Abstract
A central tenet of mathematics education reform is the integral role of technology at all grade levels. The current technological changes combined with the changes in the mathematics content and instructional method require elementary mathematics teachers to be able to design technology intensive lessons for exploration and discovery of these concepts through appropriate computer applications. In actual practice, however, most computer applications provided for mathematics education consist of software designed for a specific educational purpose: the solution in a can scenario. Furthermore, economic constraints often stand in the way of incorporating such special purpose software into an instructional setting. In this paper we will discuss an alternative to this traditional approach which shifts the instructional focus specific computer applications to more sophisticated uses of general purpose software. In particular educational uses of spreadsheets will be developed as an exemplar for this approach.
Highlights
In the recent past, when we talked about computer applications as pedagogical tools in the mathematics classroom we meant software designed for a particular educational purpose
Economic constraints often stand in the way of incorporating special purpose software into an instructional setting and challenge computer-enabled mathematics pedagogy and ongoing teacher education programs
One of the major assumptions of the current mathematics education reform is that the field of teacher education is amenable to disciplined inquiry
Summary
In the recent past, when we talked about computer applications as pedagogical tools in the mathematics classroom we meant software designed for a particular educational purpose. Appropriate use of computers in the teaching of mathematics may involve the juxtaposition of a student’s independent and assisted performances Computer technology enables both learning perspectives to be mediated by different semiotic means. The spreadsheet-enabled pedagogy has a potential to enhance the teaching of mathematical concepts in the form of assisted performance and facilitate the negotiation of mathematics meaning in a classroom discourse. In such intellectual milieu a teacher’s role becomes one of extreme complexity for he or she must be capable of surviving ambiguity in a meaning-making. Such competence can be developed through an appropriate restructuring of the teacher education programs with a focus on spreadsheets as cognitive tools
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