A practical pedagogy for GeoGebra

Use of ICT is now one of the five basic skills in Norwegian schools. But what does it mean to use ICT and how do we talk about using ICT? In our opinion, the phrase ¿we use ICT in our teaching¿ is as meaningless as saying ¿we use paper and pencils in our teaching¿. The real focus should be on the learning content and the methods and cognitive skills involved. We are convinced that most people involved in education will agree that seeing a visualization of the parameters in the quadratic functions is a totally different learning experience than, say, searching the web for information. Still, both of these experiences have been referred to as ¿using ICT¿. Just like in teaching without ICT, the teachers are faced with a plethora of choices regarding method, context, progress and activity, to name a few. We will propose one way of communicating our teaching and learning experiences using ICT. In this workshop we will restrict ourselves to one type of computer software, namely dynamical geometrical software (DGS). In particular we will limit ourselves to how we work with GeoGebra in classroom situations. We want to be able to see what we use ICT for, and not just that it is being used. In this regard, we have tried to categorize our use of GeoGebra into different learning modes. We use three different modes for this. Demonstrations, that show why something is true, illustrations, that illuminates some kind of mathematical concept, and activities, where the student explore mathematics. We emphasize that this is not an attempt to make a permanent categorization, but rather, to help us as teachers communicate, think about and understand our teaching with ICT.