Serendipity35

We (of the Writing Initiative) have been avoiding thinking about heading down the path to creating a writing-intensive math course at the college. We know it's inevitable, but we have scheduled it for the end of our 5-year grant. (I believe the secret will be finding the right professor...)

But, I have been keeping my eyes open for math sites, and I have found a lot of web resources for math.

The Educational Origami blog and wiki has lots of good stuff for math and every other subject. (I actually discovered them when I researching some updates to Bloom's Taxonomy - more about that when I finish the post.) If you think creatively about how to use some of these tools with students, writing in math doesn't seem like it will be quite so impossible.

How about understanding mathematics through insight, concept and perceptions? There are visual mathematics links at visualmathlearning.com but most of them are focused on K-12 skills, and not much specifically on writing in the math discipline. I keep an eye open for community college math sites, but even some of the better ones focus on skills.

There are sites for everything from generating your own graph papers to math journals. Journaling seems like a good way to start on the path.

Ask a student to answer in writing: Would you rather take a test that has 10 questions worth 10 points each, or one with 20 questions worth 5 points each? Or you can take a test with 25 questions worth 4 points each or 50 questions worth 2 points each? Explain your reasoning and estimate where you would score the highest and why. You will get a very different type of thinking and answer than you would for a "comparable" question in numerical format.

More for K-12 math, but adaptable?
http://www.myalgebra.com/algebra_solver.aspx
http://illuminations.nctm.org/
http://www.tutorvista.com/
http://www.algebra.com/
http://www.math.com/homeworkhelp/Algebra.html
http://mathforum.org/students/