Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

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...