I went down to Pittsburgh for a meeting this past weekend on using technology in math teaching. I didn't really find anything that impressed me much, 'though. We did have a demonstration of "clickers" that I was interested in, but it mostly killed my interest in them. (For those not in the know, clickers are small remote control devices that students can use to respond to short in-class questions, usually multiple choice format. The results are collected and tabulated by computer and can be displayed. They've been used a lot in physics classes.) I've thought clickers looked intriguing, but I'm not sure I'd bother for anything other than a large class now, and maybe not then. It seems like a great deal of trouble for not so much gain. We also got to play with fancy calculators, which are kind of cool, but a complete pain to try to enter anything into. I don't see using anything like this until/unless the input is better. I'd just go with notebook computers if you want portability, personally.
On the other hand, I got to meet a few people and we did get to go out to eat Indian food. (I think I may have introduced some of my colleagues to the joys of it; I'm not sure.) Indian is one thing I have a hard time finding around Erie, so I'm glad I got to do that. But it all pretty much ate up my weekend, so I'm glad I've got another one coming up. It will give me a chance to finish grading my latest round of tests. Oh joy.
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