Using educational technology applications to enhance collegiate mathematics education

Classrooms in the United States today look very different than they did 10 or 20 years ago. Mobile technology has a pervasiveand too often disruptive presence in today’s learning environments, but it does not necessarily have to be an obstacle forstudents’ learning. In our own classrooms, we have embraced the idea that technology, such as cell phones and tablets, is hereto stay as a powerful force. Thus, we strive to find ways to harness our students’ obsessions with the technology they cannotseem to function without, by incorporating it into our weekly, if not daily, mathematics instruction at the collegiate level.

The following paragraphs detail the ways in which we utilize two smartphone compatible applications, namely Edmodo (Edmodo, Inc., 2017) and Socrative (Socrative, 2011), in class routines in a mathematics education course for preserviceelementary and middle school teachers that concentrates on mathematics content and pedagogy for Grades 6-8. In order to bemindful of our students’ differing social backgrounds and financial capabilities, we focus on the free versions of theseapplications so that extra costs are not a prohibitive issue that serve as an obstacle for their integration and use.