![]() (Phones and computers are banned.)īasically I am trying to get students comfortable with assessments using the hardware so they won’t freak out on our state test. I am also preparing my students for an IB exam at the end of their senior year and there is a specific list of approved calculators. (See Simon Sinek’s view of cell phones as an “ addiction to distraction.”) We believe the distraction factor is a negative impact on learning. Students waste time changing music while working problems, causing both mistakes due to lack of attention and inefficiency due to electronic distractions. They can use them at home and I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m not allowed to let them use mobile devices in class. School policy is that phones are in lockers. Internet access capabilities and cellular capabilities that make it way too easy for the device to turn from an analysis/insight tool to the CheatEnable 3000 model. It’s too easy for students to share answers via text or picture. Here are their reasons, along with representative quotes, ranked from most common to least. 366 of those teachers offered reasons for that decision. I suspect I’m oversampling for calculator-friendly teachers here, by virtue of drawing that sample from a digital medium like Twitter.ħ34 of those teachers allow a hardware graphing calculator but not a mobile phone on tests. The vast majority of respondents allow hardware calculator use in their classes. So why spend the money on a second device that is much less powerful? In many cases, the student already has a mobile phone. And the mobile phone sends text messages, takes photos, and accesses webpages. You pay less than 2x more for the mobile phone and you get hardware that is between 30x and 300x more powerful than the hardware calculators. (Email readers may need to click through to see the statistics.) Here are some statistics for high-end HP and Texas Instruments graphing calculators along with a low-end Android mobile phone. I asked the question because hardware calculators don’t make a lot of financial sense to me. (Full disclosure: I work for a company that distributes a free four function, scientific, and graphing calculator for mobile phones and other devices.) Mobile phone calculators (like those you can download on your Android or iOS phone).Hardware calculators (like those sold by Texas Instruments, Casio, HP, etc.).I wanted to know if they allow calculators a) during classwork, b) during tests, and also which kinds of calculators: I'm unsure if that solves the last problem, though plugging it into Wolfram Alpha will tell you.Yesterday, I asked teachers on Twitter about their classroom calculator policy and 978 people responded. ![]() Another good rule of thumb is that if one interpretation gives an algebraic answer, use that interpretation. If it's unspecified and of the form $360/n$ for some integer $n$, use degrees. If it's unspecified and a $\pi$ shows up, you should assume radians. In contexts where you think your professor has simplified by opting to not use the degree symbol, some general rules of thumb can be applied. If none of the problems had been marked with a degree symbol, I might think otherwise since $42.5$ is much bigger than $2\pi$. I would guess that $42.5$ is supposed to be in radians, because everywhere else in the problem the professor has been careful to use the degree symbol, making me think its omission is deliberate. This interpretation agrees with the rules of thumb that I am about to give everywhere that it's applicable, leaving the last problem. If you have been taught the technically correct rule, definitely use it. However, humans tend to be bad at being technically correct, so if you haven't been told to use radians unless otherwise specified I would consider making contextual judgement calls. The technically correct thing to do is to assume that everything is in radians unless otherwise specified. The ° symbol means "degrees." Any answer marked with that is definitely in degrees.
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