Technology in Math Classrooms

There are many different ideas as to how technology should be used in the math classrooms today. Some believe that students will not learn as much if they use technology such as computers and calculators, and there are still others that believe technology can benefit students if used in the proper way. We all know as future teachers and current students ourselves, that we must understand the applications and why we do them to really understand mathematics. In other words, we cannot just memorize the steps of application and plug it into our calculator, but rather we must understand why the steps were done and what our results mean. After the students have shown that they understand the material and applications, the teacher may allow the students to use the calculator once the applications have become tedious for the students. For example, if we asked a group of Calculus students to find the maximum of a line, we would not expect them to graph the function by hand and try to guess where the point is, we would instead promote them to use their calculators to find the best estimate of the point. So, even in cases such as this, technology can be used to further demonstrate the reasoning behind a problem. It may be the case that we want our students to work on the application, and then again it may be the case that we want our students to be able to see what they are doing the application for. The only thing we really have to be careful of is not to let technology replace the “basic understandings and intuitions”. Technology has the ability to make mathematical problems more worthwhile for our students. What I mean is that students can use the Internet to find data on issues that are important to them. In this way, the students are learning how to read data bases and understand what the numbers mean. After finding this data, the students could then put it into a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel where they could manipulate the numbers, and even come up with new conclusions. Students could figure out averages and basically anything they could think of based on the information that was given in the original data. In making a spreadsheet, not only would the students become familiar with Microsoft Excel, but also they would be figuring out how to manipulate numbers and come up with equations. Another option that a teacher would have with the data the students collected would be to have them make graphs. Now depending on the class, and what the students had already learned the teacher could have the students do a number of things. In a class where students were learning to graph lines based on points, the teacher could have the students hand graph the data and maybe even come up rates, maximums, minimums, and averages by simply looking at the graph. For students who are more advanced than this, you could have the students graph the function using their calculator, or some computer program, and have them reach the same objectives as above through more accurate mathematical applications. In these examples, the technology makes the work interesting and fun, while also making the students examine and contemplate mathematical ideas among themselves.