GRAPHING CALCULATOR AS A TOOL FOR ENHANCING THE EFFICACY OF MATHEMATICS TEACHING

New trends in mathematics teaching have emerged during recent years. These trends are connected with the current approach to school mathematics as a component of education in general, where mathematics is viewed as a tool for practical life. The rapid progress of technology is one of the aspects that have affected mathematics teaching at all levels, including the preparation of prospective teachers. In the traditional teaching of mathematics the teacher passes complete information to the students and the students are passive recipients, while the integration of technology (computers, calculators, www resources) encourages and enables new approaches and procedures in mathematics teaching and learning- in particular a deeper investigation of problems, discovery of connections between phenomena etc. Furthermore, technology can help to develop a better understanding of abstract mathematical concepts by their visualization or graphic representation; we can show relationships between objects and their properties. Such deeper understanding of concepts will in turn increase the ability of the students to acquire a better working knowledge of mathematics. The article deals with the utilisation of graphing calculators in pre-service education of prospective mathematics teachers at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. We use this type of technology in some of the subjects included in their study programs – specifically in “Didactics of mathematics ” and “Methods of Problem Solving”. According to our experience it is advantageous to use graphing calculators in these subjects, especially when we introduce new important mathematical concepts, such as function, because most of the properties of functions can be found from the graphs drawn on the calculator display