Sunday, October 18, 2009

State Capital Questions for Moodle

In class we have been reviewing the state capitals of the United States of America. We have been using Moodle matching and short answer questions to help learn them. If you would like to use the questions in your Moodle system you can download them at lulu.com "State Capitals of the United States of America"

I've saved the files in the Moodle XML format all you need to do is import them into your question bank and you will have all of the state capitals as short answer questions. To help the students learn the capitals at first you can create a Random Short-Answer matching question type. Here's a screen shot of what they look like.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Mathfacts Update

Beta Version Update:
The default page after logging in has been updated so that students can more intuitively select which numbers are going to practice. The new format gives the students quick visual feedback about which problems they have and have not worked on and how fast they have solved them.

Statistics:
  • Over 100 users
  • 4,482 Math Fact tables completed
  • Over 160,000 questions answered
  • The fastest time for solving the 10 by 10 multiplication table with 100% accuracy is 2 minutes and 11.532 seconds.
  • The fastest time for solving the 10 by 10 addition table with 100% accuracy is 2 minutes and 30.687 seconds.
Observations:
  • This makes and interesting trend that I have seen in my classes but is also true across the different schools that are participating. Students addition speeds are slower than there multiplication speeds.
  • When students practice just a few times per day it helps there speed and accuracy more than a bunch of practices once per week.
  • The new table visual mentioned above allows students that are below level be successful and make progress.
If you are interesting in locking in at the current pricing forever you need to sign up quickly because there are only 5 beta accounts are still available. Keep in mind that beta doesn't mean unstable because I use this every day in my classroom.