iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

HARI SREENIVASAN: Why is it that people have no qualms about confessing, I’m terrible at math, yet you rarely hear anyone saying, I’m awful at English?

Eugenia Cheng is the scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and author, whose latest book is “Beyond Infinity.”

Tonight, we hear her Humble Opinion on why math is in need of a makeover.

Games can be a great tool for teaching students about complex topics like digital citizenship, politics and even science. With about 47 percent of kids aged 4 to 13 playing digital games every day, game-based learning is poised to further engage children in the classroom.

One classroom in Tampa, Fla., has discovered that digital games can help some children with mathematics. Gregory Smith, a fifth-grade teacher in Hillsborough County, tells Education Week that after incorporating math-strategy games — think word problems with corresponding interactive elements — his students’ math-skills scores went from an average of 49 percent to 83 percent. The students themselves also reported more enjoyment from math.

YouTube remains one of the best resources for educational video content to use with students in class. Over the past few years we reviewed and shared several YouTube channels that offer educational content for teachers and students and today we are re-featuring this list of the most popular YouTube channels for math teachers.

This is our first post in a series of posts which will be dedicated entirely to educational iPad apps to use with high school students. Today's list, we curated from iTunes app store, is about math apps. We included apps that cover five main areas: algebra, geometry, calculus, graphing and calculation. We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback. Links to the apps are under the visual.

WooTube, the brainchild of Woo, has over 45,000 subscribers and almost 4 million views. The 31-year-old maths teacher intends to create an interest in the subject through his YouTube channel.

One of the most popular posts of all time on this blog featured math tutorial YouTube channels for high school and college students. That post was originally created as a response to an email from a reader who was seeking suggestions for math videos that were not on Khan Academy. This evening I took some time to update my list of math tutorial channels on YouTube that are not Khan Academy. Here's the new list.

You can't rely entirely on your lucky game piece if you want to demolish your friends and family members in a game of Monopoly. 

Here are a few math-based game tricks that you can take straight to the bank. 

From content consumption to content creation, there are many ways to use mobile devices with students. They can create how-to videos for authentic audiences, explain their thinking through screencasting, or use scannable technology in the math classroom, for example. Mobile devices can also be used to help students practice foundational math skills and build their math fluency. You might decide to use an app on this list as part of an intervention plan or add it to a newsletter for families.

Here is a handy visual we have been working on over this weekend. This is a collection of some good math apps curated from iTunes App Store specifically for elementary students and young learners. The apps provides students with a wide variety of educational games, hands-on activities, and challenging exercises to help them enhance their math skills and develop solid mathematical thinking. Links are included in the table under the visual.

Getting to teach economics lessons is one of my favorite things about being a social studies teacher. In economics lessons high school students start to see how many of the math concepts, logic concepts, and political theory they've learned can apply to them in the "real world" after high school. Econ Ed Link is a great resource for lesson plans, videos, and interactive activities for teaching economics concepts. They recently published an updated list of their Math In the Real World lesson plan library.

Math In the Real World lesson plans include activities to teach students how to analyze business profit and loss, how the stock market works, and how distribution of income can influence government policies. The Math In the Real World lesson plans also include activities that have a more personal appeal to students. Those lesson plans include building credit, building a savings, and the dangers of payday loan schemes. The payday loan lesson plan is one that has previously been featured here on Free Technology for Teachers.

Mobile apps are becoming increasingly helpful tools for students and teachers, providing educational value to students of all grades and ages. One of the subject areas that has benefitted most from this proliferation is math. But how can you pick one from the seemingly endless sea of math-oriented apps? To help wade through the options, here are 9 great choices.

Today we spent sometime going through iTunes App Store collections for high school students and curated for you the apps below. These are some good applications high school students can use to help them with their math. The apps are arranged into three main categories: Algebra, Geometry and graphing and calculation apps.  We invite you to check them out and share with your students. The visual below is also available for free download in PDF format from

Looking for some very good iPad math apps to use with young learners ? The visual below has you covered. It features some of the popular titles to utilize with your kids to teach them basics of math and enhance their mathematical thinking.  We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page.