Project Math Access DVD 06 - Perspectives- Part 06
Transcript Start

Audio Description: Part six, graphing calculators. 

Marien Massa: A graphing calculator is required in advanced algebra, and we went through that whole thing. He had a calculator built in to his Braille Lite and everything else, and that worked for some basic stuff, but for graphing... which they had to do on the graphing calculator obviously, and we knew it was going to be a problem, it wasn’t going to work. 

So, we looked into what’s available. I don’t know, in these modern times with the computers and everything, you would just think that they have all that stuff out there, and they didn’t. We had tried everything. There was a program; we downloaded it and we got it to work on the computer. 

So, I had to go through getting a computer line in my room and him hooked up so he could log onto it. We had to move his chair to the other side of the room. That was a major problem. Then, we tried to log on. Well, the system would never let him log on. They kept changing his logon, and so we could call down. Well, obviously they wouldn't come up during the classroom period, and they wouldn't answer me for days, so that got frustrating. Then, we were experimenting with the program and it was hard, because I had to give up time to do it. I had to meet with the itinerant to do it, so she knew what to do when I wasn’t there. 

Finally, I had to call Texas Instruments and try to find out if there is a quicker way to do things. If we just graphed a simple line and we wanted to know where it crossed, like the x-axis... students could just see the point and they could tell me what it is. So, we thought it would just go there if we told it to. No, it goes through every single point. So, if he is way off the line and he wants to go to that point, it would take him a long, long time to get there. It just was not, at that point, convenient for us to even use it. We got to the point where he would not actually be doing the graphing. He would be able to tell people points, and then we would have them graph on a sheet of paper. 

So, we had to give up the idea of the calculator, which surprised me, because I really thought the technology was there.