Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

I always get the privilege of writing the last #Math371 blog post of the semester. I like to reflect on what I have learned while teaching this course that semester. While I will do some of that, I will also reflect on things the students have shared throughout the semester. For the past 2 years, I have asked the #Math371 students to create a Desmos Activity Builder. This year I decided to make that task more formal and give them a list of items that needed to be included in their activity. I got feedback on the activity before I assigned it from Mark Kreie, Brookings High School math teacher. He was very helpful and offered great suggestions. I feel like this was one of the most successful assignments this semester. The students did a great job and many of them are now excited about using Desmos in their classroom. After they created their activity, they also had to reflect on the experience. Here are a few excerpts from journal entries: I think it would be good to use this as an i...

This is the age-old question that all mathematics educators have been faced with. They might not have referred to the modern-day calculator but rather an equivalent item of assistance for the era. In fact, in early mathematical history, the abacus was used to aid in calculation. Eventually, we had the slide rule, then the handheld calculator, and now we all have calculation apps embedded into our smartphones. All these tools have made mathematical calculations easier. If they were never allowed, how many mathematical discoveries would still be undiscovered? This being said, there are pros and cons to allowing calculators in our classroom. One of the main advantages to implementing calculators in the classroom is that it allows for students to solve more advanced problems. Online graphing calculators such as Desmos and GeoGebra, are quite powerful   tools. There are so many ways to implement sites like these to allow students to explore different aspects of graphs. GeoGebra is es...

       As a future educator, there are a lot of things I am learning that are important in the teaching world that I never really thought about before. One of them is grading, and relating to that, homework and assignments. A teacher's job and goal is to help their students. Help them learn and achieve their goals in the class. The way we assess their progress is through grades. So a big question is, what type of homework should teachers give so that the grades reflect student progress?      When I was considering this question, I thought back to assignments I had in high school. Some teachers would load us up with homework that wasn't very meaningful, but it was worth a large part of our grade. We did whatever we had to do to get it finished. This means our grades probably didn't reflect how well we learned the material. But then I thought of the stimulating research projects I did in an AP English class and writing the research paper for that. The pa...

by Halle Gronlund           With the use of online homework, zoom, online instruction, and social media, the world of education has turned to the use of technology during this unprecedented time. At the start of the pandemic, we had no other option than to turn to technology to help us continue learning and teaching. We would have struggled without our current advancements. Now with students waking up 2 minutes before class, lying in bed during class, and cheating through online homework, it begs the question: “Are students lazier because of this technology?” As we navigate our way back to a “normal” post-pandemic world in the next few months, we will see the effects of the pandemic in our education.      Technology has not always been a controversial topic in education. We talk to our parents and there was no such thing as cheating or online homework when they went to school. They didn’t have the websites to look up a problem when they go...

       Technology surrounds us every day. The smartwatch on our wrists, the phone in our hands, the laptop we complete homework on, the washing machine and dryer used to do laundry, and even the coffee machine used every morning to give us caffeine boosts are all considered technology. According to, “How many devices will you use in your life,” by WebFix, the average American lives to be 79 years old and will have 43.9 phones, 15.8-26.3 laptops, 7.7-17.2 TVs, and 13.2 coffee makers. As you can tell technology is taking the world by storm.      Relating this to my Technology for STEM class, it makes me wonder is there too much technology in the classroom? Or maybe a better question is, is there such a thing as too much technology in the classroom? In my opinion, there are benefits and downfalls to technology in the classroom, but is there  a fine line of too much technology?      Starting positively, there are billions of resourses a...

As I was thinking about what to blog this week, my mind kept coming back to a topic we talk about a lot in our pedagogy classes: homework in the math classroom. In middle and high school, the majority of my homework assignments were simply 2-40 even or something similar to that. Although they weren’t extremely long, it still felt like I was just doing extra problems for no reason. Eventually, there was more of a variety, but I still didn’t really know why I had to do that much homework since it was just a completion grade anyway. I tutor a student in Algebra I, and the review assignment for their first test was literally 80 questions long! Yes, it was review and they had a few days to complete it, but that is outrageous! The assignments have gotten shorter as the year has gone by, but he still has 30-40 problem assignments to do for every class period. Now why am I talking about homework in a blogpost that should be dedicated to technology? Well, this week we learned about different ...

               As a third-year math education major at South Dakota State, math exams have been on my plate since I started my post high school education. As this week ends, I just finished two exams over the course of the week, so as you could imagine I did my fair share of studying this week. I have never been great at studying nor have I ever enjoyed it. I thought to myself, “how can I make this experience easier for my students?” As time passes and technology gets more innovative, the cluster and sheer number of options for our students to utilize while studying can become overwhelming. Being a student in a time of such rapid growth in technology has shown me firsthand how exhausting it can be to siphon through it all.             Studying is one of the aspects that the teacher doesn’t have nearly as much control over. It is the responsibility of the student to put in the appropriate...

