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Week 1: EdTech Terms [Jan. 19, 2013, 8:11 a.m.]


This "cheat sheet" Boundless put together lists 24 ed-tech terms teachers and admins need to know these days. http://blog.boundless.com/2012/07/edtech-cheat-sheet/

Question 1

How many of these 24 terms feel new, fresh and interesting to you?

Question 2

Let us make a MathTech cheat sheet! What three terms, specific for mathematics education with technology, would you include? Give short and sweet definitions of your terms, as in the list below.

Ed Tech Cheat Sheet

Update

From what participants wrote, this task seems difficult for people who are just starting their journey in math ed tech! Here are some steps that should help.

  1. Search for articles, book chapters or blog posts about topics that interest you in teaching mathematics with technology. You can search the Web in general, or blogs, or article depositories for this phrase ("teaching mathematics with technology") or add some particular technology keywords, such as "cell phone" or "abacus." For example, here is a blog search I used.
  2. Choose a likely article from your search results. This one looked promising to me when I searched. Why? The blog search gave me this description: 

    One of the more recent trends in teaching mathematics is incorporating social justice into math lessons,” he says. “One of the activities that we've done with teachers and ... Brown says that the continuous need for physical resources such as technology is a critical challenge for math teachers in California. “Besides computers, there are hand-held calculators, which help students to visualize math,” says Brown. “The technology piece is… a huge concern because it's ...
  3. Look for math ed tech terms in the full article. Here is one of the terms I found, for example:
     One of the more recent trends in teaching mathematics is incorporating social justice into math lessons,” he says. “One of the activities that we’ve done with teachers and [that they] have done with students is a probability activity that looks at racial profiling. We did a simulation to look at a situation where [a certain number] of a particular group in a particular metropolitan area were pulled over by the police, and we ask, ‘Is this a case of racial profiling or not? How do you create a probability simulation to prove whether or not this is a case of racial profiling?’
    Here are two more terms:

    “Besides computers, there are hand-held calculators, which help students to visualize math,” says Brown. “The technology piece is… a huge concern because it’s expensive. And it changes so quickly, that [equipment] can become obsolete.
    Visualization is a very important tool that students need in mathematics. Having something concrete to manipulate helps students to build their understanding of particular concepts.”
  4. Once you find the terms, you can either define them by yourself, or look up good definitions online and shorten them for this assignment. For example, I headed to the Wikipedia to check out the article on simulation, but quickly moved on to computer simulation. My version of that definition:
    "Simulation: A computer program that simulates an abstract model of a system."
  5. Make sure you give the links to articles you used, as I did in examples above. This will us all if we want to look up real uses of your terms!