AdaptedMind Math is intended to be a full pre-assessment, progress tracking, lesson, and practice product. However, you would be wise to carefully check out each and every lesson ahead of time to be sure that videos match practice sets and that explanations for incorrect answers are well targeted. While you can track progress, it would be very difficult to pinpoint specific difficulties because success is reported only in percentages and total number correct. If you were to use it for homework practice, you would likely need to use it for in-class work as well, to avoid "We didn't do that in class" situations.
Lower-grade blackboard video lessons -- while not so great for native English-speaking first graders -- could be quite useful for ELL or low-literacy students to learn math vocabulary. Because pretest results generate a percent of the whole curriculum-mastered figure but don't seem to be available for comparison to any kind of post-test results, their use is limited. You could use a random practice set as a post-test, but results are not kept separate if the set is retried at a later date.
Continue readingAdaptedMind Math is a website that teaches kids math through a series of lessons. It assembles about 60 lessons per grade (for grades one through six), each with a 20-question practice set, at least one video clip, and multiple worksheets. Upon login, kids take a pretest to generate a percentage of the curriculum-mastered number, and then move on to select any lesson in their grade, or any other grade if they wish. Kids earn cute visual badges and points toward mastery when they answer correctly and pop-up explanations when they make mistakes. Videos are about 85 percent from Khan Academy, with native videos (original content from AdaptedMind) making up the remaining 15 percent.
You can assign lessons and register up to 35 students with email-free usernames and passwords. The student progress page mostly provides a summary of percentage correct for lessons and the total number correct out of 20. The teacher progress page shows an overview for all students, plus it provides access to that same student summary page for each student.
Despite looking pretty darn good, AdaptedMind Math could use some fine-tuning. The highlights: Colors are vivid, badges are cute, points count up and inform users of progress continuously, and curriculum is somewhat thorough. However, there are a lot of drawbacks. Layout problems will confuse kids, and basic worksheets aren't very exciting (and some annoyingly displayed on-screen when they can't be completed there).
Explanations are offered for incorrect answers, but they're inconsistent and don't always address the particular problem the student's having. A third-grade single-digit decimal multiplication mistake led to a supporting video that used four places. The presentation of questions can also create confusion. For example, place value questions alternate back and forth between "How many hundreds are in the number 568?" (5) and "What is the value of the hundreds digit in the number 568?" (500). Finally, despite claiming to be fully standards-aligned, the site does not include all state standards (North Dakota and Alaska, at least, are missing), and the Common Core standards listed on the teacher progress page are difficult to relate to practice sets and don't necessarily map to the questions offered in the sets. While AdaptedMind Math makes an effort, a fine-tooth comb is needed to make this a fully useful product.
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