For today’s tech snack, I wanted to share tool that helps makes math content relevant by appealing to the comfort level of K-6 digital natives. Today’s tech snack can be found at the following url:
https://www.matific.com/
What is it?
Matific is an online site that uses hands-on, interactive mini-games, called episodes, to teach K-6 math skills. It can work on any web browser, as well as android and ipads( the apps are free.) Based on my initial testing, you don’t have to have the app on your device to use the site if your device has an Internet browser. The app has a nicer appearance, but the functionality is the same.
Most of the activities include a teacher’s guide that provides background information, other activities, and discussion questions as well interactive worksheets. You can assign episodes or worksheets by grade level, by curriculum and by book. The two curriculums available on Matific are aligned to the Common Core and TEKS( from Texas) standards. In terms of books, Matific has activities that correlate with the Evision Math and Everyday Math textbooks.
As a teacher you sign up for a free account. Then you can create student accounts and assign content for your students. Creating accounts for your students does not require that your students have email accounts and you can choose the username/password or just have Matific create them. If you have younger students and don’t want them to have individual username and passwords, you can create one class account and then the students would log in using the same username and password. From my testing, you can be logged into multiple devices using the same login information. Creating individual student accounts allows you as the teacher to get progress reports for each student.
After you create your student accounts, you can assign content. The way it works is you can “lock” all content and “unlock” only the content you want your students to have access to. By default, they will be able to see all the content but only unlocked content can be played. However, you can set it that they only see the unlocked content when they go to a specific grade level.
If you have an lcd projector, you can show the episodes as part as a whole class instruction. You can create a link to activities on classroom computers for students. Students can do the activities in small groups or individually. This is an excellent site that allows for differentiation for all levels present in your classroom.