Technology and Mathematics

Fact or fiction?: 

The greatest advantage of using technology in the math classroom is learning to apply it in real-life situations and to be able to interpret the answer.

Math teachers often use PowerPoint presentations and graphing calculators as useful tools to have a better understanding of movement problems in Calculus. The use of PowerPoint presentations and graphic calculators enriches the teaching-learning process of topics from Calculus (i.e. effects on the graph of exponential and logarithmic functions). Most teachers reveal that even though the use of these resources requires extra class prep time, there are important time savings during class and presentations are more organized.

The main disadvantage of using technology in the math teaching-learning process is that students seem to get caught in the mechanical part to get the results and not on the interpretation of the results. This means that students don’t learn to apply math to real-life situations and are not able to interpret the answer.

Testimonial of a high school level calculus teacher from Santa Catarina, Mexico:

They know how to find the derivative for the cost function, and they might remember that it’s called the marginal cost, and they could actually get the derivative using any software and even graph it, but they might not know that actually evaluating a value on the derivative represents the cost for an additional unit to be produced.