Blogging Action: tools to explore, an activity to try, a concept to ponder







Blogging Action: tools to explore, an activity to try, a concept to ponder



Edited By Ashli Black @mythagon

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Join the crew from the Direct Measurement Video Project at tonight’s Global Math as they share their work, videos, and teaching ideas for students to learn to build and evaluate mathematical models.

The conference starts at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific. Click here to join!

Last week at Global Math, Ryan Seth Jones presented on Conceptual understanding is not enough! Supporting students to see statistics as epistemic toolsClick here to view the recording and learn how this variable can engage students, and how to helps students describe it while learning how statistics can reveal the world’s secrets.

Things to Check Out

Dreambox On My Mind

Recently several members of the #MTBoS have written about games and what they believe makes a good educational math game. Dan Meyer has written/spoken/video-recorded many thoughts on how gaming and apps can be integrated into math class or how math class can be integrated into games and apps or both!

Picking up from where Audrey McLaren left off two weeks ago about Tracy Zager’s popular and controversial post about her criteria for fact-based math apps where she gives two suggestions of games that meet her non-negotiable criteria. They are Dreambox Learning and Bunny Times. Here are Tracy’s twitter thoughts about Dreambox when her daughters began their free-trial at home.

This week Dreambox continued to be on #MTBoS minds. Kent Haines, who also uses Dreambox with his children, wrote an extensive review of his first impressions. Christopher Danielson also recently reproduced how Dreambox communicates with parents.

As a special education teacher I really like Dreambox for two reasons: 1) it was developed in concert with Cathy Fosnot and 2) it is digitally multi-modal (using models, visual representations, and “hands-on” tools to develop conceptual understanding).

However, I am not without constructive criticism. Though Dreambox understands learning is not linear, I do wish they would give teachers more control over which lessons students were assigned because I believe teachers are always better than an algorithm!

written by Andrew Gael (@bkdidact)

Two Truths & One Lie

I don’t have any tattoos.
I played college basketball.
I had dreadlocks in college.

The ice-breaker fun-fact game Two Truths and A Lie can be fun. So when Jon Orr recently posted Better Questions – Two Truths & One Lie, I was instantly hooked. I knew there would be a math spin and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. Read the post and have your students play along.

What I love most:

  • Minimal teacher prep
  • Simple design
  • Student creativity
  • Error analysis
  • Stickies

Screen-Shot-2016-01-25-at-12.40.35-PM.pngScreen-Shot-2016-01-25-at-1.49.00-PM.png

As with most things, do them in moderation. I wouldn’t recommend you play this game every day, every week.  However, it’s seems like a great way to spice up class (and assessments) at times. I challenge you to try it once this week and report back to Jon Orr and me on Twitter.

*I didn’t play college basketball.

 
written by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)


A lengthy twitter discussion happened last week when Nat Banting posted the image above along with the following tweet:

[click the picture to choose the red pill and go into the rabbit hole–you’ve been warned]
The yes!-no!-maybe? responses that followed did much to illuminate how different folks think about rate, ratio, percent, and percentages. I highly recommend clicking the picture and following some of the threads as I found them terrific for challenging and refining my personal ideas about ratio and rate in ways my pre-service program and teaching these topics never quite did. One of my favorite interactions:

The entire discussion is one reason to love twitter. edufolks from all over chimed in with ideas and ways to think about ratio and rate and citations from articles with differing opinions. My brain ached a bit by the end, but in the best of ways.
Nat ended the day with this tweet,

referencing Kate Nowak‘s latest blog post outlining her current thoughts about rate that was spurred on by all the twitter chatter and is a recommended read.

Lots of great thinking and all from one question and a picture. One more reason why the sharing space on twitter is such a great place to hang out at. Thanks, Nat!
 

written by Ashli Black (@mythagon)

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Something For Everyone







Something For Everyone



Edited By Carl Oliver @carloliwitter

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Engage students with statistics in a way that helps them struggle with the ubiquitous challenge of variability. In this week’s session, Conceptual understanding is not enough! Supporting students to see statistics as epistemic tools., Ryan Seth Jones will frame statistical work as modeling variability and then discusses the learning implications for different kinds of variability. Learn how this variable can engage students, and how to helps students describe it while learning how statistics can reveal the world’s secrets. To register for the talk click here

Last week at Global Math Brette Woessner (@ReadySetBrette) described ways to improve student collaboration in her talk Reducing Status to Improve Collaboration. Letting your class work in groups has been shown to let students build valuable teamwork skills and can form the right conditions for powerful conversation among students. If you want to listen to Brette’s recording click here 

Great Blogging Action

Getting Hands On

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Teaching 6th graders for the past three years, I’ve found teaching students prime factorization to be one of the driest topics, so it was extremely refreshing and exciting to see teacher and filmmaker Thom H. Gibson’s (@gibsonedu) vlog “Bring on the Primes“. Students got hands on with interlocking cubes as they learned about prime factorization. Check out the entire video featuring engaged students and Thom reflecting on his struggles with using manipulatives and sharing how the lessons went. Did I mention there is also an original prime factorization song involved?! 
 
