About the Intergeo Project
The Intergeo Project is a EU co-financed project that aims to make digital content for mathematics teaching in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. The project is built on three main pillars: Enhancing the access to interactive-geometry-based mathematical content, enabling the exchange of content by taking down technical and legal hurdles, and assessing the educational value of content by quality testing.
Each of these pillars needs expertise from mathematics education, mathematics, and computer science. Access to existing vast amount of activities, learning paths, exercises, examples collections, etc. can only be easy if the content is properly indexed and tagged. For that, the project created an ontology of mathematical topics and skills (the GeoSkills ontology) that can be used for the classification and organization of interactive material for mathematics teaching and learning. Also, search tools and algorithms have been implemented based on this ontology, that are now available on a centralized platform at http://i2geo.net. Furthermore, curricula of several countries have been encoded, such that the Intergeo platform can be used for cross-curriculum search.
The exchange of content is only possible if teachers and others can use the material they find with their current hardware and software setup. Intergeo provides the community with a data exchange format that is being adapted by all major commercial and open-source software producers. At the same time, all resources on i2geo.net come with reuse-friendly licenses, like the Creative Commons license. Therefore, users can adapt or translate the resources they want to use in their classes to their own needs.
Finally, not all content is equally suited for each classroom situation. Among others, it depends on the experience of the teachers (and students) with ICT enhanced teaching, the declared goals of the curriculum and the technical prerequisites. Also, even if an activity is feasible for teaching, its educational value might still be debatable. Those who want to use computers in teaching depend on the experience of others, and we provide everybody with an easy-to-use but still detailed way to provide feedback about each resource. The quality assessment framework developed in the project is used for evaluating resources, and it is also a good starting point for research in ICT-supported teaching of mathematics and teacher education.