A happy discovery on Twitter, a conversation with Christian Bokhove of Southampton University led me to another home for the Wisweb widgets. Try the Digital Mathematics Environment from the Freudenthal Institute.
To access the resources mentioned here:
- Choose Open DME for student
- Login as guest.
- Explore Secondary Education (also the DME Widget list)
A guest login has restrictions but you will be able to explore and use resources, many of which make excellent demonstrations.
A site very well worth exploring to become familiar with what is available and one I’ll return to.
Some examples follow:
Choose Secondary Education, Algebra and also the Algebra Widgets to explore resources such as the following :
Algebra Arrows illustrated above is excellent for exploring functions. Form inputs, operations and output by dragging them onto the main workspace, connect them up and optionally connect to a graph. Click inside any of the elements to change the content.
The Digital Mathematics Environment has much more than the original Wisweb applets – a quick glance at Secondary Education shows we have resources to explore.
Choosing Secondary Education/Algebra/Exercises – Equations/Linear equations led me to another favourite. A whole series of these exercises is available. I like the way the steps and working are clearly shown
There are useful demonstrations that could work well in class:
Choosing Secondary Education – Geometry will give you the following choices:
I am very happy to see widgets such as Building Blocks again. This is useful for demonstrating plans and elevations. I discovered I could clear a block by selecting both left and right mouse buttons simultaneously.
Statistics and Probability widgets includes a widget illustrated here on the Normal Distribution; try experimenting with the various variables.
Probability Trees could be useful for creating diagrams as the basic diagram is very easy to set up – simply enter the number of branches you require.
(If you are using one of the older browsers and have up to date Java, you can still use the Java versions of the Wisweb Applets.)