FREE Online Professional Teacher Education Course: Teaching Mathematics with Technology

For Mathematics Teacher Educators Rapidly Moving Instruction Online

As a rapid response to COVID-19, and to assist faculty in supporting online instruction in undergraduate and graduate mathematics education courses, Hollylynne Lee, professor of mathematics and statistics education at NC State, will be opening and facilitating a FREE online professional teacher education course Teaching Mathematics with Technology, through the Friday institute for Educational Innovation.

This course is uses research-based materials and is designed to support middle school and high school preservice and practicing teachers in learning to use free technology tools (e.g., Desmos, GeoGebra, WebSketchpad, CODAP, TUVA) to support students’ learning of mathematics. Thus, the content of this course could be applicable to secondary mathematics methods courses or courses focused on the use of technology to support mathematics learning and teaching. The course will also be open for practicing teachers to join, so it may be a good opportunity for preservice teachers to interact with practicing math teachers who are rapidly responding to their students’ needs and finding and creating meaningful material to support online instruction.

The course includes a focus on several key Instructional practices such as evaluating and choosing tasks, posing questions, facilitating discussions, and assessing students’ learning. Each of the 5 units in the course will include several mathematics tasks that can be used to teach algebra/number, geometry, or statistics/probability concepts and videos of students working on tasks with technology or teachers facilitating discussions in a technology-enabled lesson. There will be discussion forums where participants can interact about what they are learning, especially about the use of technology and students’ thinking.

College faculty could join the course with their students, interact with them in the discussion forums, and choose certain aspects of the course they want to assign. There will also be suggested assignments that faculty could choose to have their students complete and submit to them. Sorry, you have to do your own grading!

There is enough material in the course to easily fill 5-8 weeks of instruction. Since all our materials are created as open resources, you can also use this as an opportunity to find new materials that you could save and integrate into your face-to-face classes next year!

Course opens March 23, 2020 and will remain open through May 18, 2020. Participants can join at any time. Once a unit opens it will remain open. All participants can also come back into the course in the future to find and download materials.