Developing mathematics learning materials using freeware

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Government (HKSAR) has been encouraging the teaching professionals at all levels to apply Information Technology (IT) in education. With a substantial amount of public money being poured to support this direction, many research and development projects have been completed or are undergoing to improve the quality of teaching and learning (T&L) of mathematics, one of the major disciplines in both primary and secondary curricula. In general, a mathematics teacher can obtain some fixed IT packages through three channels: free products sponsored by the government or other organizations such as tertiary institutes and book publishers, commercial packages in the market, and free package downloaded from the Internet. Some of these ready packages are very useful to teachers for their teaching and students for their learning. However, there is one major shortcoming among these fixed packages: they do not allow the flexibility for a teacher to develop school-based teaching materials. In order to develop dynamic and interactive programs for their own students, schools may need to purchase license(s) of some expensive software. For schools that do not have enough resources for buying software, using freeware is another alternative. In this paper, a freeware called “WinGeom” is introduced. In addition, three examples for the T&I of mathematics developed in the platform of WinGeom are described and elaborated. Copyright © 2000 香港數學教育學會 .