Texas Instruments ....

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a program at Texas Instruments in Dallas. It was FREE and on a Saturday and it had to do with the new TI calculator called TI-Nspire. Here is a link so that you can get an inkling of what the TI-Nspire does .... and that is about all you will get .... an inkling. This new calculator is amazing ... add the software and a laptop and lots of training and practice and the potential in unlimited.



The session ran from 1-4:30 .... and that wasn't near enough time to even begin to understand all the possibilities of this tool. In fact, I spent a great deal of the time simply lost when it came to making my borrowed TI-Nspire do what the instructor wanted us to do! But I sure enjoyed watching him and watching the overhead and listening to the people around me.



In fact, I recall thinking that I wished a reporter from the Dallas Morning News had been there to report on the state of Math Teachers in the area. There I sat, on a Saturday afternoon, with 25-30 Math teachers ... some who had driven 250 miles to be there. Saturday .... a day which most teachers have off .... yet these teachers were there for 3.5 hours of training on a calculator which many of them don't even own! TI supplied the calculators for us to play with .... but we didn't get to keep them at the end (although we did get a nice T-shirt advertising the TI-Nspire and Math!) In fact, if I were still a classroom teacher, I probably wouldn't have been there myself .... you couldn't have paid me to go to a workshop on a Saturday afternoon ... I was very selfish of my weekend time before I started my own business and gave myself Friday's off. But I had seen online ads for the Nspire and I wanted to see what it could do! The workshop was FREE and I had a Friday off behind me and a leisurely Sunday ahead of me .... so why not go?


I am fairly certain that I was the only retired Math teacher there, besides the instructor, who used to teach math, retired, and now teaches for Texas Instruments. I was absolutely amazed by the energy and the diversity of all these teachers. There were men and women, very young, very old, and all ages in between .... white, black, hispanic and asian ... Honors teachers and Credit Recovery teachers .... some from the suburbs, many from DISD, some from Private Schools, most from Public. It was a dedicated and energetic grouping of Math teachers. I was very impressed.


The questions flew .... conversations got off-task .... people played with the calculators and got more off-task .... we exchanged ideas ... talked about other TI products we enjoy using .... the instructor kept pulling us back to his lesson .... but we mostly veered off. Most of the questions we asked him were difficult for him to answer as our questions varied as widely as the demographics we represented. He did have a lesson planned ... but many of our questions had to do with something later in the lesson .... so he would say "I'll get to that in a few minutes." I'm not sure if he ever got to those answers because more and more questions were fired at him as we continued to play with the calculators.

But, for the record .... teachers are a difficult audience!

In the end, 3.5 hours wasn't near enough time for for us to learn the calculator, but we did get a glimpse into it's possibilities. A few days later I received an email inviting me to attend a 3-day conference in Dallas surrounding TI technology for the classroom and featuring the TI-Nspire. The registration fee covers the conference AND I will get my very own TI-Nspire CAS handheld and software .... along with lots of training! Here is some info about the Conference which is going to be held Feb 29-March 2, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. If you want to see what Math teachers around Texas are like when you get them together .... come check it out!