%0 Journal Article
%T Using Technology in Elementary Mathematics Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective
%A Sergei Abramovich
%A Michael L. Connell
%J ISRN Education
%D 2014
%R 10.1155/2014/345146
%X A central tenet of mathematics education reform is the integral role of technology at all grade levels. The current technological changes combined with the changes in the mathematics content and instructional method require elementary mathematics teachers to be able to design technology intensive lessons for exploration and discovery of these concepts through appropriate computer applications. In actual practice, however, most computer applications provided for mathematics education consist of software designed for a specific educational purpose: the solution in a can scenario. Furthermore, economic constraints often stand in the way of incorporating such special purpose software into an instructional setting. In this paper we will discuss an alternative to this traditional approach which shifts the instructional focus specific computer applications to more sophisticated uses of general purpose software. In particular educational uses of spreadsheets will be developed as an exemplar for this approach. 1. Introduction In the recent past, when we talked about computer applications as pedagogical tools in the mathematics classroom we meant software designed for a particular educational purpose. Yet economic constraints often stand in the way of incorporating special purpose software into an instructional setting and thus challenge computer-enabled mathematics pedagogy and ongoing teacher education programs. A possible way to address the challenge is to shift emphasis from using specific computer applications as teaching and learning tools to retrofitting generic software into an educational environment. Teaching using off the shelf components, as it were. Electronic spreadsheets, for example, are commonly available in schools, colleges, and universities. Yet, a spreadsheet, in order to become a mathematics learning environment, requires from an instructor a number of different skills that are the elements of an individual signature pedagogy [1, 2]. How can the introduction of spreadsheets as thinking tools into mathematics classroom be achieved? What does it take for mathematics teachers to develop into technologically minded cognizing and reflective agents [3], capable of advancing computer-assisted signature pedagogy [4] to become a field of disciplined inquiry and, in particular, being skillful in incorporating spreadsheets into the practice of mathematics teaching? This paper will attempt to address these questions from sociocultural perspective. One of the major assumptions of the current mathematics education reform is that the field of teacher
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.education/2014/345146/