Department of Mathematics Educations
EMAT 6990
I
have been working for Instructional Support Services at Georgia Perimeter
College for the past few years and one of my jobs has been to develope
a web page where students can submit math and science questions on line,
get handouts and look at previouly answered questions.
The first
web page I developed and still used by some of the other campuses had a
main page with all the links to everything on the site on that first page.
As you can see it is quite cluttered (http://www.gpc.edu/~dunmol/).
I was asked
to developed another web page for the Lawrenceville campus (http://www.gpc.edu/~lawmol/)
that would be less cluttered and easier for the student to find the information
that he/she was looking for. The web site includes everything the
previous site included and more. As you can see below, the page is
more accessable, less cluttered and more personal in nature. In order
to keep track of what was need and where pages would go a simple flow
chart was needed.
In developing the web site there were restrictions on the college logos I could use as well as any changes made to them. While most of the handouts were already saved as word files they all had to be
From the beginning
one of the problems was how questions would be answered. Using programs
like Word and Respondus for equations took a fair amount of time to type
up. Limited to ten minutes to answer a question, this was not going
to work very well. A program called "Mimio" (http://www.mimio.com/meet/index.shtml)
looked very promising. This programs alows you to write on a white
board with regular dry erase markers and the image is captured on the computer.
The file can be saved as an html file and sent to the student as well as
being uploaded to the Archived Qestions folder on the web site. There
was some time needed in training tutors on how the program works but not
much. Tutors have needed to learn how much information is appropriate for
the student to get a full understanding of the answer. The tutor
needs to be able to go from college algebra to Calculus 2 realizing how
much the student knows and needs to know in order for the online experience
to be a good one. This has proved however to be a very quick way
of answering questions and when the question is a particularly good one
an easy way to post it on the web site. An added attraction is that
streaming videos can be made using "Mimio" as well. This means a
student can hear and see his/her question being answered.