Title: A Course on Using Technology to Teach Geometry
 Speaker: Heidi Burgiel, The Geometry Center

The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota has offered the course "Technology in the Geometry Classroom" three times over the past two years. As the course title suggests, the object is to instruct high school and middle school teachers on the uses of technology in teaching geometry.

To this end, students use tools including The Geometer's Sketchpad, Kaleidotile, Kali, the World Wide Web, and Bob Devaney's Chaos & Dynamics labs to complete challenging assignments on dynamical systems, classical geometry, and transformational geometry. These assignments include proving Monge's theorem, classifying the crystallographic groups, exploring the behavior of the family of functions f(x) = x^2 + c under iteration. Students also learn about writing and presentation of course materials on the World Wide Web.

A typical class period is three hours long and consists of a brief lecture, technical instructions, class discussion, an extended period of group work (including hands-on exercises, discussion of reading, and computer exploration), and the showing of a video tape.