Abstract
The potential of ICT tools for learning have been extensively studied, with a main focus on their possible use by students and the subsequent benefits for them. However, there has been the tendency to underestimate the complexity of the teacher’s role in exploiting this potential. In this chapter, we assume a semiotic mediation perspective and discuss different kinds of resources which are offered to teachers to enhance the teaching–learning activity centred on the use of an ICT tool: by resource for the teacher we mean any artefact which may help the teacher accomplish her educational objectives. Taking a semiotic mediation perspective means to acknowledge the central role of signs in teaching–learning activity: the focus is on semiotic processes, specifically production of signs and their transformation. Fostering or guiding these processes is a crucial issue and a demanding task for the teacher. Consequently, from such a perspective, a resource for the teacher is any artefact that can help her promoting and sustaining the development of those semiotic processes. In this chapter, we discuss the teacher’s use of specific resources – namely written texts – with respect to the semiotic processes which she is expected to orchestrate in the different moments of the teaching sequence.
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- 1.
Assuming a semiotic mediation perspective, Mariotti and Maracci (2010) address the issue of how an ICT tool can be a resource for the teacher.
- 2.
The distinction between personal meanings and mathematical meanings may remind of Brousseau’s distinction between knowing (in French: connaissance) and knowledge (in French: savoir) (Brousseau, 1997). Even if they are not in antithesis, the two perspectives cannot be reduced to one another: the former stresses the semiotic dimension of the teaching--learning processes, which is in the shadow for the latter.
- 3.
Introduction to Analysis of the Infinite, Book II.
- 4.
In the text presented to the students some parts were omitted and diagrams and graphs were removed.
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Mariotti, M.A., Maracci, M. (2011). Resources for the Teacher from a Semiotic Mediation Perspective. In: Gueudet, G., Pepin, B., Trouche, L. (eds) From Text to 'Lived' Resources. Mathematics Teacher Education, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1966-8_4
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