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Should Teachers Let Students Use Their Phones Instead of Buying Expensive Graphing Calculators?

I’m excited to hear that both Geogebra and Desmos have both released apps that can allow students to use their phones as graphing calculators during tests, potentially eliminating the need for expensive graphing calculators (as long as all students have their own smart phones, and that they have enough free to space to download the app).

One app creates a log of phone use during the test, and indicates with a color coded bar (green for good, red for violation) at the top of the app whether students have used internet or other applications during the test.

Definitely something that can help with equity, because not all students can afford to purchase $100+ graphing calculators. And why should they want to anyway, when most of them already have a personal computer in their pocket that can do everything a graphing calculator can, and more?

If there is a way for teachers to make sure students aren’t cheating, like these apps allow, then by all means, we should let students use the app instead of buying a redundant device.

Our humble beginnings

What formed first, you may ask, our mouths or our anus? It’s not completely unlike asking, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” The answer to both questions is the latter: the egg, and, at least for us human beings, the anus.

We human beings are deuterostomes, which means “second mouth.” Think of the book in the bible, Deuteronomy, which means “second book” or “second law.” Protostomes are those creatures whose mouth formed first, before the anus. They include worms, insects, crustaceans, snails, squid, and octopi. Deuterostomes include us, other animals with backbones like lemurs, lizards, salamanders, frogs, and also the echinoderms, spiny skinned creatures like starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers.

Does this mean that we are more closely related to starfish than to octopi? It seems insufficient to count only the beginnings, when we may have taken different paths but arrived at similar places: with two eyes, and the keen intelligence to open jars to get at what’s inside.

Another surprise is that when the first cells divide after fertilization, they are determined in protostomes, but not for deuterostomes. Is this way a starfish are able to keep regenerating arms? Do the cells maintain that undifferentiated ability to become whatever is needed? And how were people able to determine that the early cells in deuterostomes remained undifferentiated? Did researchers actually go in and separate some cells of a fertilized egg/blastula, and all the separated cells became whole animals?

Source:

https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Protostomes_vs_Deuterostomes.html