Interactive on-line tutor

I got to be an elementary school student this morning learning about cause-and-effect sentences and order of operations math concepts using interactive computer lessons. The lessons were
www.create.usu.edu/practice_reading/reading.cfm and
www.create.usu.edu/practice_open/numberoperations.cfm
In the reading lesson I chose to work with the female (classmates said to avoid the robot persona) taking about preparing to run a marathon. She "stood" at the left side of each screen teaching me about what a cause is, what an effect is, and how they work together in sentences using clue words like "because" or "so". Just last week in my 5th grade practicum class we did boring worksheets about this very topic, and judging from their enthusiasm for interactive math lessons, I'm sure they would have learned just as much and had more FUN logging on to this lesson. I noticed as I was the student that this experience with the personal tutor would have caught more of the individual problems and questions certain students had (they have learned that if they just keep looking down at their worksheet someone else will provide the answer out loud or they can make a guess in the blank and get SOME points). This program makes you get it right before you can move on. I liked the audio that had a 5th grade female student's voice and the "hip" comments like "You're awesome!" that is great for making the student stay motivated and optimistic about learning the topic.

The math lesson was really boring and over-kill on the problems. I chose as my persona a Hispanic female and that was cool because she had an accent when she talked. I didn't like that I didn't have a scratchpad to do the complicated math problems (I'm not very great at calculating in my head!) but I did like that often she connected math knowledge to real-life applications ("go goggle to see how knowing math helps you get a good job"). I didn't know until much later that I could click to skip through the instruction screens; I would've done that sooner. I think students would want a shorter chunk of lessons because my brain got tired after a while.

I think this could be an effective extension of class work but I'm not sure I'd use these online tutors to teach the concepts. My post-test scores didn't show improvement and I didn't feel a greater love for math because of playing math games online. My practicum experience in 5th grade showed me that students love to use interactive games but consider them as games: I could see some of the boys from my class not taking this very seriously without some accountability (post-test scores for grades, for example). When I got some answers wrong (according to the computer) I didn't know why: the computer just made me "stab at the dark" again until I got the math problem right or the right wording of sentences.