Multi-User GeoGebra for Virtual Math Teams

The Math Forum is an online resource center for pre-algebra, algebra, geometry and pre-calculus. Its Virtual Math Teams (VMT) service provides an integrated web-based environment for small teams to discuss mathematics. The VMT collaboration environment now includes the dynamic mathematics application, GeoGebra. It offers a multi-user version of GeoGebra, which can be used in concert with VMT’s chat, web browsers, curricula and wiki repository. 1. The Virtual Math Teams Project The Virtual Math Teams (VMT) Project grew out of the Problem-of-the-Week (PoW) service at the Math Forum. The Math Forum is a well-established online resource for improving math learning, teaching and communication (Renninger & Shumar, 2002). Operating since 1992, the Math Forum is now visited by several million different visitors a month. Its PoW service provides challenging problems of K-12 students on a weekly basis. These problems are primarily oriented to individual student work, and exemplary student solutions are posted to the http://mathforum.org site. The original idea of the VMT Project was to provide similar stimulating problems for small groups of students to work on collaboratively over the Internet (Stahl, 2006; 2009). In our design-based research at the VMT Project, we started by hosting student chats in a variety of commercially available environments, including AOL Instant Messenger, Babylon, WebCT and Blackboard. Based on these early investigations, we concluded that we needed to include a shared whiteboard for drawing geometric figures and for persistently displaying notes. We also found a need to minimize “chat confusion” by supporting explicit referencing of response threads. We decided to adopt and adapt ConcertChat, a research chat environment with special referencing tools (Mühlpfordt & Wessner, 2009). By collaborating with the software developers at Fraunhofer IPSI in Germany, our educational researchers have been able to successively try out versions of the environment with groups