Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

I always assign myself to be the last blogger for the semester as it is a good time to reflect on the course. Having taught this course three years in a row, I have come to realize that this course is very difficult to teach. I have to admit that because it is difficult, I get frustrated and don’t plan assignments as well as I should. For my end of the semester reflection, I have decided to make two lists—things that went well and things that need improvement.  Things that went well:  I enjoyed having and using a textbook for the reading assignments. Previously, I just had to find assignments online and the book was helpful for making this part of my job easier. I would recommend this textbook for any general technology course for teachers, Educational Technology for Teachers by Dr. Gregory Francom at Northern State University.  Students did a great job improving the online iPad app rubric that was created by the Spring 2013 class. I was very impressed with the ...

Anyone who has ever taken a math class (especially at a college level) is aware the calculators are a very contentious topic. Should students be allowed to use them? Are they a crutch? Would they be allowed to use them in the “real world”? Some teachers allow only scientific calculators with the most basic operations. Others have an “anything goes” policy, letting powerful TI-Nspires into the classroom. Others still ban them entirely, requiring everything be done by hand. Since I will have to make the same call some day as a teacher of mathematics, the issue of calculators is one close to my heart.  When I was in high school, I remember being allowed to use calculators and even being required to buy a graphing calculator (I want to say it was the TI-84 that was the most current model at the time). I also distinctly remember resenting these calculators because I had no idea how to use mine. Once I got to college, some of my professors actually took the time to show us how to ...

            Khan Academy was implemented by nine study sites (20 schools) and a research brief was done on three of these nine sites. Khan Academy is a website which includes instructional videos on math, economics, history, and art. The teachers at the study sites used Khan Academy to review material and work through the problem sets on the Khan Academy website. Some of the teachers use Khan Academy for a reversed classroom setting, where the students learn the concepts at hoe work through the problems themselves and come to class with questions. The students said that using Khan Academy helped get immediate feedback, filled in gaps of past instruction, the students started holding themselves accountable for their performance, and allowed teachers to spend more time assisting individual students. At one of the sites, during the first year of the study students were spending about 22% of their instructional time on the Khan Academy activities, but dur...

As educators and students, we hear all of these warnings about copyright, but how much can it really hurt us? I mean how many times have we actually heard of schools getting in trouble for copyright? Recently in class, we had a discussion about copyright. We went on and on about how it is bad, but with every bad, there was an exception for it to be okay. This is such a vague concept that it is hard to take too seriously. What is considered proper for educational use? What websites can we use in class? How is the proper way to have your students read an article that you, as an educator, think is appropriate? I was left with so many questions that couldn't even be answered, because of all of the exceptions. It is also hard for me to take this to seriously, because throughout my educational career, almost all my teachers would copyright. Most of the time they didn't even realize that they were doing it. I have educators that constantly copyright. Have they heard these long talks a...

It is no secret that technology is taking over this world, but are we getting too comfortable with what we put on the internet. Last week in our technology for teachers class, out professor asked us to Google our names and see what comes up. It was startling to see what came up when I did that. I ask whoever is reading this to do the same and the results may surprise you as they did me. In this day and age we do not realize what we are putting up on the web for everyone to see. We had an assignment earlier this week to respond to this doxxing article Dr. Vestal sent us. If you are not familiar with doxxing it is when someone puts up personal information about someone else, like their address, phone number and other personal information like that. While I was responding to this article I was doing some research about computer hacking to see how often and easy it was for someone to find this information about someone. I found an article about a 15 year old who hacked the pentagon beca...

3D printing is incredible. With a little bit of programming, anyone can print a plastic model of just about anything. The sky is the limit. But these 3D printers also have a lot of educational applications, especially in a math classroom. One of the great things you can do with a printer is make figures of 3D graphs. 3D graphs are nearly impossible to draw by hand, and students can have a hard time visualizing the graphs even with graphing software. But holding a figure of the graph in their hands gives students that extra dimension and they can really see what’s going on. Another thing you can do is create 3D figures to use as visuals when teaching about volume and surface area. You could create loaded dice and regular dice, then have students use probability to figure out which is which. Really the possibilities are endless.                 Recently, I found out about another advancement in 3D printing, whic...

