Interactivity #5

The teacher I interviewed is an Algebra I and Algebra II teacher in Newton Public Schools.  When asked about the use of technology in the classroom the teacher did not seem extremely thrilled about the idea, but admits that the smart board has been a nice addition to the classroom because it is very useful when proving and working out problems on the board.  The teacher also admitted that NETS-S and NETS-T standards are a new concept because though the school does encourage the use of technology in the classroom, the NETS standards are not stressed.  He agrees that the first standard is important in mathematics because using graphic visuals to visualize a function can be very beneficial and help the students to better understand the curves and slopes of functions.  If the students can visualize these functions at a young age, they will have an easier time with more advanced levels of mathematics such as calculus when they will need to find the areas under these curves.  On the other hand, he like most math teachers feels that if the students use calculators too often they will become dependant on the calculators and not be able to the math on their own.

He also agrees that the other standards are important because they deal with analyzing data and being able to effectively collect that data, graph the data, and then analyze what the data tells us and report results.  Graphing is an important tool in a mathematical classroom, and he agrees is something that he could incorporate more into the lesson.  I tell him that there are a lot of different technological tools that make graphing easy, and remind him that graphing using these technological tools will allow the students to make more accurate graphs and be able to much more accurately analyze the data they are working with.  Practice using these tools will also help students in the future if they take any statistic or data analysis classes.   These skills are extremely important in today’s society and will make these students better citizens in the future, which is of course one of the main points of education.

Something important that I believe came from our conversation is that these technological tools are not always a crutch to students, but they can be used as important educational tools on which the students can build and gain a better understanding of mathematics.

You can view the changed to my Lesson Plan in Google Docs at 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoktAYMszf1ndFRqVnRBamV4aXVXOFJwLUxlbHFzalE