4 Free Online Tools for Help with Math
With our country’s middling performance in math globally and with a high percentage of current students with a phobia about math, maybe some free resources will help you breakthrough in your math class?
When I was a high school student, the internet was just starting to be accessible to all so I had very little computer support. Getting help came from buying books, getting tutored and other solutions that cost $. Now, math help is accessible to all and you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get the extra support you need.
As a math teacher, I used some of these tools with students daily in my class and as part of my homework assignments. Some of them have stood the test of time and others have gotten even better over the last few years.
Here is a list of 4 free online tools to help you with your math.
Are you a visual learner? This tool is for you. This tool is a great way to use visualization and manipulation to understand the numbers and symbols on paper. As a math teacher, I would teach the concept as a whole group and then while students were practicing in class, we would send 4 students to the 4 computers in the back of the room (remember those days when all students didn’t have a computer in their hands?) to take the practice problems and then connect their recent learning to a visual representation of what we were just working on. This website is great for math and science, and now is organized for state standards! Teachers, you can find labs here along with practice sets that can help you differentiate or personalize the learning for the type of learner you’re working with. Students, this is a great way to ensure you are not just learning by memorization. Being able to solve problems in multiple ways shows true mastery.
This site came out early in the decade and has only gotten better. I was there when Sal Kahn broke out by sharing a global and accessible school at the 2011 TED conference. We all listened in awe of his simplicity and brilliance of using video and immediate feedback to help students move at their own pace. His self-narrated videos and practice problems have become the gold standard in the industry, saving many math teachers from creating their own videos. Without the need to lecture, many teachers can now focus on what each student needs and personalize their 1 on 1 times to be more effective. We are big fans of Sal Khan and his work to ensure everyone has access to a high-quality education around the world!
When I was in high school, we had to buy expensive calculators like the TI-82. Even then the screen was smaller than my current iPhone, pixelated and grayscaled at best. Desmos takes the TI-82 up three levels by making it fill a whole computer screen, having vivid colors, and having easy tools to manipulate some of the most complex problems in high school math. If you like to learn by trial and error and by doing, this is the tool for you. This is geared for Algebra students through Calc BC or beyond, and I would use this with my students as a tool to check their math and see how the solution is visually represented. The only thing I miss from using a TI-82 is that I could load Super Mario Bros onto it for a quick math break!
As a teacher, I knew that my teaching style wasn’t going to be a fit for everyone. Before the rise of all of these internet tools and smartphones, I would have to use a lot of physical manipulatives to help fill in the gaps to reach all kinds of learners. When I went back into the classroom to teach AP Calc a couple of years ago, I was surprised by how much easier it is to reach all learners. To succeed in math, some students have to see it and manipulate it, others need to learn from trial and error and get immediate feedback, others simply need a different teacher than me. So when I was teaching AP Calc, there were many times that I would tell my students that if this doesn’t make sense to you, I am happy to try to explain it in a different way or if you want to learn from someone else, google Math BFF and the topic we were learning. I don’t know anything about Math BFF except for that she is very thorough in her explanations, the production quality is simple and of high quality and I love how they speed through some of the dead times that can happen in most tutorial videos.
I hope these 4 tools help you breakthrough and reach new heights in your math achievement. Of course, there are many more tools that aren’t named here and will likely be on a follow-up post. What are some of your favorite tools? Please share them below so we can all be high school experts.