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Effective teaching is at the heart of science and math education. Good teachers of science and math create environments in which they and their students work together as active learners.

Encouraging students to use critical thinking is more than an extension activity in science and math lessons, it is the basis of true learning. Teaching students how to think critically helps them move beyond basic comprehension and rote memorization. They shift to a new level of increased awareness when calculating, analyzing, problem solving, and evaluating.

This is a wonderfully simple maths quiz site with a good collection of activities for the 4 operations. Choose your category and get 10 randomly generated questions to answer. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

from the abstract: "Mathematics is now at a remarkable in exion point, with new technology radically extending the power and limits of individuals. Crowd- sourcing pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; symbolic computation tackles huge routine calculations; and computers check proofs too long and complicated for humans to comprehend. The Study of Mathematical Practice is an emerging interdisciplinary eld which draws on philoso- phy and social science to understand how mathematics is produced. Online mathematical activity provides a novel and rich source of data for empirical investigation of mathematical practice - for example the community question-answering system mathover ow contains around 40,000 mathe- matical conversations, and polymath collaborations provide transcripts of the process of discovering proofs. Our preliminary investigations have demonstrated the importance of \soft" aspects such as analogy and creativity, alongside deduction and proof, in the production of mathematics, and have given us new ways to think about the roles of people and machines in creating new mathematical knowledge. We discuss further investigation of these resources and what it might reveal. Crowdsourced mathematical activity is an example of a \social machine", a new paradigm, identi- ed by Berners-Lee, for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving entity, and the subject of major international research endeavours. We outline a future research agenda for mathematics social machines, a combination of people, computers, and mathematical archives to create and apply mathematics, with the potential to change the way people do mathe- matics, and to transform the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research."

"This is a rather unusual structure for organizing mathematical content, but offers an exciting opportunity for teachers across the nation and abroad to exchange ideas and discuss what they teach. This Wiki will address the underlying central concepts and propose activities that also provide rich opportunity to engage students in the Mathematical Practices. "

Fun activity for math in elementary schools

3 activities to support developing number sense with children. All can be used across KS1 or KS2 with differentiation and difficulty all adaptable by the teacher.

The Gateway expands educators' capability to access Internet-based lesson plans, instructional units and other educational materials in all forms and formats. The Gateway's goal is to improve the organization and accessibility of the substantial collections of materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. The Gateway has been serving teachers continuously since 1996 which makes it one of the oldest publically accessible U.S. repositories of education resources on the Web. The Gateway contains a variety of educational resource types from activities and lesson plans to online projects to assessment items.

A useful addition game where users 'handwrite' the answers in the box. The intro page is in Japanese, but the activity is in English. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

From the abstract (full text requires subscription or purchase): "Though cooperative learning has been a topic of considerable interest in educational research, there has been little study specific to learning in the mathematics content area of geometry. This paper seeks to address that gap through a design experiment featuring a novel small-group computing environment for supporting student learning about quadrilaterals. In this design, each student controls a unique point in a shared geometric space, and those points are linked such that a group of four students collectively forms a quadrilateral. We first present results from pre- and post-measures to show how the students learned from the activities and developed in terms of geometric reasoning. We then present three episodes, elaborated with the notion of appropriation, to explain how students took up ways of using the technological tools and of talking about geometric concepts from one another in the interactive environment. Our study found that students achieved learning gains in this novel environment, that the environment provided rich opportunities for peer interaction around geometric objects, and that student learning opportunities and interactions were characterized by processes of appropriating ways of talking about and using software features."

A superb collection of cross curricular games, activities and other resources for younger children, including a great set of maths and English language games. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Cross+Curricular

A good maths activity from the BBC about the 4 basic operations. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

A superb cartoon based maths site with areas for parents, teachers and kids. Play fun multiplication and time activities. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

A platform combining a searchable database of the "Jahrbuch �ber die Fortschritte der Mathematik" (1868-1942) and digitized mathematical publications from the Digital Library Göttingen. Cannot tell if the project is active or being updated at the moment.

A great flash based angle finding and protractor whiteboard resource. See a variety of angle measuring activities and use the virtual protractor to solve them. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

I Speak Math is an sidea-filled and informative blog from a math teacher currently at a project-based private school in North Carolina. Posts are updated often and include pictures of classroom projects along with links to resources used. Examples include a kinesthetic box and whisk-ers plot activity, foldables for functions and graphing, and reflections upon students grading their own tests. Explore the site further by viewing top posts through the link on the side bar. Search the site using the search box on the top of the page. Most posts include several tags. Click on a tag to find other posts with the same topic or click on popular tags located in the tag cloud on the side bar.

Abstract: "the researcher attempted to investigate how to better measure engagement and refine the measurement of engagement in this study. To frame the engagement, three domains of engagement - behavioral, cognitive, and emotional- are analyzed in detail to be able to examine the qualities of each type. Moreover, three game attributes -clear goals, immediate feedback, and balance between challenges and skills- are presented and discussed as fundamental features of virtual manipulatives and educational games used in this study to make an impact on students' engagement. To measure effects of educational games and virtual manipulatives on three domains of engagement, the researcher designed an engagement survey that examines each domain separately with their sub-domains. The Cronbach's alphas for engagement pre-test and post-test were found .89 and .91 respectively. In this pre-test and post-test quasi-experimental design, four fifth-grade classrooms (N=86) from four schools in southwest Virginia were assigned as three experimental groups and one control group. In the first experimental group, participants played an educational game called Candy Factory and in the second experimental group, the students played another educational game called Pearl Diver on iPod Touch for eight days consecutively, for 20 minutes each. In the third experimental group, participants performed activities with virtual manipulatives, whereas in the control group, participants did paper-and-pencil iii drills for the same duration. All of the groups studied on the same topic, fractions. According to the results of ANCOVA, experimental group students' engagement scores were found significantly higher than control group students', F(1,80)=11.568, p=.001. When three domains of engagement were analyzed, significant differences were found among all three domains between experimental and control groups. When the researcher conducted separate analysis for educational games group and vir

A 2012 book from Springer focusing on international public math awareness activities

"Math Quest is a role playing game that could be used as a tool to learn numbers and basic mathematic operations. The Math Quest package consists of two main modules; learning and game modules that can be executed separately. The use of the learning module as a tool in learning will allow for a highly individualized and interactive environment. This paper presents the design of the learning module for numbers and their mathematics operation. Due to its interactive and stimulating nature, the module is suitable for school children age 9 to 12 years old to learn the subject. The development takes into consideration of constructivism learning theories where learning is based on students' active participation in problem solving and critical thinking regarding activity that they are involved in. The framework for each of module is as follows: objectives, concept, examples, exercises, quizzes. A heuristic evaluation on the design was conducted and positive feedback was obtained."