     Technology has become even more prevalent in education in the past year in ways that we may have never imagined it to.     In February 2020, if you had told me or any of my classmates that one month later the only way we would be able to attend class would be virtually, we probably would’ve thought you were crazy.     However, COVID-19 managed to make that crazy thought a reality.     One day we were leaving for spring break, a week later we’re told that we get an “extra week of spring break,” and then the next week we’re told that the university, along with every other school in the country, would not be holding face-to-face classes for the rest of the semester.     All of our class meetings were now held over Zoom, discussion posts became the one of the only ways of communicating with our peers, and all of our assignments were turned in using technology.     I was one of the “lucky” ones.     My adjustment...

                With the plethora of technology that is available to educators, it is quite daunting to be held responsible for implementing the best products into one’s classroom. It seems like everyday more and more software flashes across the screen with a new twist claiming this development will be the one tool that will launch your students into success never dreamt before. Then, there is the situation of being reluctant to envelop any new technology since the techniques and teaching styles being used now are already proving to be effective. What is the right move? What is the right course of action to take in this age where technology is calling the shots? Before that question is answered, let me share a thought that I have frequently. For a while, I have been keeping mental notes of what the supposed “best” way to distribute and share mathematical course material is. Here are some of the main contenders: SmartBoard, generic whiteboar...

After my classmates and I shared different educational apps with each other in our Technology for STEM Educators class this week, there seemed to be a common theme running with almost half of them.   While a few of the apps were amplifiers that consisted primarily of creating more effective and efficient ways for students to learn and grow, many were just apps that churn out answers for students. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of apps that solve equations for students who need only to take a picture of their problem without putting forth any effort. These apps pose a problem for educators and make assigning homework and evaluating students a challenge. Cheating has always been and always will be something students find a way to accomplish whether it be with homework, tests, or quizzes, and these apps make it so easy that even kids who may not have cheated before will use it. These apps and other related software have become so commonplace that even social medi...

      The Spring 2020 semester started and I'm sure many educators thought that it was going to be another regular semester. Oh they could not have been more wrong. As we all know from experience, COVID-19 hit the world by storm and flipped most lives upside down. Educators were not immune to this struggle at all. Teachers all over frantically figured out how to work ZOOM and post lectures and online content so their students could receive the education they need. That semester could not have gone worse for most teachers.      While this time of struggle was not enjoyable for many, it did bring out some creative and innovative ways to get students to learn away from the school classroom setting. During this time teachers were able to figure out how to record lectures so students could see what was taught even if they weren't in class. On top of that, ZOOM allowed for students to attend live class and have real life/time experiences with their teachers while...

I am confident that I am well versed with technology at this point in my life.  I cannot say the same for my grandparents.  My grandparents on both sides of my family both struggle with technology in their daily lives.  My grandma does not have wifi, a laptop, or even a cell phone.  She is not interested in it at all.  My other grandparents have an early 2000s computer and a tablet, but do not have the knowledge to use it at an advanced level.  I am sure this is also the case in many families around the world.  I want to answer the question: Will the younger generation today stay up to date with technology for the rest of their lives? Technology is advancing at an exponential rate.  With the pandemic, technology has changed forever.  Not only has it advanced during this time, but new forms of technology have also been developed.  No one knows what technology is going to look like in 20+ years.   I have had teachers that used te...

  Recently, I had the opportunity to use and work with MATLAB for the first time.  MATLAB is a programming platform that is used to help aid in complex calculations that would otherwise be difficult to do by hand or some other method.  Because this was the first time that I had ever used this software, I was a little concerned on how well I would be able to navigate through the program in order to complete the tasks that my Linear Algebra professor had assigned us. The tasks that were asked of us were to perform different types of elementary row operations on a specific matrix in order to achieve the outcome desired.  First, we needed to define a matrix.  I should probably mention that, during class the day before, our professor went over some basics of MATLAB.  In this case, I was able to define the matrix rather easily because that was one of the things we went over in class.  Then, we were supposed to perform different operations on this matrix in o...

Last Tuesday at the beginning of the STEM Technology course, I tried to display the computer on the screen. I hit all the needed buttons and I tried other things, but it wouldn't work. Finally I emailed Classroom Technology Services and they came over and fixed it. Even better--the tech showed me what was wrong so I could look for that issue if I encountered the same problem in the future. On Wednesday I am in the same classroom for History of Math and I went to display the document camera on Zoom.  I followed all the steps that I used last semester, switched cameras multiple times, and it didn't work. After class I asked Dr. Larson if she had the same issue that morning in her class, and she did. I think it may have worked on Friday, but I am not convinced. So this is a blogpost for the technology class--why would I be negative in this post? I am not trying to be negative, but rather I am being realistic. Technology isn't going to work perfectly every time we use it so we ...