Implementing Graphing Technology in the Classroom

Halfway through my student teaching experience, I was forced to implement graphing technology into the classroom. We started topics such as quadractic inequalities, absolute value inequalities, and radical equations which graphing calculators are necessary to fully teach the unit. I realized I was not comfortable with the graphing calculator and did some research on the importance of the integration of technology into the mathematics classroom. I read the article “The Role of Graphing Calculators in Mathematics Reform” by Bert Waits and Franklin Demana (1998) to gain knowledge on the topic.

The most interesting part of this article is that it was written almost ten years ago. In Waits and Deamana’s closing paragraph they state “it is clear to us that ten or fifteen years in the future the mathematics curriculum of today will have changed considerably to take full advantage of just the technology that exists today.” In my opinion, the authors’ prediction of the mathematics curriculum was correct. It today’s classroom, graphing calculators are used almost everyday and readily available to the students. For example in my placement, each student owns their own calculator and in addition each classroom has a set of roughly ten calculators that the students’ may borrow. There is a television screen in each of the mathematics classroom that displays the screen of the teachers’ calculator. Thus, students are actively learning how to use the calculator correct. Additionally, there are large posters of the calculators with the buttons labeled so that the educator can teach the students the navigation of the graphing technology. Waits and Demana were also correct when they considered professional development a key factor in implementing technology in a classroom. In another example referring to my placement, staff development day at the start of the school year a workshop on the latest Texas Instrument graphing calculator called TI-Nspire was held.

In conclusion, I think Waits and Demana approach to integrating the graphing calculator into the traditional mathematics curriculum is beneficial to the students’ learning and a similar approach can be seen in the various classrooms today. Waits and Demana were correct in their thought process, just a little ahead of the rest of society.