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Math Resources for K-12 Teachers & Students ________________________ On This Web Site ________________________ More Math Collections ________________________ Need Plug-ins? Plug-ins / Tools for Viewing Resources
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The creation process for this collection of Mathematics resources for K-12 teachers and students included several components: 1. Choice of program to write the HTML code After spending a lot of time improving my HTML skills in creating advanced tables, using the "single-pixel GIF" for spacing and layout, designing forms, manipulating images and text, I decided that I would get the best possible results from using a WYSIWYG program and use my HTML skills as a backup strategy to ensure the web site design met my approval. I had designed websites before using a hands-on HTML editor and wanted to contribute to my own knowledge-building by trying this alternate approach to web page design. Since I own Microsoft™ Front Page 2000, I decided to use that program to develop my website. A book titled "How to Do Everything with FrontPage 2000" by David Plotkin (published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill) was quite useful in gaining a working knowledge of FrontPage features. One concern using this program is that a number of servers and browsers do not support Front Page Extensions. I had to be constantly aware of which features could be used and viewed using both major browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer). 2. Layout and design choices Ideally, I would like to develop my own graphics and features for a "completely original" web site. Within the time frame of this course, I decided to use a ready made "theme" for the site. The one I have chosen, called BLUEPRINT, provides a clean design and has graphics which relate to my "Mathematics" theme. 3. Searches conducted My search process for resources followed several procedures. I used All The Web advanced search options to find some good starting points. My keywords varied, depending on the section of my collection I was creating. As an example, when looking for provincial education documents, I always used government as my first keyword, followed by the name of the province or territory, and then the words education and mathematics. I have found that the search engines usually treat the first keyword with the highest priority and it was absolutely necessary (in this case) to get government domains in my searches. Some children's directories such as AskJeeves for Kids and Yahooligans provided starting points for further site research. Since the hits were not always exactly what I wanted, I often truncated the URL's to climb back up the directory tree and branch out to relevant documents. When browsing some Internet resources, useful embedded links were provided which I followed to find other sites for my collection. 4. Other resources consulted Several education portals, such as EduFly provide comprehensive windows to educational resource sites on the Internet. Unfortunately, there often is not a rating system to help filter through the large number of sites listed. I will continue to sift through these resources to find any resources worthy of inclusion in my collection. During our course discussions, classmates have provided links in our notes which I had bookmarked. Some of these sites had teacher resources pages and specific resources for mathematics. I also drew up my previous experience as a math teacher to find some sites I have used in the past. 5. Selection of resources Finding math resources was much easier than deciding which to use. Early in the process, I realized that evaluating every single embedded link on comprehensive sites would be near impossible. I needed a strategy to make choices for inclusion in my collection. In general, I tried to follow the guidelines provided in the Internet Detective tutorials. I also had some difficulty deciding when I should use lower level links found within a site that had already been included. Relevance to my topic had to be the ultimate deciding factor. 6. Other resources found I have not added much to the original pages since the draft. However, I had accumulated a large collection of interesting resources for teachers and educational Math games for students. Using these, I created two additional pages which are named "Math Teacher Tool Kit" and "Fun Stuff for Students". Since they do not fall under the original description of the resource collection, I have added them as "More Math Collections". 7. Further improvements addedSince the draft version, I did create an image map using a map of Canada, but I decided not to use it. It seemed ineffective since I was just linking to sections of the same page that did not require much scrolling to view anyway. If I had developed more comprehensive provincial pages as separate entities, then the image map would have been more effective. In the process of experimenting, I did learn how to create image maps, which was one of my goals for this course. I increased the student appeal by adding "Fun Stuff for Students" and increased the practicality for teachers by adding "Math Teacher Tool Kit". These pages also have more graphics than other pages. A Plug-ins page was also added to provide a single source for plug-in downloads and information. Since the draft, I have added more information in the side and bottom borders. The side border now clearly identifies each page as part of a larger collection of Math resources. This side border also graphically describes the structure of the main collection with the three new pages added since the draft. The bottom border now has a navigation bar so that the viewer does not have to scroll up to find the side navigation bar. A "TOP" link was also added to the bottom of each page. Identifying and contact information for the creator of the page was added as well. 8. Conclusion Overall, I am pleased with the production of this resource collection. Visually, the site is clean and attractive. Easy navigation has been provided. The resource should be useful to many teachers looking for a comprehensive collection without having to duplicate the searching and filtering that I have already done for them. Students should also benefit from finding resources that they did not know about or were having difficulty finding through their searching efforts. There is something for all students of all ages. When compared to my goal as stated in the abstract, I feel confident that I have met the objective to provide comprehensive curriculum support for Math teachers and students.
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This collection of web pages was developed by Sherman Pevie as an assignment for CTL1605H at OISE/UT. Page last updated on 11/12/01.
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