Characterizing questions and their focus when pre-service teachers implement dynamic geometry tasks

• Preservice teachers designed technology-based tasks and implemented those tasks with students.
• The ways pre-service mathematics teachers implemented technology-based tasks were analyzed.
• Different ways teachers focused students’ attention on technology and mathematics are described.

When technology is used in classrooms new interactions among students, the teacher, and technology are enabled. The purpose of this study was to examine the ways pre-service mathematics teachers implemented technology-based tasks with individual advanced middle-school students. Pre-service teachers posed questions that focused students on features of technology and geometry in different classifiable ways. In particular, there were instances when teachers focused only on mathematics or technology. There were also instances when the teacher suggested students use the technology for the purpose of noticing mathematics and other times when the teacher would pose a mathematics question or statement with the assumption that students would use technology in response. Analysis of six pre-service teachers’ is provided along with a classification system.