I was invited to a presentation of free math tools by a professor/website designer.  At the beginning of his talk, before showing us any materials the founder Dr. Ronald Panoff told us his story.  Having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, Bob decided to leave his mark on the world by developing a free website of computational science materials.  As it turns out, several years later he is still with us, contrary to his diagnosis.  The second thing I remember about his personal story was his method for helping us remember the website. 

“Look at me,” he said.  “I’m short and dorky.  Put those together and you have shodor.”  (If you meet him, you be the judge.)

The website is http://www.shodor.org.  In reality, the name shodor came from an entirely different source than his self image, but it makes a good story and I’ve remembered the site ever since.

Google “bar graph” and one of the top five hits you will get in your results will be within the Shodor site.  Do the same for stopwatch, pie chart and even stoichiometry, and you will once again run into the Shodor website with its Interactivate tools.

So what is Interactivate?  It is an amazing collection of java-based courseware for grades 3-12 in math and science.  For example, the tool for linear inequalities allows you to graph up to four inequalities using two variables.  The advantage to using this tool in the classroom is its ease of use.  There are times when you are trying to illustrate a concept when your students can get bogged down in the process.  The drawing takes too long or teaching the steps to program the calculator takes more than you are willing to give.  With this tool, you enter three numbers, click and voila!  Instant graph.  Want a new one?  Click clear and go again.

For each of the tools, there are four tabs: Learner, Activity, Help and Instructor.  Students can read about the tool they have chosen on the Learner tab, actually work with it using the Activity page, and get some assistance using the Help tab.  The Instructor tab provides a suggested grouping and timeline for use with students, outlines the content, standards addressed, and questions that might arise from your students.  To top it off there are links to other related activities.

Topics include: number and operations, geometry, algebra, probability, statistics, and modeling.  Science applications are found among the one hundred and fifty seven resources available to date.

The site is definitely worth you time to explore.  Whether you set your students lose on the tools, use them for a demo, or provide them as a resource for interventions, I guarantee you will find these valuable resources for your math classroom.

If you get hooked, follow Shodor on Twitter: twitter.com/shodor.

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