I looked at Pearson MathXL because my son used it in school and he could talk about it. I could not try it out for this review because I could not find a free trial link. I do not believe there is a free trial as the website tells me that I need an access code. The Pearson website loads pretty fast on my mobile phone, however I have a decent mobile phone and decent Internet speed. How good is it on your phone?
The Pearson website proclaims the following:
Access from most devices
Mobile-friendly design
The exercise player in MathXL has been updated with a new, streamlined, mobile-friendly design. Students can access their courses from iPad® and Android® tablets to work on exercises and review completed assignments on the go.
Is this a mobile app? How mobile friendly is it? Is it exemplary of mobile learning? Unfortunately I have to take Pearson’s word for it.
I am reviewing this app since it is similar to IXL Math and mathematics teaching is my area of interest. Pearson’s website claims to “provide just in time help” and “empower each student with personalized learning tools”. I am also interested in personalized learning. My son tells me that MathXL is good for providing lots of practice questions to pass tests but is not necessarily helpful to prepare students for tests that require deeper analysis and reflection or assessment for understanding. My son tells me that there is one flaw in this program that he struggled with: that the application has a fixed set of stored correct answers. However, in higher mathematics courses such as Calculus the correct answer that the student works out may look different from the answers that MathXL has stored in their answers bank. It is then extremely frustrating for the student to try to make their answer match the solutions in MathXL or worse yet if the student has produced a correct answer that looks nothing like the selections available in MathXL.