McGraw Hill Virtual Manipulatives

Summary of the Tool

McGraw Hill Virtual Manipulatives

Website: http://www.glencoe.com/sites/common_assets/mathematics/ebook_assets/vmf/VMF-Interface.html

Great site to present students with the use of technology in the classroom. Site includes manipulatives to help students have a visual understanding of math problems and how they can be worked worked on by using manipulatives. There are three ways to use the background feature, work mats, storyboards and game boards. The site is designed to be use for students from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade.

Pedagogical Uses

This site can be used to help students not be afraid of math problems and become more confident and comfortable in the area of math. It is a positive learning tool that will encourage students of all grades to solve math problems. This website can help with the progression of learning and building on material already learned throughout the grades. My screen cast will explain more how to use the site and what it can be used for.

How to do it:

This is what the page will look like at the beginning:

On the left side, you will see you can pick from grades, backgrounds and manipulatives. As you scroll down each, you will have many to choose from:

Although as mentioned in the limitations, the higher grades do have less to chose from.

Based on the lesson, you can decide whether you would like to use a game board, story board and work mats. Here is a popular lesson used for kindergarten counting bears in a boat.

The teacher decided they wanted to do the lesson for kindergarten students, and used the manipulatives boat and bears.

The boat and bears can be dragged to the middle of the screen.

The bears can now be placed on the boat. A teacher can ask students how many seats there are? How many bears will we need to fill all the seats?

As in the above pictures, bears of the same color will be used which can be made into another addition question such as how many red bears are on the boat?

This is a nice lesson on teaching children simple addition, colors and organization of items.

Limitations

The greatest limitation that I feel the website has is as a student increases in grades there are less storyboards, game boards and work mats to use. Students in the eighth grade will only have work mats. Another limitation is that the website takes time to be accustomed to. It isn't as user friendly as I would like it. Therefore, it is really important for the teacher to go through the website thoroughly before presenting it to the students to alleviate confusion.

Conclusion

McGraw Hill Virtual Manipulatives is a great website to help students practice math problems using visual manipulatives and provides students with a vast array of learning a math lesson. For students who have difficulty with math, this website may help provide students with different ways to handle a math problem helping the student to see that math can be a fun subject. I highly recommend this website. It encourages students to learn and is fun to use.