Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

Anyone who has ever taken a math class (especially at a college level) is aware the calculators are a very contentious topic. Should students be allowed to use them? Are they a crutch? Would they be allowed to use them in the “real world”? Some teachers allow only scientific calculators with the most basic operations. Others have an “anything goes” policy, letting powerful TI-Nspires into the classroom. Others still ban them entirely, requiring everything be done by hand. Since I will have to make the same call some day as a teacher of mathematics, the issue of calculators is one close to my heart.  When I was in high school, I remember being allowed to use calculators and even being required to buy a graphing calculator (I want to say it was the TI-84 that was the most current model at the time). I also distinctly remember resenting these calculators because I had no idea how to use mine. Once I got to college, some of my professors actually took the time to show us how to ...

            Khan Academy was implemented by nine study sites (20 schools) and a research brief was done on three of these nine sites. Khan Academy is a website which includes instructional videos on math, economics, history, and art. The teachers at the study sites used Khan Academy to review material and work through the problem sets on the Khan Academy website. Some of the teachers use Khan Academy for a reversed classroom setting, where the students learn the concepts at hoe work through the problems themselves and come to class with questions. The students said that using Khan Academy helped get immediate feedback, filled in gaps of past instruction, the students started holding themselves accountable for their performance, and allowed teachers to spend more time assisting individual students. At one of the sites, during the first year of the study students were spending about 22% of their instructional time on the Khan Academy activities, but dur...

As educators and students, we hear all of these warnings about copyright, but how much can it really hurt us? I mean how many times have we actually heard of schools getting in trouble for copyright? Recently in class, we had a discussion about copyright. We went on and on about how it is bad, but with every bad, there was an exception for it to be okay. This is such a vague concept that it is hard to take too seriously. What is considered proper for educational use? What websites can we use in class? How is the proper way to have your students read an article that you, as an educator, think is appropriate? I was left with so many questions that couldn't even be answered, because of all of the exceptions. It is also hard for me to take this to seriously, because throughout my educational career, almost all my teachers would copyright. Most of the time they didn't even realize that they were doing it. I have educators that constantly copyright. Have they heard these long talks a...

It is no secret that technology is taking over this world, but are we getting too comfortable with what we put on the internet. Last week in our technology for teachers class, out professor asked us to Google our names and see what comes up. It was startling to see what came up when I did that. I ask whoever is reading this to do the same and the results may surprise you as they did me. In this day and age we do not realize what we are putting up on the web for everyone to see. We had an assignment earlier this week to respond to this doxxing article Dr. Vestal sent us. If you are not familiar with doxxing it is when someone puts up personal information about someone else, like their address, phone number and other personal information like that. While I was responding to this article I was doing some research about computer hacking to see how often and easy it was for someone to find this information about someone. I found an article about a 15 year old who hacked the pentagon beca...