Integrating Technology Into the Math Curriculum

The challenge this year is to integrate technology into the math curriculum. It seems harder for teachers to integrate math and technology. It dawned on me the other day as to why when a teacher ask "What am I suppose to do throw out the textbook?" Good reading teachers learned long ago you don't have to use just the textbook to teach reading. They pull resources from everywhere-novels, magazines, newspapers, websites and etc. However, that's not been the norm for the math curriculum. Most math teachers follow the textbook exactly; with the exception of skipping around in the book to get the curriculum taught by state assessment time.

This made the light bulb come on for me. Why don't we teach math like we do other subjects. There is math in our daily newspapers, shopping carts, and households. It is a given that math and science go hand-in-hand; many teachers do teach math as part of the science curriculum. If you don't, that is a great place to start extending the math curriculum.

My friend MacMare and I created a wiki related to one math topic-the metric system. This is a beginning for some teachers to integrate technology into the math curriculum. http://metricssixth.wikispaces.com/ Along with the wiki, I have created Moodle courses on fractions and problem solving. It's a start. Hopefully, teachers will begin to use technology as part of the regular math routine; as well, as begin to integrate math and technology into project base learning units.