Geogebra Institute of Canada
Today is my blog day… I haven’t been posting much for the past three weeks as I have been very busy with teaching my daily Inquiry course for mathematics and physics teachers… and have been extremely busy with it. As the course is coming to an end, I have a little bit more time to think and reflect. Also a number of interesting things happened today. Today, I found out about a great resource for mathematics education. I have been using Geogebra for a while. It is a free software that helps students and teachers explore geometry and algebra in a very creative way. As I am interested in technology, I became interested in it and how it can affect mathematics and science learning. At the same time, we had an interesting activity in class a few days ago. I wanted to demonstrate various ways of using clickers and I had to come up with a few simple questions… As I didn’t have much time, I found a few questions online. One of them dealt with geometry and to my surprise I realized that many of our student-teachers have very little knowledge of geometry (why am I surprised, after all I know that my own children do not learn it in high school…?).
Geometry unfortunately is not a part of our curriculum any more… It is especially troubling in the context of the CBC interview about mathematics education I happened to listen to today. Geometry is something very visual, beautiful, that helps you develop reasoning skills… but we do not teach it… I personally enjoyed geometry a lot and I think Geogebra Institute of Canada provides excellent resources for teachers who want to start using it.
