Math sites in the “Dude! You have to check this out!” category

Let’s face it, 90% of everything on the Internet is crap.

This is especially true when it comes to educational resources.

So I cannot believe I did not come across these until now. Maybe they were just lost in the swamp of effluvia.  I came across so many good resources lately that I am planning on re-designing my course next spring to include a lot more applets, videos and other cool online options.

Here are some sites in the “Dude! You have to check this out!” category

Against all odds – statistics videos created in 1989! These are 26 half-hour videos on different topics on statistics. Think Nova for statistics.

Yummy Math – a website of activities making mathematics relevant to the real world. That’s their tag line. I’d say they make mathematics INTERESTING, like figuring out your savings buying Christmas presents, or comparing the durability of twinkies and tomatoes through time lapse photography or computing how much coffee could fit in a giant coffee cup. Go there. See for yourself.

SAS Curriculum Pathways – an enormous free site that has an unbelievable amount of stuff on statistics, algebra, geometry – oh, yeah, and I guess English, Spanish and Social Studies, too (if you care about that stuff). I have no excuse not to have looked at this before because I have been hearing about it for years and the nice people from SAS sent me links which I never clicked on but just sent to friends of mine teaching  middle school and high school. Hey, I’m busy. That’s no excuse. The school where I volunteer has a shortage of textbooks. Well, this site has pages to read, then research questions, then statistical applets.

Not strictly set up as an educational site, but Policy by the Numbers blog is like my twitter stream but far more in-depth. Posts on open data, Google hang-out on AP statistics. It was educational for me. Made me want to teach high school AP statistics. Just listening to this one video gave me two new books I want to read as possible textbooks for my class, so it’s educational for me.

The mathalicious blog is really cool. Their site also seems to have some good activities based on the sample ones but I’m not sure because they want $185 a year for a license, which strikes me as a bit steep.

Last but definitely not least is CAUSEweb.org – which I had actually seen before but I guess I was busy (detecting a pattern here?)  This is the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education. The first thing I saw here was a free workshop in San Diego on playing games to teach statistics, funded by a National Science Foundation grant. I signed up for it on the spot.

It’s been a very productive week for finding sites and other resources I want to review for teaching statistics. So much so that I used this other site, 43things.com to make a list of all of the stuff that I want to consider for the grand-a-mundo course re-design.

Please, please, please if you have suggestions, chime in.