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Math Educators See the Right Angles for Digital Tools

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Virtual manipulatives, seen here, in software by DreamBox Learning, are able to provide the same benefits as physical manipulatives with less of the mess.

Teachers use adaptive-learning software, on-demand videos to customize learning

By Ian Quillen

While multimedia tools have been slow to penetrate instructional methods in some subjects, the math world is bursting with tales of teaching technologies that visualize concepts, adapt to students’ strengths and weaknesses, and align with state academic standards.

There’s adaptive-learning software that gears math lessons toward individual student progress—a concept that drew mainstream media attention when Time magazine named the School of One math program in New York City as one of the top 50 inventions of 2009.

There are on-demand videos that give tutorials on nearly every concept in basic mathematics, algebra, calculus, and even applied math fields like accounting. For building one such repository, the Khan Academy, that now hosts more than 2,300 videos, Sal Khan made a name for himself and is now a featured speaker at innovation pow-wows like last summer’s Big Ideas Fest in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and this past March’s TED 2011 conference...