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Section 3

Discuss the potential of the Internet for mathematics instruction in the secondary school. Assume, and describe, the adequate and satisfactory access and connectivity. Your response should deal with the potential you can identify in this resource rather than dwell on limitations of currently available materials and access. The focus of your discussion should be on mathematics teaching and learning.

Response:

The internet, even still, is one of the most untapped commodities that we have today, regardless of its use in mathematics education. Every day there are new, exciting additions to the internet that are only a point and a click away. Over the past few years, the mathematics education community has been blessed with new innovations that are shaping the way that mathematics will be taught on the high school level.

President Clinton stated in his 1996 State of the Union address that "Every classroom in America must be connected to the information superhighway... by the year 2000." This decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number of computers being used in our schools. Between the years 1989 and 1992, the number of computers in our schools rose by 50 percent, and the United States Department of Education reports that 35 percent of public schools have internet access and an additional 14 percent have access to online services such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy (Follensbee, online).

When we talk about internet use in the classroom, in particular the mathematics class, many of us really are not sure what "internet use" really means. Internet use is not restricted to just browsing the web, although that is a powerful tool in itself. The internet not only means "web surfing" and web page design in the local school, but it also means using email and listserv discussion groups, interactive video networking, the use of gopher sites, the use of Java applets, and much more. These are some of the items that we will focus on in this discussion.

One of the biggest concerns in using the internet in the classroom is the need for measurable result. Since the internet has become available to education, only a few studies have been done to show outcomes of its use. One such study was done in seven large urban cities in the U.S.; these cities included Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, Memphis, Miami, Oakland and Washington, D.C. The population, broken into two groups: 14 experimental classes and 14 control classes. The experimental classes were connected to Scholastic Network and the Internet, and the control group had no online connections. Both the experimental and the control studied a unit based on the school's curriculum along with activities and worksheets developed for the study. Both the experimental group and the control group were advised to use the computer wherever possible in order to give the most accurate results, but only the experimental group was allowed to go online (Follensbee).

There were two main questions that Follensbee was trying to answer:
1. What is the impact of online use on student performance and attitudes?
2. What is the impact of online use on teacher behavior and attitudes?

The Follensbee study found that "students who used online access became more confident and students without online access became less confident." The findings for teachers was equally telling: "Teachers in the experimental group reported that during the study their students found information more quickly, drew resources from a larger number sources in a wider variety of formats, and dealt with information in ways that made the material more relevant to their lives. Teachers felt that e-mail (and other tools from the internet) helped their students learn from other students, teachers and the community at large" (Follensbee).

As we can see there has been some success implementing the internet into the classroom, but now let's take a look at how the internet can help us in the mathematics classroom.

We will assume that a classroom exists with full connectivity to the internet, and each computer in our class is hypothetically unlimited in memory capacity, and every connection speed is fast enough to be a non-factor (as demonstrated in the lab in the mathematics education department at the University of Georgia). Since this is purely hypothetical, we can assume that anything that we desire to accentuate our use of the internet will be provided.

One of the simplest uses of the internet is the use of email. As individuals we do not even need to have an online account to have an email address (with the use of services such as Hotmail and Yahoo). It would be very possible for a student our class to have communications with someone from anywhere on Earth via email. A possible assignment for a student in mathematics could be to look on the World Wide Web for a site that deals with a particular topic in mathematics and begin correspondence with maker of the web site. The students could draw information from this person that would not be available from the teacher in the classroom. Topics from subjects such as engineering and applied mathematics could be discussed between students and people who use mathematics in their everyday lives. The students could then take this information and create their own person journal entries on their own web pages that would describe the topics discussed with their own "real-world person."

Another form of communication similar to email is the use of the listserv. A mathematics student can make contact with a person or a group of people who are in a certain field and be placed on a list of people worldwide who are email with information sometimes on a daily basis. This type of communication is something that will allow students to come to class and have new information at their fingertips the instant they log on. Listservs can be relevant to mathematics or any other topic depending on who is providing the listserv. There are three things that make professional listservs valuable: they are current; "the information is shared between people who are currently teaching using the same methodology and who understand not just the technology and pedagogy,...(and) the listserv is generally designed specifically for dialogue, making listservs different from journals and books" (Burke, online).

Another use of the internet is the use of interactive video networking. The method allows for class participants to communicate in real-time by video conferencing. This method could be used student-by-student or to a class as a whole (similar to what is done in Georgia's GSAMS facilities). As interactive as email and listservs are, the video networking concept is so much more dynamic because of its real-time capabilities (O'Haver, online). "Video conferencing could lead the way for a dual approach, giving students more responsibility for their learning, working in groups, doing tasks, all of which would benefit conventional teaching" (Cunningham, online). Once again, using video networking will allow the teacher to bring another real-world resource into the mathematics classroom. This idea can be so valuable because it will allow the students to be able to answer their own questions when they ask "why are we learning this stuff?"

The use of gopher sites can be also be useful to students. People use gopher computers to make information available to other people over the internet. Individuals and companies around the world have set up more than 7,500 gopher computers, called "servers," with information on just about every subject, and there are several dealing with mathematics. A few things to understand about gopher: gopher resources are usually text-based but can also consist of pictures, sounds, and other sorts of files; gopher menu items can link students to information resources that can reside either on the gopher server itself or on other gopher servers located anywhere in the world. The resources (text files, images, etc.) are downloaded to your computer, then displayed on your screen (America Online). There a quite of few attributes to gopher sites. These sites are faster than WWW sites; they are mostly text, and they are primarily simple lists.

The final item of the internet that we will discuss is the use of Java applets in the web. A Java applet is a much more dynamic application created from the Java programming language. Java allows images on the web "come alive." This concept is illustrated in an application called JavaGSP. JavaGSP allows the user to take advantage of some of Geometer's Sketchpad's capabilities without the user actually having GSP loaded on his/her computer. JavaGSP can almost make full use of GSP's animation capabilities on the web. This tool can be very powerful because it can illustrate some difficult concepts on the web without the student actually having to know how to create the animation him/herself. It is very conceivable that textbook creators could uses Java applets to supplement the textbooks that they already provide. It is also very imaginable that we could be working in our geometry texts, when we come to a point where the text suggests that we go to a web site with a JavaGSP applet. This applet will allow our students to visualize the concept to which they have just been introduced.

The NCTM Professional Standards states that "various means for communicating about mathematics should be accepted, including drawings, diagrams, invented symbols, and analogies...Teachers should also help students learn to use calculators, computers, and other technological devices as tools for mathematical discourse" (52). I feel that even though the internet in the mathematics classroom in still in unchartered waters and is cutting-edge technology to most of us, the NCTM still promotes the use of such technologies. Hopefully, it will only be a matter of time before the things we have discussed in this response will become commonplace.

Bibliography for this response