Technology in Mathematics :: Education School

There are many different ideas as to how technologyshould be used in the numerical classroom of today.There are those who believe that students will not learn asmuch if they use technology such as computers andcalculators, and there are static others that believe thistechnology can benefit students if used in the proper way. after(prenominal) reading many articles on the use of technology in themathematical classroom, I have to agree with NCTMsTechnology dominion, which states that technology isessential in teaching and learning mathematics itinfluences the mathematics that is taught and enhancesstudents learning (Principles 24).What the Technology Principle is not saying that somemay interpret is that students will not have to learn howto solve problems on their own. The way I see it, the belief is telling us the very opposite of this. We allknow as future teachers and current students ourselves,that we must bring in the applications and why we do themto really understand mathema tics. In other words, wecannot just memorize the steps of application and plug itinto our calculator, but rather we must understand why thesteps were done and what our results mean. After thestudents have shown that they understand the material andapplications, the teacher may allow his or her students touse the calculator once the applications have becometedious for the students. For example, if we asked a assemblageof Calculus students to find the maximum of a line, wewould not expect them to graph the function by hand and tryto guess where the point is, we would instead leaven themto use their calculators to find the best estimate of thepoint. So, even in cases such as this, technology can beused to further demonstrate the abstract thought behind a problem.It may be the case that we want our students to work on theapplication, and then again it may be the case that we wantour students to be able to see what they are doing theapplication for. The only thing we really have to be careful of is not to let technology replace the fundamentalunderstandings and intuitions (Principles 25).Technology can be a great tool for teachingmathematics because we can show and manipulate visual formwith such programs as The Geometers Sketchpad and manyothers. Programs such as these help students to visualizeproblems, and can also help teachers better explain themathematical concepts. One of the questions we memorise a lotin mathematics is why? I can even remember teachersstruggling to answer these questions with their crudedrawings on the board or their wordy explanations.