Technology in the Classroom

A technology that I use in my everyday life is a cell phone. In today’s society almost all students have a cell phone or access to a cell phone. I learned last semester during a practicum experience in a middle school, that almost all of my sixth grade students owned cell phones. The lesson I would be using the cell phones for would take place in a sixth or seventh grade classroom. Since cell phones are such a major part of everyone’s life, I figured I would try and incorporate cell phone usage into a mathematical lesson on graphing and statistics. In my experience, students sometimes have a difficult time grasping the concept of graphing simply because they do not see how it works. By this I mean the student have trouble distinguishing between which variable goes on the x-axis and which one goes on the y-axis. The idea I came up with was for students to record over the span of a week the number of minutes they spend talking on the phone as well as the number of text messages sent and received. By having the students use their cell phone to record data they will see how the assignment relates to their everyday life. If one of my students does not have his or her own cell phone then I will tell them that they can record an older sibling or parent’s data. However, if no phone is available I will provide the student with data that they can use. After the students have collected their data, they will bring it in to class and we will work together to create graphs from the information. Each student will be responsible for creating their own graphs using their own data. Once this is completed, the students will come back as a class, and we will try and figure out the average number of minutes and average number of text messages sent by the entire class. This brings statistics into the lesson as well. We can also use this new data to create a class graph. From this lesson the students will have more practice creating graphs and actually seeing the difference between the x and y axis as well as seeing how an everyday technology can relate to learning math. When students see how math relates to their life, it seems that they understand the material better and enjoy learning more. This lesson would incorporate two of the important SOLs for sixth grade math. The SOLs are below:

6.18 The student, given a problem situation, will collect, analyze, display, and interpret data in a variety of graphical methods, including
a) line, bar, and circle graphs;
b) stem-and-leaf plots; and
c) box-and-whisker plots.

6.19 The student will describe the mean, median, and mode as measures of central tendency, describe the range, and determine their meaning for a set of data.

After coming up with this idea, I went online to try and find teachers who had used this type of assignment with their students. However, I did not find any. I found the following link that could be another interesting cell phone related math activity for older students to complete involving picking the best cell phone plan. This assignment also allows the students to see how math is used in real life.