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Graphing Technologies

I thought it was really interesting to navigate through Desmos and Geogebra. I have been through Desmos before but it was mainly doing the activities that other people have made. I did not know that you could do all those things with it. I thought Geogebra was similar but a little easier to navigate. I had no idea how much easier it can be with graphing points and solving equations with these websites. I really enjoyed exploring the different tools that they offer and seeing how I can use these to help students understand graphing.

I am a middle grades math major. I hope to teach grades 6-8 when I graduate. I think this will be a great tool to use when I start teaching in my own classroom. I already see Desmos being used in the class I am at this semester. The students will plug in values and see the scatterplots to predict or see the relationship between the variables. I think this is a great way to use Desmos so that you don’t have to draw all the points by hand. I think another way I will use it is when students need to graph equations. They can use Desmos or Geogebra to see how they can move the equation and what happens when you change the slope or y-intercept.

Lists and Statistics

I learned so much working with our calculator and Desmos to practice with lists and statistics. I had no idea how much our calculators could do. We worked with naming lists, looking at plots, and tables. I never knew how much Desmos could help with these things. I learned so much during this chapter because I am not super savvy with technology. I now know how to help students with these lists and statistics on the calculators that I didn’t know before.

I think these two technologies can help a lot with the topic we just went through in my TA class. We worked with mean, median, range, and mode. The calculator is a great way to plug in your values and you can see these values immediately. Desmos also works great because once you enter your list, you can type in what you are trying to find. We can also use these when we are working with box plots. We practiced this with our calculators and you can really see the relationships between the values.

I think using Desmos and calculators is a great tool for my 7th grade class. We can use these to solve these values faster. I know my kids know how to do this by hand, so if I mainly want them to see an overview or the main idea, this will be a great tool to use in the classroom.

Other TI-83/84 Features

We explored other features that the calculator offers. One thing I remember learning in high school was working with matrices. I remember kind of struggling at that and not really understanding how they work. In this class, I really got to practice all the features that come along with matrices. I thought it was interesting to see all the different types of math you can do with it. Plus, it really isn’t that hard to figure out! After all the practicing, I feel pretty confident in working with them.

We went through many different activities that we could use the calculator for. I think the one that I really liked was using it for probability. In my seventh grade class that I am in, we went through a probability unit and I think knowing this information could have been a great way to deliver a lesson. We could have simulated an experiment with a coin toss and really got to see the probability. This is something that I want to implement next time I have the opportunity.

Geometry Technologies

We used different types of tools to work with geometry. I had not used any of these sites to work with geometry before. I am pretty familiar with Desmos because my class at Midway uses that, but I was unsure how to incorporate geometry with it. I thought using Desmos was a little bit more challenging than the others. Geometer’s Sketchpad was a very interesting way that I had not seen before. I liked this tool because it was easy to follow along. I think Geogebra was the easiest to learn because it told me step by step how to make the certain shapes which allowed me to learn the site better.

I knew Desmos offered many different types of learning, but I did not know how to actually incorporate geometry. I now understand a little better how to work this. I had never used Geometer’s Sketchpad so all that is new to me. I learned a lot during that chapter and I think it is a very fun and interesting way to work with geometry.

I think that I could have implement this in my 7th grade class that I was teaching. Since I am a middle grades major, there are many ways to have fun with geometry with these resources. The students in these grades work with all different shapes to learn relationships. I would love to use Geometer’s Sketchpad to work with triangles and relationships between angles. I could have the students work with the sketchpad to show the relationships in polygons and their angles.

CAS Technologies

I got this type of calculator when I got to college so I was familiar with the graphing and calculating aspects of it. I did not know how to do the geometry and statistics part on this calculator. There were lots of things on this calculator that I never had to do with normal calculating.

Since I want to teach middle school, I think that this would be a great calculator show my students awesome techniques in math. I would love to use the geometry tool with my students to show students different polygons and their angles. I also love the graphing aspect on this calculator. You can add different graphs and see the relationships between them all on one screen. This would be a good way to show students how graphs are similar or different.

3-D and Graphing Technologies

I did not know all of the things that a TI-Nspire could do. I learned a lot about this calculator. I did not know that you could graph 2-D/3-D on this calculator. I think this would be a great tool to use in the classroom. I learned all new things on Geogebra’s 3-D graphing. I really enjoyed working with this feature. I thought it was very easy to follow.

Since I want to teach middle school, I think using these features would be a great way to practice and learn volume and surface area. With 7th graders, the students would be working with prisms and pyramids and I could use these features to model the relationships between them and the formula. I could also use 3-D circles to work with volume and circumference.

I really enjoyed learning about these different technologies. It provided me with many different tools to use in the classroom when I graduate.

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