Digital Technologies and Transformation in Mathematics Education

This chapter is a commentary on a collection of chapters that focus on the transformational potential of digital technologies for learning mathematics. I suggest that the theoretical perspectives represented within the collection cohere around theories that predominantly derive from sociocultural theory, with a focus on the mediating role of technologies in human activity. All of the chapters acknowledge the role of the teacher, and the importance of designing activities to exploit the semiotic potential of digital technologies for learning mathematics. However I argue that the chapters do not adequately take into account students’ out-of-school uses of digital technologies which are likely to impact on their in-school use of ‘mathematical’ technologies, and also the societal and institutional factors that structure the use of technologies in schools I also argue for the importance of scaling-up the design based studies represented in the collection and developing a model of professional development that ex-ploits the potential of networked communities of mathematics teach-ers in order to initiate large-scale transformation in mathematics classrooms.