My dear friend Krystal Shaw texted me this Vimeo Clip at 5:23am so I knew it had to be good…
My gut reaction…this is awesome!
The focus on number crunching has superseded our students’ ability to problem solve for far too long. There’s a definite need to develop our students’ computational fluency and number sense but you have to admit that as adults, most of us go to a calculator because it’s an awesome tool.
Wolfram Alpha made solving equations much easier and now PhotoMath has blown the door wide open. If the focus now shifts from solving equations and formulas to deriving them, we’ll all be better off because of it.
So here’s the question: if every student walked into math class with a smartphone and PhotoMath downloaded on to it….what would I teach?
Now I’m a sure there are glitches with PhotoMath but with each passing day technology pushes it way into our classrooms, which is a great thing. I’m all about job security and what I do know, is that apps can calculate but they can’t model mathematics and that’s where I come in as an educator.
Now students can begin to truly engage in SMP #2 and #4