The strength of the community: how GeoGebra can inspire technology integration in mathematics teaching

During the past decades, it has been demonstrated that a large number of enthusiasts can alter conventional thinking and models of development and innovation. The success of open source projects like Linux, Firefox, Moodle, and Wikipedia shows that collaboration and sharing can produce valuable resources in a variety of areas of life. With the increased accessibility of affordable computing technologies in the 1980s and 90s there was overly enthusiastic sentiment that computers would become rapidly integrated into education, in particular to mathematics teaching and learning [8]. However, numerous studies showed only a marginal uptake of technology in classrooms after more than two decades [2]. There were many attempts and projects to encourage wider technology integration, but many of these attempts led to only marginal changes in classroom teaching [1]. While working on the open source project GeoGebra, we are witnessing the emergence of an enthusiastic international community around the software. It will be interesting to see whether or not this community approach could penetrate the difficulties posed by technology use in mathematics teaching. Although the community around GeoGebra is growing astonishingly fast, we realised that both members of the community and teachers considering starting using GeoGebra need extensive support. To be able to offer such assistance, we have established the International GeoGebra Institute (IGI) last year. In this paper, we will offer a brief outline of the current state of both