Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

One of my goals this semester was to figure out ways to use AI as a helpful tool for teaching. As a result, my students have experimented with AI in both the Technology for STEM Educators course and the Assessment in STEM Education course. When it comes to lesson planning as a teacher, we need to be realistic. Teachers aren’t going to create detailed multi-page lesson plans for each course every day. And there will be some days that they will be stressed because they don’t have a plan for the next class period.  During these stressful times as a teacher, I think that it would be good to use AI to come up with a basic lesson plan. After exploring some AI tools, one of our favorites was Gemini . It isn’t one of the AI tools designed specifically for teachers, but it does a very good job when given explicit directions. We used it to create a detailed lesson plan and also discovered that it is great for creating rubrics for summative assessments, such as projects, presentations, or o...

Definition : A building thinking classroom helps change the way students are learning. Students are encouraged to learn and explore new techniques while being guided by a teacher. Students learn vertically on a whiteboard where they can erase problems and learn by proving definitions. This is mostly done in group work while changing groups f requently to work with different perspe ctives. The biggest kicker of this type of classroom is NO NOTES; there are barely any notes for students to take because they learn by doing or struggling through questions .   Pros: This approach to learning math presents a lot of positive areas of growth for students . For one, it encourages students to problem-solve and critically think as they work through unfami liar problems with little initial direction. It also gives students many opportunities to collaborate with classmates, and not just their friends. Switching up the learning groups allows students to see and share different methods for...

The way students learn is constantly changing , and teachers must be able to adapt to those changes. Just because your teaching style was effective last year doesn’t necessarily mean that it will carry over to the next year. As educators, we will have to continue developing our teaching skills and styles to become the best teachers we can. Thus, it’s time all teachers start looking into other options that may best help the ir students learn. So, we will talk about some of the options out there and explain t he benefits that go with each one .  One style of teaching that would benefit the classroom is a flipped classroom . According to Harvard University, a flipped classroom is when students cover the material by themselves before class . When the students get to class it opens lecture time for deeper intellectual discussions on the material, instead of spending most of the class in a lecture . Some of the benefits that a flipped classroom provides is that it allows stud...

  When people hear you are a math major, their response is usually along the lines of: “Wow, you like math? Good for you; I could never do that.”  We seem to be noticing, as time goes on, less and less enthusiasm for math. Often, this is not because of the content, but rather, because of the way that it is presented. In a research article by Jair J. Aguilar, “High School Students’ Reasons for disliking Mathematics: The Intersection Between Teacher’s Role and Student’s Emotions, Belief and Self-efficacy,” we see the statistic that out of 350 participating students in grades 11-12 from a school in northern Mexico, 21% said they disliked math because of a “lack of interest or apathy” in the subject matter. Is there a solution to this? What is a way that students can have an interest in the content and applications without actually changing the content itself? Well, one possible answer to this question is gamification.  What exactly is gamification? To put it simply, gamifica...

While I may not be a teacher yet, I know middle and high school students everywhere are always complaining about math. Students will constantly ask the questions: why are we doing this? Why is this important? When will I ever use this? And to be honest, these are questions that go through my head as well. With that said, it can sometimes be difficult to answer these questions depending on what’s being taught. I know that from this point on in my college career I will most likely never teach what I am learning. So, sometimes it can be hard to see the bigger picture and these students are feeling the exact same way. Many students will choose to not use math in their future careers. Therefore, they don’t understand why they should learn math beyond the basics. So, the real question is why is it important for all students to keep learning math and how do we respond to these tough questions?  The easiest way to respond to these students is to say that math isn’t always about math. Which...

When it comes to solving a math problem, there are several methods a student can implement that will yield the correct answer. Sometimes, while helping friends with their math problems, I like to wait until they finish the problem to confirm their answer matches mine. This approach gives allowance to the fact that we learned two different methods for solving that sort of problem. However, because I grasp the general principle that they are applying, I can often double-check their work even if the specific notation or order of steps is different than what I utilized. I have noticed that my understanding of general principles is not shared by all math students. This makes me question whether math teachers are teaching methods or principles to their students in the classroom. Many students struggle to solve a problem unless they are using the specific method they learned in the past because they do not understand the underlying principle behind the method. “As to methods, there may be...

Earlier this week I had the privilege of attending the South Dakota STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Ed ucation conference in Huron, SD. I attended the conference with an open mi ndset of learning a lot of new things, however, one session , “Teaching Math as a Languag e , ” left me questionin g .   The way the session opened was by comparing a math classroom to a language classroom. When he played the video of the language classroom, we were all a bit confused , as we had no idea what was going on . Later in the session, he presented an equation in slope form with a range of x -values.   He then asked for volunteers to read the equation aloud . T wo volunteers read the equati on differently. At this point, I was confused about why or how they could read the equation differently.   As a math education major, I adapted to the speech of math early on in life, but just like language class es , so me people cannot adapt or process the la...