Hi everyone! So at home, I'm going to be teaching ds10 math. This should be interesting....haha I'm going to be covering the schools everyday math curriculum, but I also want to "spice" it up with online learning. Any opinions on IXL or the ALEK math program? He has tried EPGY for enrichment in the past, but it just wasn't visually stimulating enough for him (or me!) Thoughts are greatly appreciated!

So I hope I'm not sounding like a broken record but here is what we've found with our very mathy kid (well into algebra at this point, starting algebra II).

ALEX: Okay. Good, not great. The pie charts that they offer for what you need to cover are good, but that's about it. It's generally presented as problem-oriented (solve this problem to see if you're proficient) and not really lesson oriented. For us--and probably you too--the courses do match local curriculum so that's a plus. Costs money.

Alcumus / AoPS : Much, much better. It's still problem-focused in that you're given a problem to solve but there are a couple of things that make it better. First, it's a much better interface IMO. More usable. Second, you rate the question. Third, you also rate the explanation of the answer. For an auto-didactic, once you get them started they can basically go at their own pace on autopilot. There are nifty "quests" that you go on for fun. Some of them are random and some are focused on solving given problems. DS loves it. Oh, and it's free.

Khan Academy: My new favorite. You may have watched the videos in the past (in fact DS still does on the drive to school) you're probably familiar with Sal. Well they've recently launched a companion web site that coordinates video lessons with test exercises. Best of all worlds IMO. There are also "badges" you can earn for doing various things to keep some of the goal oriented fun. I believe Khan has it broken down to be reasonably close to CA's curriculum. There are A LOT of metrics you can get for your child as well to help you figure out what he/she is getting stuck on. They're actively working on the platform so I expect it to continue to improve. Oh, it's also free.

So our son was doing ALEKs at school but now that he's done with that, he basically just goes back and forth between AoPS and Khan and loves them both.

Not sure if that helps or not, but that's been our experience. We use these as enrichment at home.

Good luck!

JB

BTW, if you're not already familiar with Vi Hart, go to her web site (http://vihart.com/) or YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart) and watch her math videos. All of our kids love them and we keep hoping she'll post more. She's a virtual hero in our household.

(Dontcha wish this is the type of thing that they'd actually do in school for enrichment?)

JB

Great! Thank you JBdad! Yes, LOVE the ViHart videos...My son was trying to explain their coolness factor to his math teacher and once again, his teacher didn't care grrrr...I just discovered the Khan Academy and it looks wonderful. I will look into the videos with test exercises and also Alcumus/AoPS. Thanks so much for taking the time to reply!

No wonder where Vi got her motivation from huh? "So if you're like me you're sitting in math class bored..."



JB

Check out www.conquersmath as well. My DS prefers it to Aleks.

Could you give a few more details why you like the conquersmath? Would this be good for a talented Math student who learns quickly?

DS10 has Alex available at school to do this year, but is not doing it. He has decided after only 2 hrs in the program that he has to do too much work that he already knows. He was suppose to do this program to increase his pace, but the teacher is not familiar with Alex and now he is just going along with the class, which is too slow for him.

Hi OTGmom,
If Aleks is already availible in school, I would call the Aleks people and find out if there is a special switch the teacher should press to allow your DS to move ahead after 3 correct problems like we did at home. Also - ask them how to allow the teacher to Allow your son to take one of their assesments - perhaps at the next grade level up - to see where he is on their schema.
Switching is ok, but better to see if you can tweak what you already have, yes?

Love and More LOve,
Grinity

I'm the ALEKS administrator for my school and I'm not sure what you mean by "going along with the class." Unless the teacher is manually resetting ALEKS, this just doesn't happen. Your DS would take an assessment at the beginning of logging into ALEKS the first time. From that assessment, the software fills in a pie based on what he already knows, needs to know or wasn't tested.

Once a child has completed 85% of the pie (unless the school set it lower) then the teacher receives an email from ALEKS saying it's time to move to the next level, where the whole assessment starts over again for the new grade/course.

If he hypothetically completed 85% of 6th grade and the teacher re-placed him in 6th grade again, he'd take an assessment. If he finished 85% or close to it, ALEKS would email again saying the child is ready to move up.

It sounds like based on your explanation that he maybe needs to move to the next class? But I'm still not sure how he has anything left to do in ALEKS and the teacher didn't reassign him.

