open source) or Geometer's Sketchpad or Cabri. * Logo (for some special purpose lessons). I use a small implementation that runs over the web (TurtleTracks.) For high school, it would be useful to have a computer algebra system that is moderately powerful and easy to use, with both a graphical and a text-based interface. I have not found anything open source that meets these criteria. Commercial software that meets at least some of them: Graphing Calculator (better for graphing than for symbolic algebra), actual graphing calculators (Texas Instruments TI 83 and 89, for instance; I find these awkward to use, and hard or expensive to interface with computers), Derive (the computing engine behind the TIs; I don't use this because it only runs on Windows). Maple and Mathematica are much too complex to use for most students, and are very expensive. There is also a shortage of unified, educationally sound mathematics curriculum in many of these areas. In the US, at least, dynamic geometry and graphing calculators are used and integrated in some math classrooms, mostly at the secondary level. (We do not have a national curriculum. Our curriculum is locally controlled, sometimes even varying from teacher to teacher.) My impression of the elementary/primary level is that it's mostly arithmetic drill programs, if anything. While I am eternally grateful to those who do the coding, it may be time to coordinate with some education people. On Sep 30, 2006, at 7:58 AM, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
Susan Addington Math Department, California State University, San Bernardino (USA) |
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