GeoGebra is a FREE, powerful, open source, java-based, geometry and mathematics tool. One of the difficulties in teaching geometry and graphing is that students often get the impression that the graphs and figures are static instead of being instances in time. GeoGebra lets students do geometrical constructions and graphs and then play with them. It is similar in many ways to
Geometer's Sketchpad for computers or to
Calibri Jr on the TI graphing calculators. GeoGebra goes farther and lets you EMBED the creations.
Très cool!
To try and put this in use this year, I created an offshoot google site [
link] from my homepage [
link] wherein I could embed some of the experiments (I call them toys so that kids aren't afraid of breaking them). I have had trouble sometimes getting them to open in Internet Explorer, but on Firefox or Google Chrome they run perfectly.
Try one out! The picture here is of a concept that is in the 5th grade standards: the area of a triangle. Click on the picture's caption to go there and play with the toy! One rule the 5th graders had to know: the triangle's movable point had to be touching the top of the rectangle.
No comments:
Post a Comment