Jimmy Clemson

10/1/13

Dr. Adu-Gyamfi

MATE 4001

Technology Observation

The classroom is divided up into tables that hold two people each. There are 16 tables

arranged 4x4 and then two more tables at the back wall to hold the larger classes that are

there. The room has in the middle of the 4x4 grid of tables a cart that has a laptop and a

projector. The projector just projects right onto the white board where there is a mimio set up.

There is also a Mobi that goes along with the rest which is what gets used most often. The

lesson that was being taught was the quadratic formula and discriminants. The lesson started

out with a review of what the homework was from the previous class. Technology wise there

was nothing special about this part. Here the teacher used the white board to go through the

problems that the students had for that homework. She then asked the kids if they had done

the quadratic equation before. Most students didn’t remember it. The teacher then went to

the computer and found an appropriate video to show to the students that sang the quadratic

formula. From there she went through the notes on quadratics and discriminants using the

mimio and the mobi. After about 20-30 minutes of notes the students started working on a

worksheet.

The students each are assigned a calculator if they do not have one of their own. There

is significant evidence that they have used them before and frequently. Upon entering the

classroom and setting up at their desks they all knew to go and get their specific calculator

before Mrs. Baker entered the classroom (between classes she stands at the entrance to her

room and doesn’t come in until the bell rings). They all took them right back to their desks.

One student noticed that the calculator that she normally had wasn’t there this time, so they

figured out who had grabbed the wrong calculator and swapped everything correctly. The

students also were able to do anything that Mrs. Baker asked them to do with the calculator,

showing their familiarity with the technology.

For most of the lesson the teacher was the primary technology user. She was the one

using the mobi and mimio to give the students their notes. This was where the technology was

used to show and display information. It had also been used to show information during the

song that introduced the quadratic formula. The use of the technology shifted halfway through

the lesson when the students had enough notes to be able to do some practice problems. For a

few problems they did them together but then the focus shifted totally to the students where

they were the ones using graphing calculators to go through the problems. After the students

had found their answer they would check it by graphing the quadratic on their calculators and

finding the zero’s and in that way they could find out if they had correctly used the formula.

One student even, in an effort to save time later, figured out how to program the formula into

her calculator. She was naturally the first one to finish since she only needed to input a,b,c into

the calculator and she had the answers.

At the beginning of the lesson Mrs. Baker had asked students to write down the

quadratic formula. It seemed like most of the students had heard/learned it before but were

having trouble recalling it. She gave them five minutes or so to rack their brains to try and

remember it while she found a suitable video. Here she was having them reflect on what they

had learned previously.

The technology in this case allowed for the teacher to have a much more interesting

way to present the main information of the day as opposed to just telling them and having

them write it down. For the students it gave them some entertainment in the middle of the

class to break up the monotony of a whole class. The technology did not seem to enhance the

learning of the topic. What they learned from the technology was about the same

understanding I think they would have had from a standard lecture. The video was a fun way to

present the info and the mimio and mobi are just like writing on the white board with the

added benefit of being able to write up there while wandering the room which is very beneficial

to classroom management but other than that not too different than a standard lecture. Using

the calculator simplifies the process of finding the zero’s but doesn’t necessarily lead to a better

understanding. Maybe with the graphing calculators it is easier to see the connection between

the x-intercepts and the quadratic equation. The only modification I would have made would

have been the way that the discriminant was explained with regard to how many solutions

there are going to be. Mrs. Baker essentially just told them what happens when the

discriminant is greater than 0, equal to 0 and less than zero. I would have had them do at least

one problem where each situation came up. By doing that you can more easily show why each

case gets the result that it does and then relate it to the graph and how the graph looks.