Literature Review; Using 21st Century Resources to Enhance Math, Teaching & Learning

http://www.pbs.org/teachers/webinar/archive.html

Using 21st Century Resources to Enhance Math, Teaching & Learning

In viewing this webinar, its focus was using two on line applications for elementary school students in grades k-6.  These two applications;  CYBERCHASE in the Elementary classroom and VITAL( video in teaching and learning) are two online tools that enable students and teachers to teach and have fun learning in math.

In the world of  CYBERCHASE, the dastardly villain Hacker is on a made mission to take over cyberspace with the help of his blundering henchbots Buzz and Delete.  But heroes Jackie and Matt are curious kids that are set out to stop him with the aide and help of their most powerful weapon , brainpower.  Each  level of the math adventure takes students on a thrilling math adventure that is driven by different math concepts.  The mission is to develop and sustain different math concepts and problem solving skills.  Cyberspace also helps teacher bring resources to the classroom, in a fun context to learn math. As a teaching tool it teaches students that math is everywhere, you can be good at it.  Each episode also has a live action segment following the animated episode, showing how students learning math can solve real life problems. 

The philosophy of cyberspace is to show students that math is every where and everyone can be good at it.  The program and supporting activities have been designed to support math curriculum in education and to reflect standards in math.  It is meant to foster enthusiasm, model ma thematic reasoning, improve problem solving skills and to equip students with an attitude to approach math with confidence and a positive attitude.

VITAL(videos in teaching and learning) is a web-based  learning environment.  First it enables students to view, analyze and communicate ideas with videos. Secondly it is vital web site for teacher resource for media  and lesson plans.  It contains over 125 sites for lesson plans and over 2000 sites for resources..  It is organized in to topics and sub-topics with a list of resources, one of them being cyberspace.  It suggests what videos to use in the classroom, follow up suggestions, it correlates to standard text books and to standards in curriculum.  Lesson plans are designed to be short and simple.  They contain a six step process that have assessments and handouts.

With these two resources you can bring math adventures into the classroom and keep learning fun.  Students can use both their imagination and real world problem solving into the classroom.