My students need an LCD panel that fits on a regular overhead projector that will display what's happening on the screen of a graphing calculator.
$629 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
For students to successfully navigate a mathematical world--and achieve success in high school and college level math classes--they need to understand graphs. Graphs can communicate a lot of information, and even when a student may not understand the other parts of a problem, or may not have the language skills to comprehend the written text of a problem/situation, they can often "read" a graph and interpret a lot from it.
I teach Algebra I and Algebra II at a high school where most of the students come from the local, underserved communities. But at our school, we hold them to high expectations, and they work hard, to make sure they are ready for college. When they get there, I want to make sure they are familiar with all sorts of graphs and their characteristics.
It's funny, that in such a modern, digital age, when students are exposed to ever-increasingly complex cell phones and Ipods, that when it's time to hand out the class set of graphing calculators, they can be so fascinated by them! I want to be able to take full advantage of their curiosity, but oftentimes, too much time is wasted with me repeating instructions on where to find certain menus or enter certain values on the calculator, and on walking around the room checking in with students to see where they're at and show them how to get to where they need to be. Also, when they do their own work on the calculators, there is no way for them to show the whole class what they've done.
To help combat these issues, an overhead calculator would be invaluable. With it, I can lead the class through instructions (around using the calculators) more efficiently. When wanting to compare and contrast multiple graphs, I can do more when switching between them on the overhead calculator and dynamically analyzing them with the calculator's tools, than if I were to write them all out on the board and have students just "observing" them or asking the students to interact with them so passively.
And just as importantly, by using the overhead calculator, the students will have the opportunity to share their work will all their classmates. In preparing for college-level work (and work as an adult outside of school!), they should have practiced the skill of presenting their work through some type of dynamic visual presentation.
Especially in Algebra classes, graphs need to be at the front and center of understanding the mathematical concepts and relationships covered. And you can help make sure that these graphs are literally at the front and center of my class(room)! Once these students are comfortable with and skilled at manipulating, interpreting, and analyzing graphs, they are set to be more successful in their future education and more likely to better handle much of the math they'll encounter in the rest of their lives.
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