Thom isn’t the only one eager to have his students play with manipulatives. In his latest post, Sam Shah’s students explore the question, ““Which [regular] polygons fit together snugly? Which don’t?” (sans manipulatives) Unable to find regular polygons tiles (other than a triangle, square, and hexagon), he turns to twitter and #mtbos (Christopher Danielson and Kate Nowak) comes to the rescue. Sam now has some wonderful and amazing regular polygon tiles to use in the future! Sam wants more than just students playing around with the manipulatives before getting into algebra. He wants his students to use the manipulatives and “gasp with surprise and horror and delight” as they realize the connection between configurations of different sided regular polygons that fit snugly (Like the 3, 7, and 42). Read the rest of Sam’s post to read how he plans to do that!
 
Written by Sahar Khatri (@khatrimath)
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Hot on Twitter

Symmetry!

Tessellations seem to have taken over my Twitter feed.  And it seems like there is one person behind the curtain.
 

 

I’m not going to lie, when @samjshah and his awesomeness come across my blog feed I’m guaranteed to spend the next 2 hours lost down a rabbit hole of Dr. Math and Wolfram Alpha, trying to make sense of it all.  Each time I leave with an understanding that’s clear as mud…but I still leave a little smarter than when I entered.  It seems like there’s 25 grade levels between Sam and I, but he makes me want to know what he’s up to so I always read on.
This week Sam shared the beautiful gift he received from the man behind the curtain. If you don’t know about the 4, 5, 20. And the 3, 8, 24. And the 3, 10, 15. And the 4, 5, 20 you need to check this out.  24 hours later I’m still digging.
 
Written by @gfletchy (Graham Fletcher)
 

 
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January 10 kicked off the 2016 MTBoS Blogging Initiative, an event which encourages new and veteran bloggers alike to write once a week – just for 4 weeks – on a specific topic.  This year, Initiative Masters Sam ShahTina Cardone and Julie Reulbach have not only set up the four challenges, but they have paired mentor bloggers with mentees in an effort spread the joy of the MTBoS.  The first week’s challenge was to blog about One Good Thing that happened in school during the week OR to fully chronicle an entire day in a teacher’s life.  

I loved hearing about details of the days of people who I’ve been conversing with on line for several years – you know, walking a mile in someone else’s shoes?  Maybe reading a blog is not the same as living someone else’s life, but it is a glimpse into the reality of someone who may be only (at this point) a virtual presence in your world.  And you may meet someone completely new.  For example, in scrolling through the comments for Week 1’s assignment (everyone who participates shares a link to their blog post for the week), I discovered the blog of Joanne L. Robert, a middle school teacher in North Carolina, whose blog is a treasure trove of math, science and inspirational links, including this very cool video

What struck me most about the Day in the Life posts I looked at (including my own at a whopping 1700 words) was HOW MUCH WE ALL DO every day.  Some posts just gave me good ideas from old and new acquaintances.  Amy Zimmer, over at Mrs. Z Teaches in Mathland, talked about a trig sum and difference formula activity which I must definitely borrow, especially because it involves neon paper!    This week’sassignment is to write about a favorite activity, lesson, or tool that we use, so the posts are bound to be filled to with great ideas, like Julie’s glowing post on deltamath.  Check out the comments to the assignment post as the week goes on for links.


​Today is the day on which we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., and by clicking on a link in an intriguing tweet I came across this compelling post about Hip Hop Chess written by a highly enterprising (and thoughtful) physical education teacher.  It’s got me thinking about how I can integrate some chess into my classes, and how I might be able to connect to students whose love of math is, well, not.  
 
Cheers – 
Wendy Menard (@wmukluk)

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This Week’s Newsletter is a Little Gamey







This Week's Newsletter is a Little Gamey



Edited By Brian Bushart @bstockus

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Reducing Status to Improve Collaboration
Presented by Brette Woessner (@ReadySetBrette)

Collaboration is a powerful tool to help students build knowledge together and deepen their understanding of math practice and content standards. But this collaboration is not innate for many students who enter our classrooms. Collaboration must be explicitly and purposefully taught, scaffolded, and reinforced. Not only that, but we must be aware of and strategically combat status issues in our classrooms that stand in the way of equitable student learning. Let’s chat practical ideas about norms, task design, and assessment strategies that will position all of our students to grow as math learners together!

To join the meeting when it starts at 9pm Eastern (or RSVP if it’s before 9pm), click here.

Last week at Global Math Tina Cardone and Dylan Kane gave us a taste of the PCMI experience prior to the January 15 deadline. 
Click here to watch the recording.

Care for a Game?

