NSpired 4 iPad2: Apps to Deepen Mathematical Understanding

My Students

A typical day in my classroom involves students hesitant to learn at first but as we continue our study through activities that allow students to be collaborative and move throughout the room, they find success. "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new". Albert Einstein

My Algebra 2 students are juniors and seniors who have not found abundant success in math.

But with college looming soon, it is awesome to watch them grow and mature throughout the school year, take risks, work hard and improve with each unit. While I am extremely fortunate to work in a suburban area school in a middle to upper class community, it is often assumed that all of our students have similar resources. Many of my students take a 45 minute bus ride from a nearby large city to attend class. Several students attend a vocational school in the morning and take general credits in the afternoon. My students are racially diverse, representing the heritage of Africa, the Middle East, and North and South America. 37% of these students have an IEP with disabilities ranging from Autism, Learning Disabilities, ADHD, and Emotional Disabilities. But the commonality is that they all have dreams they want to achieve. I want to do my best to help each of these students reach them.

My Project

In class, I should be the one speaking and doing the least amount of math while students should be talking and doing math the most! So after some initial instruction to the topic being learned, I like to design activities that allow students to interact with the math. We might complete a matching game, a card sort, puzzle, scavenger hunt, or jigsaw activity for students to practice problems. It allows them the collaborative time they need while I can go to each group/student to provide help when needed. I can meet the needs of individual students (differentiation) and provide remediation for a student who needs it or challenge those who are ready to move on. I would like an iPad in the room to serve as another 'station' of activities for students to participate. Students would access the NSpire, a dynamic math app, to deepen their understanding of math. I would also like students to see the connection between algebra, geometry, and introduce coding apps to challenge students.

My goal is to eventually have 5-6 iPads in the room so students can work collaboratively with the mathematical apps it can provide.

I want them to touch the graph, move it around, watch how the algebraic and numeric representation changes and use this to conjecture about mathematical patterns. It is this thinking that will change their lives--its not about memorizing algorithms. They will benefit from deeply understanding mathematical relationships and applying it to their daily lives.