I read an article about cell phones being used in the classroom. Though, all the articles I read mostly had cell phones being used as polling agents. Here is one of the articles I read http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/05/how-teachers-make-cell-phones-work-in-the-classroom/ . I have experienced cell phone use in a classroom when I observed a Geometry classroom. The teacher didn't not promote the use of cell phones, but if his students lacked a calculator he allowed them to use their cell phone. The only time he would not allow the students to use their cell phone is when they were getting to more trigonometry based criteria. The only reason he  wouldn't  allow them the use of their cell phones was that the accuracy of the sine function and cosine function are extremely off within the scientific calculator of a phone. I also experienced one within my Middle School Applications class this semester where we all took a poll with our phones. I was pretty excited to find a...

Recently, I got the chance to meet some wonderful 7th graders from Mickelson Middle School in Brookings, SD. I was very excited to meet with four girls to discuss reading for my Middle School Philosophy class that I am taking. At the end of our meeting, I got the chance to ask them some questions about middle school, and what they could change. Immediately, I made sure to ask them about the Digits Program that they are working with. I am familiar with the Digits Program mainly from observing the classes and tutoring some of the students. My first two years of college, I was required to observe 8th grade mathematics. As soon as I got to the class my first day, I was shocked at what I saw. Everything was technology base, EVERYTHING! The lesson that the teacher taught was on a smart board and through a program that provided a step by step lesson. The homework was all online. The tests were online. Even the analysis of the students at the beginning and end of the year was online. I don...

Last week in Math 371 we took some time to cover basic concepts regarding statistics. Dr. Vestal shed some light on a disturbing issue regarding some teachers in our area. She mentioned the week previous that teachers struggle to retain main statistics concepts, which leads to struggling to teach stats in a high school. It is easy to see how future teachers such as myself could forget such material. We are only required to take two stats classes as a math Ed major, both of which are usually taken as a freshman and sophomore. For that reason, she assigned our class to take some concepts from the “For Dummies” series, which involved our TI-nspire, to teach to the class in teams of two. We are still learning to effectively use the nspires but are becoming easier and easier to use as we use them more. It has been a couple years since I have had to work with any statistics based concepts so it was a good refresher for when I have to take the second level of Stats. I worked with Jessica and...

This week in class, as with many other weeks this semester (and the previous ones too) our class discussion has turned into a conversation and even somewhat of a debate about the benefits and conflicts of technology in education.  The great thing about these debates is that everyone contributes and we all have varying opinions.  One specific struggle that continually comes up and we face more and more each day, as math educators, is the challenging question: “When should and should I not use technology?” If anyone is looking for the answer, our class is not the place to find it.  However, we have learned new ways to consider the use of technology.  Through research, class discussions, evaluations of other teachers, and even self-reflection, we have learned which questions to ask ourselves before choosing to use technology.  For some people these questions come easier than for others, as do the answers.  Yet, for some of us, knowing the right question...

This week in Math 371, we spent our time revamping the app rubric survey made by the class a few years ago. We felt the old survey was a little vague and not all the questions applied to the specific type of app we might be reviewing. Our new survey includes a lot more branching than the original, since we wanted to make sure we were asking relevant question based on the kind of app. We now have separate sets of questions for apps that are games, resources or tools. While we easily agreed on the types of questions we wanted to ask, we had a tougher time wording our questions. We wanted to make sure our questions were worded as precisely as possible to avoid any confusion. This led to some lengthy discussion, but we finally created an outline of all the questions we want in our survey. Dr. Vestal is working on putting all of our questions into QuestionPro, and the only thing left for us to do is to decide how we want to score and weight each question. I can’t wait to see our final surv...

The assignment in Math 371 last week was for each student to review three iPad apps.  Below is a summary of each review, including the grade level, the function of the app, and whether or not the student would use it in his/her classroom.  One of their best comments was that they feel like the online iPad app rubric that the Math 371 class created 2 years ago needs to be modified.  So that is their homework for next week.  Stay tuned... Chad Blackwelder IQ Gym middle school to high school       This app was made to improve your mental math skills for the user. There are three main categories add/subtract, multiply and division, with three subcategories below each: Challenge, Survival, and time attack. It gets increasingly harder as you work through the levels, to a maximum of level 99 for each subcategory. No real goal other than to improve mental math.      I do not think I would use this app in the classroom. This...