Abstract
The paper presents an analysis of non-mathematical content of online teaching materials for mathematics created by Czech in-service mathematics teachers posted on the website www.veskole.cz that serves Czech teaching public as a source of interactive materials to be used on smartboards. It builds on a poster presented on ECEL 2015 conference.
The question the author asks is how innovative electronic materials are as far as their cultural, non-mathematical content is concerned? Are these materials a mere conversion of traditional hardcopy textbooks or have its authors gone further, introducing new motives, images and realities closer to everyday lives of their own pupils and of themselves? The author of this paper builds on her research in the area of non-mathematical content of mathematics textbooks (Moraová, 2013) and of problems posed by teacher trainees (Moraová, 2014). This research tries to analyse what images of everydayness pupils come across in lessons of mathematics, in the process of which they absorb cultural norms very often unaware as their attention is focused on solving a problem.
The presented research combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. The author analyses one hundred and seventeen activities developed for smartboards downloaded from the website www.veskole.cz.
Word problems are classified according to their cultural content and the most frequent images are described and commented upon. The analysis clearly shows that Czech authors of inline materials fail to grasp the chance of introducing new topics and backgrounds and tend to use the most traditional word problems, only making them interactive.The findings of this study are of interest to in-service mathematics teachers planning to develop an online teaching unit, developers of online teaching materials in general, mathematics educators but also policy makers as not much attention is paid to the cultural contents of mathematics teaching materials.