It is easy to view classroom technology as a toy instead of as an instructional tool. Once you begin to appreciate the ways technology can strengthen your classroom lessons, however, you'll wonder how you ever did without. In my journey to find apps to enrich my iPad-equipped math classroom, I have found these three apps essential.
In my experience, Notability is the best app for day-to-day instruction. It allows you to share or project PDFs that you have made or are using. Once the PDF is imported, the app allows you to highlight words and type or write on the document. The app also has the ability to record what you are doing in real time. While you are giving direct instructions, you can record the lesson and send it to students who are absent or create a database of lessons. You can also make lessons ahead of time and use them in a flipped classroom.
If there is a 1:1 technology ratio in the school, students can also use Notability to create documents or to take notes. In my geometry class, I use Notability for an activity that involves students finding a picture on the Internet, writing a conditional statement about the picture, and then writing the converse of that statement. Next, they write a response to the question: given that the conditional statement is true, is the converse always true? As a whole class, we preview some student examples and discuss why the converse is always true in math but not necessarily true in other situations.
If you want students to have multiple ways to demonstrate their understanding of a concept, Educreations is an app that works well in any content area. With Educreations, students can draw, write, or insert pictures on a number of slides. Then they can record their voices over each slide to explain the concept. I use this app in my math class to ask students to solve problems, check if their answers are correct, and create a presentation describing how they solved the problems. Students create a video describing their thinking and the strategies they used to solve each problem. Once they click save, the app creates a sharable URL that becomes an instant virtual study guide for the students.
When I want students to investigate and discover new knowledge about math concepts, I use Desmos, a free graphing calculator app. Desmos comes with preloaded problems so that students can learn about concepts such as vertex form or point slope form. Students have used this app to discover transformations by graphing the parent functions and a transformation of that function and then recording what changes they noticed. After a few observations, students make conjectures about the transformations. Students have also used the app to investigate exponential versus polynomial functions and determine whether or not the exponential graph will always overtake a function. This app allows for all these investigations because students can not only graph the function but also look at or make a table of values.
There are a multitude of apps out there, and it can be overwhelming to approach technology integration if you don't first have a clear purpose for what the technology will help you and your students achieve. The apps I've highlighted here all have a very specific educational purpose and serve my goals for blending instruction, inviting student innovation in demonstrating understanding of a topic, and creating interactive graphing applications. New or old, the technologies that help you achieve your teaching goals are the ones worth using.