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Out of 87,227 public schools, 82,065 now have computers. Almost 50,000 have between 21 and 100 computers, and over 64,000 have Internet access.* School libraries have morphed into media centers, and terms like Internet and browser are almost as common as text book and chalk board. Teachers are painfully aware of the importance of bringing technology into their curriculum, both to engage students and also to give them the skills they will need to succeed in the 21st century. Now that the hardware and connectivity are in place, the push is on to find the media that teachers can use to make utilizing technology worthwhile. Except for calculators and certain “drill and skill” software, there hasn’t been much digital excitement in math classrooms. The National Math Trail excites and engages students in learning math. It is an excellent opportunity for teachers to integrate technology—digital cameras, scanners, word processing, and web page authoring tools—into their curriculum. It’s not necessary to use digital technology to do a math trail with students, or even to create a submission for the National Math Trail website. Students can draw pictures of the math they find, and write their problems using paper and pencil. The website will digitize the submission and post it. But most teachers are trying their hand at creating digital submissions, many for the first time.  “The National Math Trail does help integrate technology,” says Angelique Conner, who first had her student groups design math trail booklets, and then enter their text and photos into the computer.
“You don’t want to just stop in the classroom after you take the pictures and do the problems, because no one gets to see them and you don’t get to share. The National Math Trail is a way of letting the world know what you’re doing. The kids feel
really great about themselves when they can go on the computer and use the Internet. This is something their parents can pull up on the Web at
home; the principal and everyone else can see what they’re doing.” “These third graders are using a lot of technology in conjunction with this project,” Conner says. “They’re learning how to download and resize the pictures. They’re doing word processing, cutting and pasting on the computer, and they’re going back and editing.” In James Unger’s room, there are 28 students, one computer and one digital camera. He says, “I asked my students, ‘how are we going to do this?’ I let them think about it a little while. They said they could all take turns, but soon realized it would take until the end of the year to get the project even half done.” He ended up giving each student a piece of paper with a box in the middle that said "National Math Trail," then asked them to think about places they’ve been in the school where they’ve seen math. They sketched their math locations inside the box and made up questions. Unger has them each present their problems to their classmates. Only when the problem makes sense and can be understood by the rest of the class, are they given access to the digital camera and then to the computer. “I thought it would be neat,” says Unger, “to give them a project where they could see their work online. We went to the site. Georgia was lit up but no elementary school had a trail posted yet. I told them that if we got good, we could send our work in to the National Math Trail site and maybe be the first ones from Georgia up there. They went wild.” |
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