Ok, I just bookmarked the Khan Academy website as something we might find useful, but the AoPS appears to be pretty pricey, not free -- am I missing something?

We do like ALEKS, although I agree that it is not much on explanations and heavy on problems. DS8 is finishing up 7th grade level in his ALEKS with the school. If the school has an account, you can get ALEKS for $40/year, as opposed to the $20/month price for it as an individual. Our school pays for it out of their GT budget.

The Alcumus portion of AoPS is free, a great boon for us, indeed.

If you go here , you can register for a free account.

I did call Aleks people and they never mentioned anything about the settings. I will try them again to ask your question. The teacher says she is not familiar with the program and has dropped promoting it. Aleks people told me it only takes an hour to get familiar. I have also thought he should move up a grade but no one seems to agree. At this point he has a bad attitude with Aleks and he would need a teacher to promote it and help him. The teacher also feels he is not proactive enough about keeping himself moving on independent projects, which I have seen at home. He learns well on his own but can get stalled not taking charge.

They admit the regular class pace is too slow for DS but don't seem to be able to do anything about it. I may have hit a wall with this Math. DS has a C in Math this semester and he should be a A student.

Next year, if this all stays the same. We will have the same problem. The teacher says all the students are going the same pace. I have a talented math student that seems to be losing interest. How sad.

Assuming your DS knows his username and password, it sounds as though it would be useful to have him log in at home where you can see what he's doing and see what's going on here. I have read around ALEKS quite a lot (research interest as well as a DS doing it) and haven't seen any sign that it has a mode other than the usual one where you pick a topic, answer a few questions on it, and get it on your pie. If it's just that all the topics currently available to him are easy, but he can't face doing the easy questions to show it, then someone needs to click on "do a new assessment now" or whatever the option is called, in the parent/teacher interface. Then the system will reassess him and give him a chance to skip over easy stuff.

I think DS took an assessment in the beginning. Should the Aleks people be able to look up the assessment? He has put 2 hrs on the program and it looks like he has 50% of the pie complete. DS mentioned being frustrated because he said the program thinks he doesn't know division. I'm not sure what to think, but if the teacher does not support the program, we can't get anywhere.

At home,DS took an assessment on line from http://www.tenmarks.com/asdoAssessmentInit.action and scored 85% on 5th grade math, but they thought it might not be higher level thinking. He is at a GT school. I think there were 20 questions.

The whole idea was that he would do Aleks so his pace would be more appropriate. It seems he is stuck doing the regular class work at a too slow pace, going along with the class.

The only other solution I can think of is if he had indivual help from another teacher/tudor. I don't think they have the resources for this.

The assessment fills in as much of the pie as the system can deduce that he knows from the assessment - since each course includes a lot of pre-requisite material that most people starting the course will already have, 50% is actually pretty low as a starting point IME. Is he prone to careless mistakes? It may be that he made a lot of slips on the initial assessment with the result that he has lots of conceptual knowledge - e.g. of division! - that didn't show up as correct answers to the assessment questions. In that case, the right way to proceed is definitely to have him do a new assessment, warning him to be more careful this time, since ALEKS can't usually tell the difference between a slip and a more serious failure of understanding! The teacher should be prepared to click for a new assessment, even if she isn't pushing the use of ALEKS, surely.

How many questions are on the initial assessments? How long does the assessment take?

Between 20 and 25 questions - but it has a lot of information about the prerequisite relationships between topics, and the questions are carefully selected by the system to home in on where he's at (it's very clever, I do recommend reading the Research behind ALEKS section!) so it gets more information than you'd think possible with so few questions. One or two careless slips don't seem to mess it up much - the underlying theory does take account of them - but a lot would. It's supposed to take about 20 mins, but it's common for younger children to take much longer.

I like the idea of him bringing home his password and username so the two of you can figure it out together. I can't believe that the teacher is allowed to 'get away with' dropping the program like that at a gifted school. I would propose you ask the school to assign someone else who is more computer savy to adminsiter Alexs to your son in a different room while the other kids do math.

My son atually needed me to sit next to him while he did Aleks in 4th grade. Apparently if you make an addition error or other careless mistake, the program thinks you don't understand the current topic and gives you lots more questions to practice on. IF your son makes lots of simple mistakes, he might be spending away lot of time on simple errors.

