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iknowit.com: Online Math Practice Activities for K-5 Students

12/11/2017

7 Comments

 
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iknowit.com is a math practice site designed for K-5 students.  It’s currently a completely free resource, until August of 2018 (at which point it will cost several dollars per student).  The site has over 25,000 Common Core aligned math practice questions across 300 lesson topics, and was designed with an eye towards engaging early elementary students.  

In addition to being CCSS aligned, the resources also align with most common math textbooks and curriculums.  It’s an excellent resource for elementary teachers, so let’s take a look! 

To begin, you can sign up for a free teacher account to start exploring the resources and activities they have available.  Teachers are able to see and preview all of the lessons before assigning them out to students.  This also means you could share activities through an overhead projector or SMARTboard as well.

Lessons are broken down by grade level and then by topic.  You can hover over a lesson to get an example of what the question types look like, as well as see the specific Common Core standard(s) the lesson is aligned with.

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Each lesson contains a database of 100+ custom created questions.  In other words, these questions are not being randomly generated, but have been created by iknowit’s teams of teachers in order to specifically address the skill that is being taught.  This wide variety of questions also means that students can practice a topic for a long time without ever seeing a repeated question.

Once teachers find a lesson they like, they can assign it out to their students by clicking the checkmark next to the lesson.

There are also lots of differentiation possibilities when assigning lessons, which is great to see. Teachers can assign lessons to individual students, groups of students, or the entire class.  Plus, when students are working through a lesson, they’ll only see if they’re on level “A”, “B”, or “C” and they won’t see the grade level.  This means that students who are above or below grade level, will still see the same interface as other students in their class, which means teachers can worry less about students feeling self conscious about the level they’re at.

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When students are working through a lesson, any question can be read aloud.  Students will see their progress at the top right, and click to get a hint at the bottom left. 

One of my favorite features is that if a student gets a question wrong, they will get specific feedback and instructions on how to solve the specific problem.  That feedback is designed to be predominantly visual, and written at the appropriate reading level.  

So many math apps I have seen do a terrible job at providing feedback like this, so it’s wonderful to see how much time the iknowit team as put into this part of the learning process.

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When students get an answer correct, they’re rewarded with a fun animation from the character at the bottom right.  They can change this character if they’d like to, opt for the more “adult” emoji option, or just remove that option altogether.

Students can also see their own overall progress as well, so they can know how they’ve done on the lessons they’ve completed.  They can choose to look back through all previous questions, or only at the questions they got incorrect in case they’d like to review those.

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On the teacher side, you’ll be able to see detailed reports of each individual student’s progress.  The team is also adding in graphs and additional analytics in the coming weeks.  My only thought here is that it would be beneficial for teachers to be able to see individual student and whole group progress towards a specific Common Core standard, which unfortunately is a feature that isn’t available.

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Overall though, iknowit is an excellent resource.  It was clearly designed with elementary students in mind, but beyond that, it’s incredibly easy for teachers to pick up and begin using.  From assigning lessons, to seeing student progress, everything about the iknowit interface is intuitive and easy to use.

Plus, if students are using the site on an ipad, there’s a built in scratchpad option that students can use in order to take notes or work through problems.

For elementary math teachers looking for a classroom resource that can be used to easily supplement their current curriculum, and provide a wide array of engaging practice problems for their students, I absolutely recommend iknowit.com.  Especially since the app is free until the start of the next school year, now is the perfect time to test it out in the classroom and see if it’s a good fit for your students!

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The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I was not compensated for writing this review.


7 Comments
Jacqueline Jimenez
1/25/2018 04:16:22 pm

This truly is an amazing resource for both teachers and students. It's awesome to see that as of now it is free and I hope since it appears to be a great practice site, many schools will have the funding to pay for this.

Reply
Mike
1/28/2018 01:24:39 pm

Hi Jacqueline,

Thanks so much for reading! Happy to hear this resource could be useful for you!

Mike

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Taylor Worley
1/25/2018 08:17:02 pm

This is an amazing resource for teachers and students! I hope that it will stay free so students will not be denied the ability to use this site based on money. It's a great idea that it uses "A, B, C, D, etc" for levels instead of actually saying what level the student is at. As a teacher I think this is a great way to see where your students are at in specific subjects and what they need more help on.

Reply
Mike
1/28/2018 01:25:13 pm

Hi Taylor,

Thanks so much for reading! I agree with your idea on the categorization, I definitely think that's more beneficial than doing it by grade level. Glad you found the resource useful!

Mike

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Samantha Alvarado link
1/28/2018 12:30:16 pm

Every student is unique with varying strengths, challenges, and background knowledge in specific areas. This website appears to enable the teacher to select an individualized set of lessons and then track that student’s progress. In addition to individualized learning, the teacher can select small groups or the whole class when assigning lessons. As the students complete questions, they can select an aural version of the question if they are better at understanding aurally than visually. The problems have words and pictures as well, and this set of presentations addressed a variety of learning styles, especially if the scratchpad option is used on an iPad. Hints and feedback are provided to the student as they progress through the lesson, and this allows students to work at their own pace. This program also provides the teacher reports on each student’s progress, and it appears that future versions of this site will integrate graphs and analytical data on student progress as well. This easy to use website appears to be simple and easy to implement in the classroom. Definitely a “win” for the students’ learning.

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Mike
1/28/2018 01:25:51 pm

Hi Samantha,

Thanks for reading and sharing your ideas! I appreciate your analysis of the benefits of iknowit, and I'm happy to hear you think it would be beneficial in the classroom!

Mike

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Robyn Brandhuber
1/28/2018 08:40:56 pm

Looking at this article and the website, iknowit.com looks like it could be an amazing resource for both students and teachers. My high school used a website geared towards secondary math (Math XL). While it gave instant feedback, something that was really frustrating was that if an answer was incorrect, they would not provide an explanation on why it was incorrect. I like how iknowit shows why an answer was incorrect. It helps the student pinpoint what they did wrong. I also like how iknowit shows students which level they are on, but not their grade. Grades can make a student feel self-conscious on their academic performance and intelligence, which may not be beneficial for those who struggle in the subject. Some students work well in groups while others work better individually. It seems like a nice feature to allow problems to be adjusted to different sizes of groups. It looks like the website carefully considers the differences among students, which is something that schools need to apply today.

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