Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

In Math 371 we spent the day working with Excel and showing its uses in the math classroom particularly with statistics. From working with it, I realize Excel does have quite a few uses in the math classroom setting. We spent time working with the probability and statistics section which worked quite well especially for calculating average, median, mode and all sorts of other types of statistical data. It also had a variety of different charts useful to plotting data. Another uses of Excel is the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet allows students to create formulas that are useful for data. The students can just develop an equation and then copy and paste to put different values into it which make it easy to solve equations. However as a teacher, it is much more useful for students to solve equations themselves and when equations are used it is much more useful to see the graph which Excel cannot do.  This is one of the major reasons I find GeoGebra to be a better tool for a tea...

Last week in Math 371 we got the opportunity to practice with a SMARTboard and a Promethean board. We were able to take turns, try new things, and teach each other useful techniques. One beneficial trick that one of the students taught the rest of the class was a quick way to erase the SMARTboard. If you take the eraser and make a circle around what you desire to erase and simply touch inside the circle it disappears. When working with the Promethean board the toughest part is writing on the pad because you can only see what you’re writing on the Promethean board. Overall as the class worked more and more with the boards it was clear that everyone slowly became more comfortable using them. Over the course of this semester that seems to be the theme with all the technology the more you work with it the more you perfect it.   While we were practicing with the boards we discussed amongst each other about using these devices in the classroom. One thing that we all agreed o...

I was forced to join Twitter in May 2012 to attend a conference sponsored by South Dakota EPSCoR called Science: Becoming the Messenger, funded by NSF.   I was very skeptical about Twitter and slightly annoyed that I HAD to join.   Now I feel that it was one of the best things that I have done for my professional life.   I have only tweeted 757 times in 22 months, slightly more than once a day.   My tweets definitely are sent in spurts, when I have time to spend on Twitter and read others’ tweets.   I am currently following 401 people, including friends, family, and educators.   The last group is the largest and contains a variety of individuals, most of who are interested in mathematics, education, technology or some combination of those.   I am up to 178 followers, which isn’t a lot in comparison to others, but the number is increasing weekly.   I want to discuss a couple of great experiences that I have had because of Twitter and the...

Last week in Math 371, we looked at our Desmos creations and talked about how to use GeoGebra in different ways in our lessons.  First, a little explanation about our Desmos assignment: We were asked to create a picture using Desmos, an online graphing site. For my picture I made something basic, a house. It was made with straight lines and one circle for a doorknob. I settled on a house after my many attempts at creating more creative pictures failed. The time it took me to complete this assignment, including time tinkering with the site’s many features, my numerous attempts at other pictures, and the completion of my final picture, took me somewhere in the vicinity of three hours. Later we talked about using GeoGebra, a free graphing program, to help enhance our lessons for future classes. For this assignment we were asked to keep the emphasis on topics covered in probability and statistics. For my example, I used GeoGebra’s spreadsheet application to show that the p...