DIGITAL LIBRARY
REVIEW OF THE TEACHING OF GEOMETRY IN SECONDARY: INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AS A LEARNING RESOURCE
Institute for Secondary Education / Comunidad de Madrid (SPAIN)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN09 Proceedings
Publication year: 2009
Pages: 353-360
ISBN: 978-84-612-9801-3
ISSN: 2340-1117
Conference name: 1st International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 6-8 July, 2009
Location: Barcelona ,Spain
Abstract:
The question, "How I teach geometry in high school?" Is the starting point of the review that I suggest, because as teacher I have observed that my students try to get the contents that Organic Law for Education (OLE) marks and they finish the stage of secondary education without assimilating and acquire well, the basic skills we have set ourselves.
My proposal a reflection of what could be the cause and raise some possible solutions. I will return from the intuitive geometry that proposed Poincaré. We’ll see the importance of teaching geometry from an interactive aspect, the help of information and communication technologies (ICT) and recover its dynamism.
We will present two resources, Geogebra and Wiris, showing its usefulness in the classroom through experiences.

The following items make up the body of the communication; some are covered from a completely empirical way, while others are personal views of the methodology that can be used for teaching geometry in Secondary Education.

1. Review of the learning skills of geometry in Secondary Education.

We will make a brief tour of the current Education Law, seeing that we should encourage in our classes about the processing of information and technologies skills.
We will present the meaning of learning skills, developing the sense of ICT skills. And we will focus on capabilities that students must acquire in Secondary Education.

2. Intuitive Geometry as a solution to build a solid foundation in learning.

Nowadays Geometry is one of the forgotten topics in Spanish Education. We will develop the idea as a child from birth to high school learns geometry from intuition but we forget this, and we teach from the logic during the secondary stage.
How can we work from the intuitive geometry? One answer to that question it is using of computer programs.
We know that ICT resources are very well accepted by our students motivates them and use them with ease.

3. Addressing the geometry from a dynamic point of view: ICT as learning resources.

We will discuss the usefulness of two computer programs: Geogebra and Wiris. The reason to choose them it’s because in my view, resources with which we work in class should be accessible to students. And both of them are free software.
We propose a resource, Geogebra, through several examples, for working with geometry in a dynamic way, ie to make the student to learn, with the simple gesture to interact with the shapes. See figure 1.

We can observe that if the points A, B and C are moved; there is another new triangle. But the orthocenter, the circumcenter and the centroid always belong to the same line.

In summary, ICT must be fully integrated into pedagogical processes, which requires a cognitive shift on the part of educators and curriculum developers.

Keywords:
technology, geometry, education.