While ALEKS is an excellent tool to use for the purpose of learning and practicing math problems, one thing that is missing in ALEKS is helping students use their own problems and showing them the steps to solve it.
ALEKS generate its own problems. This is excellent for the purpose that it is made for but not good enough for integration with local curriculum content.
Wolfram Alpha has just released a feature where a student can input a problem into its search box and it will generate the steps to show to the student on how to solve it.
The original post about it can be found here.
A sneak preview of how the steps looks like:
This is excellent for parents that wants to oversee the math practice sessions that their child spends time in at home.
This is also useful for students to learn on their own. Students today have no excuse to say that they have no one to guide them. We have a lot of tools today that can be used for self directed learning. The habit of independent study and lifelong learning is one of the most important habits that a student can develop in the world today.
How can a teacher integrate ALEKS and Wolfram Alpha together?
They can assign math learning, practice and assessment by using ALEKS. But one of the equally valued skill today is for a student to answer a question in step by step fashion. We as a society still see the value of a student knowing how to write in paper the way how they solve a math problem.
Unfortunately, not all of us are trained to be math teachers at home. Its not easy to find a good math teacher for tutoring at home too. The best way to do this then is probably take advantage of current technology that is offered free to all of us.
I am really happy when I received the announcement about this from Wolfram Alpha as this is one area where ALEKS does not provide.
Steps on How to Use Wolfram Alpha for Local Integration with Math Curriculum
1. List down the type of problems that you would like to assign to your students (if you are already using ALEKS, find topics that your students are currently struggling in)
2. Create 2 versions for each of the problem. One will be for students to view the answers in Wolfram Alpha. Give this as a homework for them to solve at home guided by Wolfram Alpha.
3. The other version should be made into a separate assignment sheet. Our expectation will be for the students to be able to solve the problems in this worksheet in the class itself. This will be for the purpose of collecting student work products related to the standards.
4. If students can show that they are able to solve the problems given in class, then it means that they have mastered the problems in this particular assignment.
