Wisconsin Heights School District’s math department is one of the leaders in the state, and perhaps the nation, in integrating technology into curriculum.

This fact will be acknowledged at the Wisconsin Educational Technology Conference in Milwaukee Oct. 12 and 13. High school math teacher Lauren Jensen and Middle school math teacher Dianne Koch will be teaching a workshop aimed at helping teachers at other schools learn how to do what is now routine at Heights.

Koch says that when they gave this same workshop in Oshkosh teachers from all over the state and other states, as well as Canada, came to it. Jensen talks about the national and international audience they drew when they presented it in California.

Both Koch and Jensen credit former Heights math teacher Kent Jensen (no relation to current teacher Jensen) with beginning the introduction of technology into the math curriculum at Heights. Lauren Jensen characterizes him as very innovative and says he was "one of the first educators to use graphing calculators in his upper level math classes." Koch says that the incorporation of technology into the math curriculum took a giant step forward five years ago when the middle school opened. Koch, who taught at Mazomanie Elementary before the creation of the middle school, says the existence of the middle school allowed the staff to stretch the math budget to cover technology hardware, such as the purchase of classroom sets of graphing calculators, But, she also emphasizes that, by grouping all the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders in one building adjacent to the high school, it also allowed the math staff to begin accelerating students much earlier.

This year a 9^th grader is taking advanced placement calculus, the highest level math course offer in the district. Jensen says there would have been three juniors in the class too, except that two moved away. Four students are taking computer programming on the internet. As Jensen says, this is an example of the Heights math department "using technology to provide classes they don’t have the people to teach." 

Jensen says that courses in which students create and maintain web pages are some of the math courses that are forcing the students to incorporate interdisciplinary skills into their math program. All the students in Jensen’s junior and senior level pre-calculus class are creating their own web pages that will be accessible to internet users through the high school web page. Creating these pages requires the students to use both graphic design and language arts skills to communicate mathematical information. As Koch explained, this project, using the computer as a communications tool, builds on work she started when she had these students in 8^th grade pre-algebra and algebra. Heights math students write papers in math from 8^th grade on. Koch says that, although the students do not begin writing it down until 8^th grade, even in the elementary schools the math teachers make them explain their reasoning, how they got the answers they did. Koch said this change has been egged on by the state assessment tests which ask the students to write how to solve problems, not just to solve them. Jensen says it is also one of the ways in which the math department’s extensive use of technology in its curriculum will be spread to other departments.

As Jensen says many teachers, including math teachers, don’t know how to use certain technologies, so they are uncomfortable with them. This is what she and Koch are trying to overcome with the workshop for teachers in other districts that they are giving in October. Jensen says that a lot of math teachers, especially at the elementary level, are frightened of tools such as graphing calculators.

That is the tool Jensen and Koch will be teaching the teachers to use in October. The adults in Milwaukee will be doing the same activity that Jensen’s pre-calculus students did on Monday, Sept. 13, except that the Heights students will do more with the data than the adults. Teams of three students use motion detectors to gather data about the change in the speed of toy cars over time. They store this information in their graphing calculators as linear data. The calculators translate the numbers and letters of old fashioned equations into a concrete picture which the students can see.

This, in turn, means, according to Jensen and Koch, that you no longer need to be as abstract a thinker to be a mathematician. Math is now accessible to students with different learning styles. Some students are visual learners. Others need to do something in order to learn a concept. Jensen says that the abstract thinkers are still going to get it, but that the subject is no longer limited to them.

She also says that it makes math more fun and allows the teachers to connect abstract concepts to real life things. As Koch puts it, it allows them to answer perennial "When will I ever use this?" questions that nag math teachers.

One of Jensen’s favorite examples of this is the parabola. From time immemorial, algebra students have had to learn the equations that allow them to plot a parabola and they have all asked "What in my life does this apply to?" Now with motion detectors and graphing calculators she can show them.

She has a student throw a ball into the air in front of a motion detector that is connected to a graphing calculator. The resulting curve is an upside down parabola. Once some students see that every football kick-off traces a parabola and the nature of that parabola influences the success of that kick-off, Jensen says some decide math is not such a useless thing after all. It has meaning within their world. They are willing to look at the concepts involved in this example (point of impact, the force of gravity, and velocity) with new eyes.

From the look in her eyes when she says this, it is obvious that producing this reaction is one the greatest rewards she receives from teaching.