Introducing Math Jam

The pandemic has brought about so much change for all of us! For teachers, reaching students through remote learning has come with many unique challenges. Woot Math received feedback from many teachers early on in the pandemic that a collaborative whiteboard would be very helpful in promoting student interaction and learning! We listened to your suggestions, and we’re excited to share the launch of the Math Jam collaborative whiteboard!

Math Jam is THE digital whiteboard you need for your virtual classroom! It provides a space to work collaboratively with your students or have them work on their own. Math Jam offers an ideal way to upload your lessons in advance or add instructional content on the fly. The best part is that Math Jam really engages students in a math-friendly, online environment with premium math tools and manipulatives.

How to get started

Math Jam is accessible from your teacher dashboard. Just click on the “Math Jam” tile to get started.

For a blank workspace, just set a password and then “Launch Jam.” Math Jam offers two options for adding your instructional content in advance. To load content already available in Woot Math, click “Choose content.” You can then find and insert any existing Woot Math warm-up, quiz or homework task. When uploading Woot Math content, Math Jam automatically paginates your lesson so that it’s easy to work through with your students page-by-page.

If your instructional content is a PDF document or a JPEG image file, you can use the upload tool in the bottom toolbar to add content as you go. PDF documents will automatically paginate in Math Jam, but JPEG images will need to be manually loaded onto new pages. Use the orange toolbar on the left to navigate between pages or to add and delete pages. The teacher can set the pace by selecting the lock at the top of the page toolbar so that all students are locked onto a specific page. Pages can be reordered by dragging them around in the page toolbar.

If you’d like students to work in smaller groups, you can have each group use a specific page of the Math Jam. As the teacher you can pop around in between the pages to easily see what each group is contributing. There are some other great features like an optional timer at the top of the page, a chat window on the right, and all the math-friendly tools in the bottom toolbar. Below is an example of a Woot Math poll in a Math Jam work space. (Note that the scratch pad is constrained to the smaller right section, and there is no answer submitting or answer checking available at this time.)

While fraction bars and circles, number lines and dice are not new, Woot Math strives to bring them alive digitally so students really feel like they are interacting with actual manipulatives. These manipulatives are great for building models of concepts students are exploring. The dice and coin are awesome tools for lessons in probability.