The Math Forum

[中文]互联网为改进数学教育提供了巨大的机会。它解决了对教育的需求，这种教育将对个人需求作出反应，并使广泛的资源和支持关系易于获得。教师与同龄人、导师和专业人士一起，寻求获得丰富的策略、活动和有趣的数学。我们期望学生在掌握基础数学方面得到支持，并通过网络进行丰富的研究，这些网络远远超出了他们的本地资源和经验。为了培养这样的机会，数学论坛将实施我们的虚拟数学教育中心的全尺寸版本。在接下来的三年里，我们将把精力集中在应用、扩展和传播我们所学到的关于使用互联网通信的知识上，以整合三个关键活动：1)在涉及数学教育的许多团体之间建立社区；2)用户建设、评估和组织材料和项目；3)在线教育指导和促进。研究结果表明，该项目可以作为其他领域的模板。数学论坛的优势在于它专注于使用互联网工具来创建一个活跃的社区和一个深度的、组织良好的资源中心。实质性的材料是由学生、教师、数学家、关心的家长和教师教育者之间的互动产生的。诸如“问数学博士”和“每周几何问题”等互动项目的成功，已经产生了可应用于其他领域的服务。通过与教师提升项目的合作，我们已经开始开发将专业发展经验转化为在线课程和培训资源的流程。每周都有成千上万的教师和学生访问数学论坛网站，他们希望将互联网数学教育材料整合到他们的教学和学习中。有许多课程和教师改进项目需要支持，以便向教师和学生分发他们的材料和创新。这些项目将受益于我们在互联网数学教育方面的经验、我们的软件工具以及我们向互联网过渡的支持。通过对论坛网站的改进，用户将受益于大量材料的贡献，这些项目将为在线社区带来新的参与者。此外，参与者将有机会塑造并为在线课程做出贡献。我们将把工作重点放在利用一组精心挑选的现有数学教育项目的活动上，这些项目希望在互联网上发展。通过这种方式，我们可以与一些项目正式合作，同时保持论坛对技术转让和咨询的关注。我们的合作伙伴是经过精心挑选的，以代表探讨上述三项活动可行性所需的各种情况。它们包括课程和软件出版商、暑期数学项目、教师评估、网络和学校改革方面的系统倡议、职前教师教育、互动互联网服务、师生指导项目，以及涵盖所有年级、涵盖许多不同社会经济和文化社区的专业组织。在三年的时间里，我们将建立一个财团，在拨款完成后承担论坛的管理工作。我们还建立了一些机制，将成熟项目的责任转移给现有机构或自我维持的收费服务。根据该项目的规模，设计了一个仔细而详细的评估过程。我们将对成千上万的教育工作者产生直接影响，并每年支持数百万美元的活动。评价将提供信息，用于优化这一努力的影响，并记录用户和机构伙伴参与方面的转变。我们将了解虚拟中心作为改革的推动者和社区促进者的可行性。＊＊＊

- 9618223 Klotz The Intemet offers great opportunities for improving mathematics education. It addresses the need for education that will be responsive to individual needs and make accessible a wide range of resources and supporting relationships. Teachers seek access to a wealth of strategies, activities, and interesting mathematics, together with a community of peers, mentors and professionals. We expect students to find support for mastering fundamental mathematics and pursuing rich investigations through a network that reaches well beyond their local resources and experience. In order to cultivate such opportunities the Math Forum will implement a full-scale version of our virtual center for mathematics education. Over the next three years we will concentrate our efforts on the application, scaling, and dissemination of what we're learning about the use of Internet communications to integrate three key activities: 1) community-building across the many groups involved in math education, 2) user construction, assessment, and organization of materials and projects, and 3) online educational mentoring and facilitation. The results of t,his project can serve as a template for other fields. The strength of the Math Forum is its focus on using Internet tools to create an active community and a deep, well-organized resource center. Substantive materials are generated from the interactions of students, teachers, mathematicians, concerned parents, and teacher educators. The success of interactive projects such as Ask Dr. Math and the Geometry Problem of the Week has resulted in services that can be applied to other areas. Through our collaborations with teacher enhancement projects we have begun to develop processes for turning professional development experiences into online courses and training resources. Each week the Math Forum Web site is visited by thousands of teachers and students who want to integrate Internet math education materials into their teaching and study. There are many curriculum and teacher enhancement projects needing support for distributing their materials and innovations to teachers and students. These projects can benefit from our experience with Internet math education, our software tools, and our support in making the transition to the Internet. Through enhancements to the Forum Web site, users will benefit from the extensive contributions of materials and the new participants these projects will bring to the online community. Additionally, participants will have opportunities to shape and contribute to online programs. We will focus our work on leveraging the activity of a carefully selected group of existing math education projects that wish to develop an Internet presence. In this way, we can work formally with a number of projects while maintaining the Forum's focus on technology transfer and consulting. Our partners have been carefully selected to represent the range of contexts necessary to explore the viability of the three above-named activities. They include curriculum and software publishers, summer mathematics programs, teacher assessment, systemic initiatives in networking and school reform, pre-service teacher education, interactive Internet services, teacher and student mentoring projects, and professional organizations covering all grade levels and encompassing many different socioeconomic and cultural communities. Over the course of the three years we will build a consortium to assume management of the Forum upon completion of the grant. We have also incorporated mechanisms to shift responsibility for mature projects to existing institutions or self-sustaining, fee-based services. A careful and detailed evaluation process has been designed in keeping with the scale of this project. We will have a direct effect on thousands of educators and support millions of dollars in activity each year. The evaluation will provide information used to optimize the impact of this effort and to document transitions in user and institutional partner pa rticipation. We will learn much about tile viability of a virtual center as an agent of reform and a facilitator of community. ***