week 14: photomath

I’ve heard of the photomath app before, but never knew anything about it until this year. Photomath is a free app that takes a picture of a math problem and then shows a step by step process for solving it. I’ve had a minimum of two students this year use it to cheat on assessments during virtual learning. The latest occuring this past week. What’s intriguing to me is that I noticed them using it because the strategies/method it provided and they wrote down is so much more sophisticated than the methods we’ve learned in class and way above their ability level. I ended up downloading the app myself and tested the problems and wal-la the work my students wrote is exactly what came from the app. This is frustrating to me because my hope and goal is for students to understand material. I feel like I bend over backwards to offer help and support student understanding and I don’t understand why they feel like they need to resort to cheating by using the app. Both students have been confronted. One parent is not happy with ME one bit for accusing her student of cheating. And I haven’t been able to reach the second student’s parents.