Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

I sometimes forgot how young I actually am, and there are moments in my life where my age shows through. The other day it dawned on me that I am part of an exclusive group--a group is one that doesn’t remember the days before cellphones. I do not know when exactly cellphones were invented or became more attainable, but I do know that as long as I’ve been alive, they have been around. I also realized my lack of age talking to my mother. She starting talking about what I’m going to call a party landline. Essentially, your neighbors could hear your conversations if they picked up the phone while you were chatting with somebody else. I can’t imagine that: a life with no cellphones, not to mention life with a landline that’s not even exclusively your own. Not to mention, emails have also been around my entire life, but that’s pretty new as well. Back in the old days, where there were cars with carburetors, you had to send mail through the post office. I honestly do not even know how to se...

There has been a lot going on in the past couple weeks. Colleges and universities all over the U.S., as well as worldwide, have been closed. Public schools in 30 states, with the count continuously rising, have closed their doors. This leaves more than 50 million kids from elementary to high school at home without structure and sometimes supervision during the day. This can be so overwhelming to think about and I completely sympathize with peoples’ fears, but the way that teachers have responded and reacted gives me so much hope. Crises foster innovation. For teachers of a traditional learning classroom, online applications may have never been used. Teachers in schools without one-to-one access have rarely had to help students with using laptops or tablets. This can be seen as a hardship, or as an opportunity. Now is the time to develop the amazing technology that we have into our daily classrooms. Now is the time to learn the right and wrong ways to use ...

This topic is one that hits close to home for me, and it is one that I do not look forward to dealing with when I am a teacher. Before I go on I must admit that I am very guilty of being a letter chaser. A letter chaser is someone who goes to school with the mindset of putting more emphasis on getting an A rather than learning the material. After my four years of high school and now into my second year of college I have learned the power of learning instead of chasing the letter. From the very beginning of high school I was always told that A’s were the goal, and doing the extra work would pay off in the long run. Well this might be true, and I am not so naive to think that grades don’t play a factor in getting into colleges and other life impacting areas such as scholarships and awards. However, in this post I hope to give you a different mindset the next time you find yourself chasing the letter. Like I mentioned above, I am a letter chaser. I am your stereotypi...