Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

I am confident that I am well versed with technology at this point in my life.  I cannot say the same for my grandparents.  My grandparents on both sides of my family both struggle with technology in their daily lives.  My grandma does not have wifi, a laptop, or even a cell phone.  She is not interested in it at all.  My other grandparents have an early 2000s computer and a tablet, but do not have the knowledge to use it at an advanced level.  I am sure this is also the case in many families around the world.  I want to answer the question: Will the younger generation today stay up to date with technology for the rest of their lives? Technology is advancing at an exponential rate.  With the pandemic, technology has changed forever.  Not only has it advanced during this time, but new forms of technology have also been developed.  No one knows what technology is going to look like in 20+ years.   I have had teachers that used te...

  Recently, I had the opportunity to use and work with MATLAB for the first time.  MATLAB is a programming platform that is used to help aid in complex calculations that would otherwise be difficult to do by hand or some other method.  Because this was the first time that I had ever used this software, I was a little concerned on how well I would be able to navigate through the program in order to complete the tasks that my Linear Algebra professor had assigned us. The tasks that were asked of us were to perform different types of elementary row operations on a specific matrix in order to achieve the outcome desired.  First, we needed to define a matrix.  I should probably mention that, during class the day before, our professor went over some basics of MATLAB.  In this case, I was able to define the matrix rather easily because that was one of the things we went over in class.  Then, we were supposed to perform different operations on this matrix in o...

Last Tuesday at the beginning of the STEM Technology course, I tried to display the computer on the screen. I hit all the needed buttons and I tried other things, but it wouldn't work. Finally I emailed Classroom Technology Services and they came over and fixed it. Even better--the tech showed me what was wrong so I could look for that issue if I encountered the same problem in the future. On Wednesday I am in the same classroom for History of Math and I went to display the document camera on Zoom.  I followed all the steps that I used last semester, switched cameras multiple times, and it didn't work. After class I asked Dr. Larson if she had the same issue that morning in her class, and she did. I think it may have worked on Friday, but I am not convinced. So this is a blogpost for the technology class--why would I be negative in this post? I am not trying to be negative, but rather I am being realistic. Technology isn't going to work perfectly every time we use it so we ...