Don't know your tangent ratio from your cosine ratio?
New School District 43 online resources are making it easier for students to pass their Grade 10 Math provincial exam.
This past fall, retired Heritage Woods secondary school math teacher Sandra Rietchel was hired to put together screencast lessons - sort of a digital version of a lesson given on an overhead projector - practice links and additional resources for Foundations and Pre-Calculus Math 10.
The lessons have now been posted at www.sd43.bc.ca to help struggling students and assistant superintendent Sylvia Russell said they're aimed at helping students and their parents master the difficult and wide-ranging curriculum.
"She designed the math website to look at the mid-range student, one that finds math a little bit hard and students that maybe need some support to remember concepts that are needed to build up a skill set," Russell explained.
The need for online resources has been talked about for years, Russell said. Math 10 was chosen as a place to start because it's a difficult course, with many subject areas and a provincial exam at the end that could be a barrier to some students. The resource went live in January in time for provincial exams.
"You need more than what the textbook gives you," said Russell. "This might actually be enough for a mom and dad to be able to sit beside a student and actually help."
FUTURE LESSONS?
A similar program is being considered for Math 9 and for Workplace and Apprentice Math 11, but will depend on the availability of resources, Russell said.
Don Gordon, SD43's numeracy co-ordinator, said the lessons are on the district's home page where anyone can have access, without need for a password. He hopes they save parents and students the frustrating job of hunting and pecking through the Google information jungle. One key difference: These lessons are directly tied to the B.C. curriculum, which other sources are not.
"You can watch as she performs the operations," Gordon said of Rietchel, "and she's narrating what she is doing."
FEEDBACK NEEDED
And now that the resource is up, the district wants to know if parents and students find it helpful. To provide feedback about the math support resources, email him at [email protected] or [email protected].
Meanwhile, the province is also looking at providing more free online resources for post-secondary students and has established a committee to put together textbooks for 40 high-enrolment first- and second-year post-secondary courses. The open textbook project will be co-ordinated by BCcampus, a publicly funded organization that aims to make higher education more accessible through the use of information tools.
