Guidlines for Appropriate Uses of Technology in Mathematics.

The first 5 guidlines are taken from the article "Promoting Appropriate Uses of Technology".
Click the link to see an in-depth explanation of the default 5 guidelines.

1. Introduce Technology in Context
2. Address Worthwhile Mathematics with Appropriate Pedagogy
3. Take Advantage of Technology
4. Conect Mathematics Topics
5. Incorporate Multiple Representations

These are some guidelines that I came up with to supplement the original five in the article.

1. Use Technology to Enhance Exploration
- Technology has the benefit of not being limited by what authors put in a textbook or the preferred method of any given teacher. This means that there are countless applets, articles, videos, and other material that students can find to enhance their learning experience. Students should be able to discover and find their own ways to understand a mathematical concept that is comprehensible to them.

When a teacher only teaches in one or two styles, some students can be left out. Technology can help broaden the possible learning opportunities, giving them more chances to learn and understand. For example, before a lesson, have students explore the topic by themselves and bring their research into class. Then, all students are invested in the material before it begins. It also will show how there are many different explanations and methods to topics in mathematics, which will help show that math isn’t “solved”, but rather is an ongoing discovery process.


2. Enhance and Encourage Communication
- While we tend to want to see how technology can affect math in the classroom, we should also remember that part of teaching is being able to communicate effectively with your students, whether they are in front of you or remote. Technology allows us to post corrections to homework, links to videos and other interesting and useful applets. This communication (through webpages, email, and in USU’s case, Canvas) allows teachers and students to rapidly communicate ideas between each other. This communication allows students to easily learn outside the classroom, which can expand learning opportunities that don’t have to fit into a 50 min class period, which might make some things not practical.


3. Promote Availability to Students
- 100 years ago, if a student has a disability, it could be extremely difficult to learn mathematics, if not impossible. Partially, this could be attributed to people’s attitudes toward disabled people back then, but it is also true that we did not have the luxury of modern technologies nowadays. For example, we have text-to-speech software’s available which can be extremely helpful to those students who are blind or have impaired vision. These technologies can help expand mathematics and make it available to more students than ever before. Teachers should be able to recognize when technologies like these can be helpful to reach more students.