What we worked out in the beginning was for him to do the problems and then I would check it on a calculator before he typed in the numbers and then he would check that he had typed in the answer correctly, and then I would check it before he hit 'send.' After a few days, he would do the problem, then double check himself in order to earn me to come by with the magic calculator and tell him if he needed to check again.

It was painful at first, but did wonders for his attention to detail. Talk about high stakes!

Bottom line is that your son is at a gifted school that is committed to meeting his academic needs, and you might be needed to pipe up and let them know there is a problem (although I think the C in the gradebook might be a clue!)

Love and More Love,
Grinity

I'm thinking... if there were only 20-25 questions it should be pretty easy for someone to look at other Placement assessments and see how they stack up. He said he had problems with filling in some anwsers and the program was not working properly. Sometimes he blames his problems on others/otherthings.

It seems to me he is not getting the attention needed to make the plan happen. I think the teacher is too maxed out on time. I wonder is it not possible to get this type of differentiation, (like with Aleks) because he is not independent enough OR did he just not get a good enough start with it and not enough structure/planning? OR is it not good for him.

I think I will speak up again.

I wish somebody had the time for him who could figure out his needs and try to meet them.

It's not that simple, because *which* 20-25 questions you get is dependent on how you're doing. (In a nutshell, the next question it asks you is one which it is as uncertain as possible about whether you'll be able to answer - that way it gets the information about what you can do as quickly as possible. Fictional example: if it asked you 23 x 19 and you got it right, it might later ask you 549 x 10057, but if you got it wrong, it might later ask you 6 x 7.)

However, the topic lists from here are detailed enough that someone should be able to compare that with any other assessment he's done.

Odd behaviour does happen sometimes. We've noticed, for example, that using the back button is a really bad idea in assessments (I'm still not sure quite what happened the time DS did!)

It sounds likely that he's got in a pickle with the initial asssesment and just needs someone to watch him do another assessment and then make sure he knows how to use the program. He shouldn't need much in the way of supervision after that. I'd say it's worth perservering.

The initial "pie" assessment usually has 30 questions and like ColinsMum said, it depends on how you do which questions you get. In our math intervention program (obviously not gifted kids) if a child scores 50% or below, we automatically bump them down a grade. We're shooting for getting them in the 60-75% range and then working up.

The pie is visible from the parent/teacher login. If the teacher doesn't want to help, ask her to create a teacher account for you and then move your DS to that class. It takes about 45 seconds to do it and it's easy! Then you can see what he's working on, how many problems he attempted, how long he worked, create worksheets, move him from class to class and also ask for quizzes or assessments. It's all pretty user friendly and clickable.

I like ALEKS because it actually doesn't make you do a ton of questions. If you get one wrong in the work mode, it will add 2-3 more to the practice pile. If you get the first one right, you can usually complete a topic in 3-4 questions depending on the level. In school, this would usually amount to 3-4 whole worksheets spread over a week! That's pretty darned quick IMHO!

By the way, I know I sound like an ad for ALEKS... Sorry about that! I have found for a school setting it creates the easiest differentiation method with a resistant teacher and a nonsupportive school so I like it!

We've been using Aleks for a year, and I'm growing less impressed. It's not a good stand-alone curriculum, only really good for supplementation/practice, and the further out of level DS gets, the less I feel he's actually learning the material. He is being exposed to lots of concepts, but I'm not convinced he's mastering the skills in the way I would like to see.

Aleks also doesn't model problem-solving skills well; all it cares about is that you get the right answer, so there's no reinforcement for laying out a problem carefully and correctly.

I'm starting to work with Singapore Math as an offline alternative to address this.

DeeDee

Thank you everyone for the help.

We've tried IXL before but now we have found another better replacement, Beestar. Beestar is also an online learning website but offers more subject program options than IXL. As I know, it has math, language arts, science, social studies...Its math program is free.
My daughter likes to use Beestar much more than IXL. She says the math exercises are very interesting and effective. She doesn't need to spend too much time doing repetitive work. All of its questions are based on state standards and many of them are from real life problems.
Although her math ability stands out in her school, she finds plenty of competitive peers from other schools on Beestar. It's great achievement for her to get on the honor roll. She enjoys it and becomes more confident. Her teacher suggests her to enroll Beestar's GT math next semester. I am glad for her.