Alyson:

What (if any) pedagogical benefits do you believe graphic calculators offer and why?

Graphics calculators are a quick way to check graphs and to compare different graphs. They are difficult to master, but if you use them all the time it’s not too difficult to use them for creating most graphs and to input data so you don’t have to plot it out yourself. It’s also got the advantage of being small and portable, which other technological devices such as Maple and Excel don’t ahve.

Graphics calculators allow you to chack your work and also complete work much faster. Students take a long time to draw their own graphs and a lot of the time it isn’t necessary for them to draw it. Unless the specific idea of the lesson is teaching them how to draw graphs, there’s no reason to waste more time making them create a simple graph that they already know how to draw. More time looking at the graph and less time drawing it means there are more possibilities to discuss its implications and any deeper concepts that arise.