Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

I always get the privilege of writing the last #Math371 blog post of the semester. I like to reflect on what I have learned while teaching this course that semester. While I will do some of that, I will also reflect on things the students have shared throughout the semester. For the past 2 years, I have asked the #Math371 students to create a Desmos Activity Builder. This year I decided to make that task more formal and give them a list of items that needed to be included in their activity. I got feedback on the activity before I assigned it from Mark Kreie, Brookings High School math teacher. He was very helpful and offered great suggestions. I feel like this was one of the most successful assignments this semester. The students did a great job and many of them are now excited about using Desmos in their classroom. After they created their activity, they also had to reflect on the experience. Here are a few excerpts from journal entries: I think it would be good to use this as an i...

This is the age-old question that all mathematics educators have been faced with. They might not have referred to the modern-day calculator but rather an equivalent item of assistance for the era. In fact, in early mathematical history, the abacus was used to aid in calculation. Eventually, we had the slide rule, then the handheld calculator, and now we all have calculation apps embedded into our smartphones. All these tools have made mathematical calculations easier. If they were never allowed, how many mathematical discoveries would still be undiscovered? This being said, there are pros and cons to allowing calculators in our classroom. One of the main advantages to implementing calculators in the classroom is that it allows for students to solve more advanced problems. Online graphing calculators such as Desmos and GeoGebra, are quite powerful   tools. There are so many ways to implement sites like these to allow students to explore different aspects of graphs. GeoGebra is es...

       As a future educator, there are a lot of things I am learning that are important in the teaching world that I never really thought about before. One of them is grading, and relating to that, homework and assignments. A teacher's job and goal is to help their students. Help them learn and achieve their goals in the class. The way we assess their progress is through grades. So a big question is, what type of homework should teachers give so that the grades reflect student progress?      When I was considering this question, I thought back to assignments I had in high school. Some teachers would load us up with homework that wasn't very meaningful, but it was worth a large part of our grade. We did whatever we had to do to get it finished. This means our grades probably didn't reflect how well we learned the material. But then I thought of the stimulating research projects I did in an AP English class and writing the research paper for that. The pa...

by Halle Gronlund           With the use of online homework, zoom, online instruction, and social media, the world of education has turned to the use of technology during this unprecedented time. At the start of the pandemic, we had no other option than to turn to technology to help us continue learning and teaching. We would have struggled without our current advancements. Now with students waking up 2 minutes before class, lying in bed during class, and cheating through online homework, it begs the question: “Are students lazier because of this technology?” As we navigate our way back to a “normal” post-pandemic world in the next few months, we will see the effects of the pandemic in our education.      Technology has not always been a controversial topic in education. We talk to our parents and there was no such thing as cheating or online homework when they went to school. They didn’t have the websites to look up a problem when they go...

       Technology surrounds us every day. The smartwatch on our wrists, the phone in our hands, the laptop we complete homework on, the washing machine and dryer used to do laundry, and even the coffee machine used every morning to give us caffeine boosts are all considered technology. According to, “How many devices will you use in your life,” by WebFix, the average American lives to be 79 years old and will have 43.9 phones, 15.8-26.3 laptops, 7.7-17.2 TVs, and 13.2 coffee makers. As you can tell technology is taking the world by storm.      Relating this to my Technology for STEM class, it makes me wonder is there too much technology in the classroom? Or maybe a better question is, is there such a thing as too much technology in the classroom? In my opinion, there are benefits and downfalls to technology in the classroom, but is there  a fine line of too much technology?      Starting positively, there are billions of resourses a...

As I was thinking about what to blog this week, my mind kept coming back to a topic we talk about a lot in our pedagogy classes: homework in the math classroom. In middle and high school, the majority of my homework assignments were simply 2-40 even or something similar to that. Although they weren’t extremely long, it still felt like I was just doing extra problems for no reason. Eventually, there was more of a variety, but I still didn’t really know why I had to do that much homework since it was just a completion grade anyway. I tutor a student in Algebra I, and the review assignment for their first test was literally 80 questions long! Yes, it was review and they had a few days to complete it, but that is outrageous! The assignments have gotten shorter as the year has gone by, but he still has 30-40 problem assignments to do for every class period. Now why am I talking about homework in a blogpost that should be dedicated to technology? Well, this week we learned about different ...

               As a third-year math education major at South Dakota State, math exams have been on my plate since I started my post high school education. As this week ends, I just finished two exams over the course of the week, so as you could imagine I did my fair share of studying this week. I have never been great at studying nor have I ever enjoyed it. I thought to myself, “how can I make this experience easier for my students?” As time passes and technology gets more innovative, the cluster and sheer number of options for our students to utilize while studying can become overwhelming. Being a student in a time of such rapid growth in technology has shown me firsthand how exhausting it can be to siphon through it all.             Studying is one of the aspects that the teacher doesn’t have nearly as much control over. It is the responsibility of the student to put in the appropriate...