I read a recent blog post Why the graphing calculator still matters in an ipad world. My intent is not so much to refute but to deflate.
I was at a technology firm focus group recently and they asked me how they could make sure their product was well incorporated into the high school environment and I offered the TI calculator as an example of how no matter how much you want to push your product, math classrooms are remarkably resistant to change. TI (thanks to our students, parents, governments, school boards and districts) have poured a fortune over the past twenty years into professional development for teachers, textbooks & resources for classroom use and classroom sets of (over-priced, in many cases) TI calculators. And yet, if I were to throw a stone at a random classroom (even if I were to only use those with classroom sets) would I see much effective TI calculator usage? Our Ontario ministry textbooks often look like a TI calculator manual, with step-by-step procedures and screenshots of the TI calculators for reference. Having been in classrooms throughout the Greater Toronto Area (and in conversation and observation of teachers around the province) I see very little usage (let alone sophisticated and deep immersion of the technology within the classroom) and certainly not of a type that would require the purchase of an individual device solely for math class.
I would argue that it is more cost-effective from the teacher, student, parent and tax-payer perspective to emphasize the use of portable devices (read: smartphones and tablets) that are inexpensive relative to their usage (the graphing calculator being a device little used outside of math class), ubiquitous and push the technology envelope in a far more competitive way than graphing calculators (the TI84+ uses a chip introduced in 1976). The use of mobile web-based resources to replace the functions of the graphing calculators would level the playing field; the burgeoning group of math educators blogging and twittering would expand on and distribute materials that would result. This is an environment far more likely to foment more real change than the past twenty years of effort on the part of TI.
Lucas closes with his insistence that the requirements of the AP & SAT tests will mean the TI calculators will continue to be a staple of classrooms. However, the AP Calculus exam is lessening the graphing calculator component and the use of CAS will become an issue of equity relatively quickly as they become more common. The Core Curriculum in the States will produce a whole new testing regime and one could easily envision an online testing scenario with the calculator built in … that online calculator will be what will be available to every students’ phone and tablet in short order.
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p.s. The sycophantic tone of the article (ex. TI has “an army of millions of devoted followers“) speaks to a common problem in the math community. TI has shown such largesse to well-intentioned, well-motivated educators that it often seems that the graphing calculator, in particular, the latest TI incarnation is the sine qua non of the exceptional math educator. While I have great respect for many of the teachers who are TI aficionados, it is occasionally difficult to separate their individual voices from the one they are typically paid to espouse in their roles as TI trainers or paid participants in TI training. Upton Sinclair put it best: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Fair disclosure: I attended a free training twenty years ago on the TI81 and was a passionate user of the graphing calculators (requiring my students to purchase one) for the following ten years. Then I was fortunate enough to work at a 1:1 school and discarded them in favour of a more useful technology (except in my AP Calculus courses, when they had to be shown the six functions useful on the exam).