Tuesday
Sep152009
Can a Graphing Calculator be replaced with IPod Touch?
Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 9:16PM Studentsa are spending almost $200 each on their "graphing calculators". I need to know if "graphing calculators" can be replaced with an IPod Touch. Please leave a comment for us as we explore the possibilities. Here are the current apps related to "graphing calculator" in the App Store.
- Have you ever used any of these? Feedback?
- What capabilities and or functions do "graphing calculators" have that you can't live without?
- Are there educational issues related to students having multiple more functions with Touch at their disposal that would cause a problem?
Have at this. What do you think? I will be contacting these vendors and any others to ask some math teachers to test pilot these apps sometime. What are the positives and negatives? Issues with testing? Etc.
Reader Comments (4)
I can't answer 1 or 2 solidly enough, since I'm not a math teacher, and can't speak to the richness/capabilities of the iPod touch calculators. BUT, I can say that, if you're using a classroom set, and need (maybe for official testing day, perhaps) for students ONLY to have access to the graphing calculator, you could simply resync the classroom set, hide any potentially troublesome apps, then give them out. Next day, re-sync the other apps back on. I've seen that done successfully!
I had teachers tell me they would recommend using my application to students. I also had students report that they were not allowed to use their iPod during an exam. I think it really depends on the teacher. Of course, nothing can prevent students from using it at home for home work.
At this point, none of the iPhone/iPod graphing calculators support every feature you’d find on a TI-89 calculator. I focused on the most important features for high school students first. Creating a complete TI-89 replacement is a considerable time investment, and it’s only worth doing if the answer to your question is “yes”.
As far as technology is concerned, the iPod/iPhone hardware is more than capable of doing everything TI’s hardware can do. In fact, it can do it much better. Zooming and tracing graphs using my application is much more fun than on a TI calculator thanks to the nice high resolution colored touch screen.
I think that yes, eventually they can be replaced. However, if your state is anything like mine ... they haven't allowed (and probably won't) the use of an iPod graphing calculator on the state exam at the end of the course. So, therefore, I don't think it would be in a students best interest to use an iPod all year and then be thrown a graphing calculator for the state test.
PI83 is a great app. There is also another, think it's called GraphCalc. Could be wrong and I don't have a Touch in front of me right now.
I think is a great tool for a student, but until everyone else is on board with calculator requirements, perhaps they still need to use a graphing calculator for now.
I've had a student use an iPod app in place of a graphing calculator. Between it and GeoGebra, he was able to do anything required for algebra 2 and trigonometry, except for writing a program (that does the quadratic formula). Is there an app that you can do basic programming in?