Reflection Week 5: My attitude towards technology in mathematics

Before I was in this class, I remember all of the great ideas and strategies that I was planning on using in my future classroom in order to make it successful for my students. I planned on having fun activities for my students which would allow them to work together in small groups. I also planned on not lecturing all of the time, and allowing my students to come up with their own ideas on certain topics in ways that they learned them best. Although I still plan on using these same strategies in the next year or two when I am in the classroom, I have also came to the point where I think using technology in future math classroom will be very beneficial to my students as well.

Before I entered this class, I had never considered using technology too much, and even the first few weeks of class I really was not taking it into consideration. But after hearing some of our online meetings with teachers that are currently in the classroom today, I have began to change my mind about technology. I am not saying that I think technology should be used every single day in the classroom, and should take the place of other teaching strategies (lecturing, group work, student led activities), but I think that it should have some part of the learning process in the classroom. I felt like Mr. Pinkerton had a good grasp of how to use technology in math, and it seemed like he understood how his students were going to handle the use of this technology. He understood that every one of his students may not benefit from it, but he also realized that some of his students that were not benefiting from normal classroom strategies that he was using would benefit from seeing how math can be used through certain technology.

So after five weeks in this class, I am currently thinking that I will use technology a few times a month when it comes to the whole class using technology, and allowing them to complete activities that they would enjoy on these computer programs. I think that it needs to be something that is student led, and is fun for them as well. I think a lot of times we try to keep students in a box way too much, and I think allowing students to use technology is a great time to just let them loose a little bit so that they can learn and explore the way that feels most natural to them! Hopefully this will allow them to grasp something about mathematics that they never would have understood in a normal classroom setting!