ABSTRACT
One debate dominates all others when it comes to the place of digital technologies in mathematics education: the controversy surrounding the acceptability of calculator use. Whenever the public discusses school standards, or politicians broach revision of the national curriculum, the same sound-bites surface about the ‘danger of producing a “Sat-Nav” generation of students overly reliant on technology’, who ‘reach for a gadget every time they need to do a simple sum’. The opinions that public and politicians express about this all too familiar tool indicate the preoccupations that they bring to any wider consideration of the place of digital technologies in school mathematics. Thus the fi rst half of this chapter will explore the terms of the public debate over calculator use, and then examine the educational reality in more depth. In view of the trend that will emerge in which digital technologies are valued more as pedagogical than mathematical tools, the second half of the chapter will examine how teachers’ classroom technology use links to their broader pedagogical orientation. Here, the chapter will consider the continuing debate around the use and value of interactive whiteboards; then it will examine contrasting approaches to the classroom use of dynamic geometry.
