CAS Technologies Blog Post

Even though I personally use an Nspire for my own math classes when I can, there are still a few things that I didn’t know about this technology. One of the main things is that you can create a whole document, basically a large as you want, containing anything from calculations to typed notes. You can also divide that document into different problems, which also contain different pages. I think this would be a very helpful technique to use in the classroom if you were using this technology. Something else I didn’t know you could do before is export those documents saved on your Nspire to an Nspire program installed on a computer, which from there you can email or share it with other people. This is also helpful if you want to save documents for long periods of time, so instead of keeping them all on your handheld you just save it all onto your computer.

Using the CAS technologies you could teach many different grade levels, but I would probably prefer to teach a 11th or 12th grade calculus class since I enjoy that subject the most. There are lots of calculus features to use on the Nspire, so it could be used in almost any type of calculus lesson. For most topics I would most likely create a lesson where the students would learn how to solve whatever they are solving by hand. Then, they could move onto more difficult problems or situations and start using the calculus features on the Nspire to help. For example, one topic perfect for this situation would be integration. I believe that first the students need to know how to integrate by hand. However, I could then present them with problems where you add, subtract, multiply, or divide multiple integrals. Then, I could have them enter each integral separately in the Nspire and then perform whatever operation on the numbers, and enter all the integrals and the operations from the problem altogether to see if they get the same answer each time. Another more basic idea to add to that lesson is solving the equation by hand with the upper and lower limit and subtracting them to find the area. Then, entering the whole integral on the Nspire to compare both answers.