Week 7 Reflection: Geogebra

Before this week, I had only used Geogebra in MATHS 202 to do a few small activities. After this week, I can see how this program would be very beneficial for middle and high school students. I really liked using this program because it allows students to see how beneficial it is to see certain shapes and polygons, but Geogebra is special because it also allows students to understand certain algebraic qualities that these geometric figures have by displaying the slopes and equations that these figures have. I really thought that Elizabeth and Ashley did an excellent job writing a module that allowed us to slowly get used to the program by doing simple operations before we dove into more difficult operations. I also thought it was really cool how Geogebra used sliders to show certain qualities of functions because it would allow students to have a much deeper understanding of how certain variables of equations of functions can change the graphs of a function depending on its numeric value. The only thing that I observed that would make this program a little bit more difficult to use especially at the middle school level is that the instructions for this module tended to be somewhat lengthy which may give middle school teachers a headache when trying to keep students focused on these activities. As far as high school students, I think that they would pick up what is going on very quickly. Overall, I was very impressed with the detail and organization of this module, as well as the program that was being used.