Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

This week in Math 371 we concentrated on cyber-bullying and teaching mathematics in a classroom with technology. First, we talked about cyber-bullying, and as a teacher how we would deal with cyber-bullying. Since cyber-bullying usually happens at home it is difficult for a teacher to try and handle the situation. A lot of good ideas on how to handle cyber-bullying were mentioned, such as telling the parents if you see it happening or even talking to the one being bullied, or the bully. Sometimes telling the parents is not as effective as we would like. One of the article's for reading this week talked about parents that were bullying a young girl on their block because their daughter and the girl had a falling out. The parents bullied this young girl so much she committed suicide. Half the kids that are cyber-bullied are bullied in schools as well. It is important as a teacher to know what bullying looks like and to report it if we see it happening. We also talked about teachi...

As technology advances, students cling to the resources they can use in the classroom.   In high school, I rarely used a computer and filled countless notebooks for my classes.   Nowadays, students use laptops, iPads, and Chrome books for school related activities.   This week’s discussion was primarily focused on the use of graphing calculators in math classes.   Should students be allowed to use their graphing calculators whenever they desire or restrict their usage to ensure quality education?             In the first article, “Why the graphing calculator still matters in an iPad world?” was written in 2011 and discussed the use of graphing calculators compared to iPads.   Lucas Allen provides strong evidence that graphing calculators are better for students and teachers.   The main producers of graphing calculators, Texas Instruments, provide workshops for teachers so they know how to use the...

"Flipped Instruction" is a term I had just recently heard about (thanks to our Geometry class last semester) and something that teachers have started introducing into the classroom in the past five or six years. After reading "The Flipped Classroom" by Bill Tucker in the Education Next online journal, it was clear to me just how new this idea is. It came from two high school Chemistry teachers as they were having trouble reteaching lessons to students who had missed class. They started by posting videos for review of each day's lesson. Soon, they learned that not only were absent students watching the videos, but also many of the students that had sat through the lesson already needed just a second glance for reinforcement and practice on their homework. (By the way, the cost of the very first software program to do such a thing was only $50 for the teachers). This new idea turned into a whole new teaching style for these teachers. Instead of standing in front ...

Today’s technology has reached unprecedented heights. There are mobile devices that can access the internet almost anywhere and countless numbers of apps. One device that has come a long way through the years is the calculator. There are many different types of calculators, and each one varies in power and what it can do. Some are very basic and can only do the four basic math operations; add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Yet others can do derivatives, integrals, matrices, three-dimensional graphing, and many more. One of the more powerful calculators is the TI nspire CX CAS . This calculator features a backlit 16-bit color display with 100MB of storage. It even has the ability to do programming. It could do just about anything a student would need of a calculator, and potentially a lot more. But many classrooms are not allowing the use of calculators, at least in specific situations. So let’s take a quick look at a few of the pros and cons involving calculator use in the class...