IEP

Technology and Math go together like peanut butter and jelly. However, there is a very real danger that you can overuse technology in mathematics to the point that students will understand the programs they are using but not the concepts. Since that is the case, math teachers are constantly striving to find the appropriate level of technology in the classroom. In my modest experience, I found that technology is best suited to reinforce most concepts in Algebra but can be used quite effectively to discover concepts in Geometry.

I think the students really enjoyed using Geometer's Sketchpad. We did several lessons with this program and I found them to be quite insightful for a large majority of the Geometry class. I had used this program in my college geometry class, however, the univeristy uses a very outdated version of the program so I had to do quite a bit of work to get myself to a place where I felt comfortable teaching it to students. I did find it very rewarding and I've picked two of my favorite lessons to show you here: Finding Euler's Line and Critical Thinking Word Problems.

In Algebra, we used the TI - 84 Graphing Calculator. I had never really used this model of TI but I have used other models pretty extensively. I found that my experience with the other models made learning the 84 pretty intuitive. And since most high school and college students rely heavily on these, I thought I should include two lessons with these: Matrices and Graphing Parabolas.

We also used the Green Globs program a number of times. I had never used this program before but I found that it was great at reinforcing ideas. This program is an extensive graphing program that includes games and puzzles. This is the type of program that a teacher could lose their students in if they used it too often. We stayed away from the games but used the graphing programs in Graphing Parabolas and Circles and Graphing Ellipses and Hyperbolas.