Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

For quite some time, I have thought about how I will be able to engage my students in learning. It seems that many students do not want to participate or try in math classes because of one reason or another. Too often I hear people say that they are "just not good at math" or that they cannot "do math" because their parents were not good at it. I want to make sure my students do not have that mindset. To me, it seems that there is a difference in the way people think about math versus other subjects. In my experience, people believe that there are two types of students: those who can do math and those who cannot. Of course, I do not believe this. I believe that everyone can "do math" as long as they put some effort into it. Whenever I think about the different learning styles and when people say that math is not their subject, I think about how it's different than other subjects. Math is just another subject in school. Sure it has to deal with number...

   Wow! Looking at the Common Core Standards there is a lot of "stuff" that we are going to be required to teach our students in a short amount of time. In some schools, teachers will be required to teach twice the amount of information in the same amount of time that they were given before the new standards. On top of having more to cover in the same amount of time, we will be evaluated on how well our students do on the Smarter Balance test that covers the Common Core Standards. It is quite overwhelming! In this blog, I am going to talk about some of the things I am worried about with the standards, and some of the reasons why I am glad we are all switching to common standards.    First of all, I will talk briefly about what I am worried about with the new standards. Like many, I am worried about not having enough time to teach everything, and I don't want to have to make the decision to leave something out when everything is equally important. There ar...

     So I googled "math education" to see if any interesting blogs popped up, and honestly I was surprised. There were so many instant results that simply criticized  math education and didn't offer any realistic solution. The first one I read I couldn't even finish, it referred to math as soul crushing and I just couldn't keep reading that article.      The next article I read wasn't quite so, let's say 'mean spirited' toward math education but still highly critical. Here's the link: http://www.computerbasedmath.org/  . On the FAQs page it talks about how as teachers we only teach "computing" and not enough mathematical thinking, they suggest using computers to replace the hand calculations. But they do not take into account that computers, calculators, or any other technology that solves math for a student doesn't help them understand the "mathematical thinking" for that question.      The article suggests that l...

In this article by Howard Pitler, he shares data gathered by McREL, which has a classroom tool called Power Walkthrough.  They gathered information from more than 60,000 classrooms that use this tool.  They went into classrooms to see what kinds of technology were being used and how often they were used by both teachers and students.  Graphing calculators, interactive whiteboards, document cameras, online software, and many other similar technologies were recorded.  If any of these technologies were used even briefly, they recorded the classroom as having used technology.  Their studies revealed that in 63 percent of their observations of teachers, no technology was utilized.  This number increased to 73 percent for students utilizing no technology. In an era where emphasis has been put into using technology to educate our students, these numbers seem appalling.  In many of these situations, the teachers had easy access to use technology.  ...

The article "Whiteboards for Dummies" was very interesting because I did not know that there was that many things you could do with an interactive whiteboard.  The teacher in the article plays a game with his students where they get to throw a koosh ball at the board and then questions pop up when they hit certain objects.  He uses this to help them with their vocab words.  I think this is a great way for his students to actively learn in his classroom.  It makes learning fun and interactive and the technology is used to it's full potential.  Sometimes technology can hinder the learning process if it is used incorrectly, and this activity definitely does the opposite.  The students get more engaged because this is a complete new way of learning their vocab words other than the standard way of  writing them down and defining them.   The students get to associate images with the words and get asked questions about each word.  The article also a...