A week or two ago David Slavin (see if you can find him!) sent out information on the Time website and suggested its use. I looked around and found a multimedia presentation on the United States population. We are integrating its content across our Math and Language Arts classes in order to have the students use data from graphs to draw conclusions, work with statistics, and to write a mini-research report.
The link is here:
In the last two weeks we have had Renaissance Learning’s Math Facts installed in one of our classrooms, and soon there will be another classroom that has it, too. New School has a few goals in using this program. First, reduce the student-teacher ratio during direct instruction; second, allow the students to move at their own pace; and third, accelerate the learning of our students who have somehow missed acquiring math basics during their academic career.
We hope that having some students work on the computers while others are working with the teacher will allow for more individualized attention. We also like the ability for students to receive instant feedback from the computer, and that they can learn individually without the stress associated with trying to keep up when they are behind, or being bored when they are a bit ahead of the class.