What's New

Shodor has just released a major upgrade to Interactivate. This is release 3.0. Users may not notice major changes to the site, but the infrastructure supporting the site has been completely gutted and redesigned.

What users may notice, however, is that changes and upgrades to existing materials and additions of new materials will happen more frequently. Because of the structural changes, we now have the ability to release an individual resource to the live website, such as a modification to an applet, or uploading a new lesson plan. Prior to release 3.0, all changes had to be made at once requiring an entire copy of the development site.

Browsing and Searching

The most important new features in Interactivate 3.0 are updates that greatly improve the Search and Browse features.

The Search feature now searches through all available resources and returns resources based on the occurrence of your search terms. For example, you can enter two search terms such as "linear function": This search will return a list of resources that include the search term "linear" or the term "function" or both terms. Interactivate 3.0 now orders the list of resources based on the relevance resources to your search term.

New Resources

This release of Interactivate features a number of new lessons and discussions that cover a wide variety of topics.

New Lessons

The new lessons in Interactivate 3.0 span the topics of Number and Operations, Geometry, Probability, and Statistics.

• Bar Graph: Introduces students to what bar graphs are used for, how to interpret the data presented, and how to organize their own data using bar graphs.
• Elapsed Time: Introduces students to elapsed time and how to calculate it.
• Fraction Conversion II: Extends Fraction Conversion lesson plan for students to convert fractions to percentages.
• Number Base Clocks: Introduces students to the concept of base ten and how to use other base number systems.
• Probability and Geometry (elementary): Introduces students to how probability can be represented using geometry.

New Discussions

The new discussions in Interactivate 3.0 will introduce students to a number of topics across the curriculum:

• Angles (elementary): Discusses the classification of angles as acute, right, or obtuse.
• Base Ten: Discusses the base ten system and how it differs from other base number systems.
• Converting From Base Ten: Discusses methods of converting from the base ten system to another base number system.
• Distributive Property: Introduces the concept of the distributive property.
• Elapsed Time: Introduces the concept of elapsed time and teaches students how to calculate elapsed time.
• Finding the Surface Area of a Rectangular Prism: Discusses the process of finding the surface area of a rectangular prism.
• Finding the Surface Area of a Triangular Prism: Introduces the concept of surface area in relation to a triangular prism.
• Finding the Volume of a Rectangular Prism: Introduces the concept of volume of a rectangular prism.
• Finding the Volume of a Triangular Prism: Introduces the concept of volume of a triangular prism.
• Fraction Conversion: Discusses how to convert from fractions to decimals.
• Integers: Introduces the concept of the integer.
• One Step Algebra: Discusses processes for solving one step algebra problems.
• Order of Operations: Introduces the convention of order of operations.
• Perimeter Algorithm: Introduces a method for finding perimeters of irregular shapes on a grid.
• Place Value: Discusses what individual digits represent in multi-digit integers.
• Probability and Geometry (elementary): Discusses the relationship between geometry and probability.
• Slant Height: Introduces the concept of the slant height of a triangle and how to find its measure using the Pythagorean theorem.

Additional Standard Alignments

Another addition to Interactivate 3.0 is new alignments to state standards:

• California Content Standards
• Tennessee Curriculum Standards
• Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills
• Virginia Standards of Learning