Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Stats and Probability part 1

For some reason the people who make the standards, be they the old ones or the new ones, insist that Stats and Probability be integrated into high school math classes rather than being taught as a separate class.  I find it difficult to integrate the topic because no matter when I teach the material, it disrupts the rest of the topics and I'm done with it.  I seldom get a chance to review or reinforce material in time for the state tests.
I found three apps by Appzest, inc could be used in the general math class to help students learn more about the topic without giving up too much time to actually teach it. These apps are not meant to teach students the material necessary to meet state standards but they are good to review and reinforce student learning throughout the year so students are better prepared for state tests.

The first app is Appzest EZ Statistics lite Students get a nice review of mean, median, mode, range, finding missing data, interpreting charts, quartiles and outliers, probability and others.



http://img-ipad.lisisoft.com/imgmic/7/6/1367-1-ez-statistics.jpg






As with other apps by Appzest, It gives a brief review and then
several questions for the students to work through.  If they make a mistake, it tells them what they did wrong.

A second app by the same people is EZ Permutations combinations lite which covers combinations, permutations, factorials, the probability of simple events, dependent and independent events, compound events, etc. This picture shows what happens when a student selects the wrong
answer.  Again this app follows much of the same pattern
as its others do.

Finally is the EZ graph and data lite app.  It covers interpreting tables, bar graphs, line graphs and plots, stem and leaf plots, histograms, box and whisker plots etc.  This app has a nice selection of questions.

 Some of the apps are free some are paid and I really don't know the difference  but among  the three apps, students get a great exposure to prepare them for state tests. This app has multiple choice questions for practice. I like the review each topic has on the first page of each chapter but the number of questions for each topic is limited but still the immediate feedback helps the students learn.

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