Teachers’ instrumental geneses when integrating spreadsheet software

The spreadsheet is not a priori a didactical tool for mathematics education. It may progressively become such an instrument through the process of professional geneses on the part of teachers. This chapter describes the beginning of such a genesis, and presents some results concerning teachers’ professional development with spreadsheets by examining the outcomes of two different sets of data. Theoretical notions, such as instrumental distance and double instrumental genesis supported the analysis of data leading to a comparison of a teacher who is integrating spreadsheets for the first time in her practices with the practices of teachers who are more expert with spreadsheets. The similarities found in the ways they use the tool leads to some hypotheses on the importance of these common elements as key issues in teachers’ ICT practices.