Demme Learning's Math-u-See

Many of you are familiar with Demme Learning's Math-U-See program but did you know that they now came out with their Digital Packs? We recently had the chance to review their Geometry Digital Pack.

Math-U-See is a homeschool math program for grades Kindergarten through 12th grade. They take a multi-sensory approach in teaching math concepts. The student watches and listens to a video and for some of the levels, they have manipulatives to further help the student comprehend what they are learning. They then take what they learned and apply it to the math problems to solve in the student workbook. You won't find their math listed by grade but rather by levels. They want students to master the concepts before moving on to each lesson and eventually each level instead of going by a standard grade in which the student is in. Math-U-See offers placement testing to help assist you in determining which level your student should be on.
You may be wondering what is the difference between Math-U-See's regular Geometry program and their new Digital Pack. 
For the regular program, you receive:
-Instruction manual with complete solutions -Instruction DVD -Student Workbook -Test Booklet -12 month access to the Digital Pack
If you purchased the Digital Pack, you receive:
-12 months access to streaming instruction videos -Instruction manual PDF's -Lesson and test solution PDF's -extra downloadable resources such as record keeping sheets, math fact sheets, extra lesson practice pages, just to name a few of the added bonus'.
For the Digital Pack, you would also need to purchase the Geometry Student Pack.
The instructional videos in the digital pack are the same ones they have on DVD. The upside to using the digital pack is that you can pull up the videos and PDF's anywhere you have internet connection and on almost any electronic device!
To access your Digital Pack, you go to the Math-U-See website and login into your account. From there you can view your Digital Packs, select which curriculum you have (on the left hand drop down menu) and then from there you select which lesson video you want to watch (on the right hand drop down menu). You then hit play and the video plays right on the page like as displayed below. All photos can be clicked on to enlarge.

What makes having the Digital Pack handy is having all your references in one place. Rather than have a separate book with the instruction manual and solutions that you would always need to page through to find the corresponding lesson, you can see the link to the summary and solutions are right on the page with the lesson. (as indicated by the arrows in the photo below).

 Once you click on the links, it opens a separate PDF page where you can either scroll through to find what you are looking for for just that specific lesson or have the option to download or print the page out.

Here is a screen shot of the PDF's for the lesson summary and the solutions page.
Also included in the student workbook are honors page. Basically these are bonus pages at the end of each lesson that are optional but allow for extra practice. On the Digital Pack, you will find a link for the solutions to the honors page.
In the Geometry level, there are a total of 30 lesson videos. In the student workbook there are approximately 10 pages of corresponding work to each lesson with the bonus of 2 honors pages. The way my daughter used this course was to sit down and watch the lesson at the beginning of the week and completed the first 2 pages of math work. If you divided up the 10 pages, the student would roughly cover 2 a day. Many times before she started her work each day, she repeated watching the lesson video to help reinforce what she was doing which is how Mr. Demme feels is the best way to learn math. 
With some lessons, she understood them better and would complete the 10 pages of work in less than 5 days and moved ahead to the next lesson. That's the beauty of how Math-U-See works, the student goes at their own pace and doesn't advance until they have the concept down solidly.
The benefits of using the Digital Pack is that my daughter could pull up the lesson on the laptop or the iPad and could wear earphones so as to not distract the others. When you use the DVD's, you have to either watch them on tv or a laptop with a DVD player which isn't always handy.
The other part that we really liked with having the PDF manual and solutions right with each lesson is that we didn't have extra books to cart around and waste time paging through to find the info we needed. This would be especially convenient for a family who schools on the go, having everything right at your finger tips.
A few of the things I noticed that could make using the Digital Pack more challenging is if you lost internet connection and wouldn't be able to access anything online. Also, if you have multiple children that you want to use this curriculum with over a few years, it would be more cost prohibitive to use the DVD's rather than to purchase the Digital Pack each year (as the subscription would only be good for 12 months and for someone like myself who has several children in close consecutive grades, the DVD option is more affordable).
One thing I'd like to see is a quicker way to access the Digital Pack. As it is right now, you have several pages that you have to click through to get to the videos. It would be nice to just login from the home page and after logging in, see the main digital pack screen.
Overall we were pleased with the convenience and ease of use of the Digital Pack and plan to continue finishing this level of Math-U-See.
One added note about the Demme Learning company, they have amazing customer service! I actually live near their headquarters so I personally stopped in to see them to get my student workbook. The several people I had the privilege of meeting were all very helpful and answered any questions I had.
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