Criteria for Good Games and Apps

This week, one particular post kept flying across my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and I didn’t pay much attention other than to vaguely wonder what a “fact-based app” was. On Friday, someone who is not even a teacher shared it with me, and I finally woke up and paid attention. It was this piece by Tracy Johnston Zager (@tracyzager ): “My Criteria for Fact-Based Apps”.  A fact-based app is typically marketed as fun and engaging games or activities for students to practice math skills at their own pace. I’ve had some experience with some of these apps, and after reading Tracy’s post, I realized what it was that was bothering me about a lot of them. Most of them use the math as a dangling carrot. There is a distinct border between the math and the fun.

Tracy lists her three baseline, non-negotiable criteria for recommending such an app: that there be no time constraint, that there be a conceptual basis for the operations, and that mistakes must be handled productively. Sounds kind of like a good classroom!

Tracy names a few apps that do it well, as well as some that don’t. I’ve always loved Explorelearning’s gizmos, and although they aren’t listed in the post, (which Tracy points out is not exhaustive), I think they would meet the criteria. She also directs readers to teacher.desmos.com (where I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately), for examples of engaging activities in which the math is indistinguishable from the fun (for example, marbleslides). I couldn’t agree more.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

Number Grid Tic-Tac-Toe

Speaking of math games, Joe Schwartz posts an excellent game that he developed for his second grade students: Number Grid Tic-Tac-Toe. In the game, students try to get 4 squares in a row. All they have to do is write in the correct number to take the space! It’s a wonderful way to build fluency with the 100 grid while also giving kids a chance to think strategically about winning the game! The math is embedded deeply in the game, and kids may notice all sorts of patterns within the board that they wouldn’t otherwise notice.

Joe posts about some extensions and wrinkles that you can add to make the game more challenging. I don’t know what Tracy Zager thinks of this math game, but I have a pretty good guess…

Written by Kent Haines (@MrAKHaines)

Five By Five

Recently, I came across Sara VanDerWerf’s (@saravdwerf) post about a game she has been keeping secret for 24 years! I’m not sure why she has chosen now to break her silence, but what’s done is done…unless you work in her district. In which case she is very clear that you are not allowed to use the game if you teach at a school that feeds into hers. (She’s so passionate about it, I felt obligated to share that caveat.)

Sara’s class plays this game only *one* day per school year, the day before winter break. This might give the impression that this is a throwaway game, but in fact there’s some interesting strategy to it. So much so that one reader went so far as to design an Excel spreadsheet to find out how to optimize the score. You can find a link to that spreadsheet in the comments on her post along with a few other reader-recommended games.

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

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Teaching Problems, Other Classrooms, and a Blogging Initiative







Teaching Problems, Other Classrooms, and a Blogging Initiative



Edited By Ashli Black @mythagon

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Online Professional Development Sessions

Join Tina Cardone (@crstn85) and Dylan Kane (@math8_teacher) tonight to get a taste of the PCMI experience, just in time for the January 15th application deadline! The conference starts at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific. Click here to join!

Things to Check Out

Teaching Problems & the Problems of Teaching

If getting Dan Meyer’s pot stirrer award wasn’t good enough to get you reading Dylan Kane’s blog then maybe this will be. Dylan has begun to unpack Magdalene Lampert’s Teaching Problems and the Problems of Teaching in a series of posts on his blog. Dylan is going chapter by chapter to dig into the type of ambitious mathematics teaching that Lampert writes about in her book. Dylan starts here, so you might as well, where he describes his background and his goals for reading the book.  

Michael Pershan also investigates Lampert’s book from another angle, that of the teacher/writer.

If you want to know more about Lampert’s ambitious math teaching go to TEDD.org developed by the University of Washington, where Lampert’s ideas are at the forefront of their work.  

All of this has inspired me to do my own investigation of Lampert’s book and look what just came in the mail!

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written by Andrew Gael (@bkdidact)

Other Classrooms

Have you ever been in a colleague’s classroom, for whatever reason, even if it was for only 30 seconds? Were you able to notice anything?

Two years ago, my colleague and I made it a habit to visit each other’s classrooms during our prep periods. Besides the #MTBoS, it was the BEST professional development available to me each day. I was able to steal ideas and immediately use them with my students. I share this experience with teachers at conferences and trainings, but never have anything to point them to that might guide, encourage, and support them in this wonderful opportunity. Enter Steve Wyborney.

Steve Wyborney has posted a practical (and concise) series of posts on his blog titled Stepping Into Each Other’s Classrooms.

Steve says it best:

There may be teachers just a few moments down the hallway who are using highly effective strategies that could quickly empower our own instruction and positively impact our students.

I offer 4 challenges and several practical suggestions to turn that nearby opportunity into a powerful possibility.

In addition to the posts, Steve has included “The Animated Learning Walks Series” of videos for you and colleagues to refer to. Check them out and watch how you will take your teaching to a new level of awesome. My favorite is The Teaming Exchange.
 

 
written by Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel)


Wanting to blog more in the new year? Check out the 2016 Blogging Initiative! The first challenge is to start a blog and get the About Page going if you’re new to blogging or dust off and update your blog if you’ve already got a blog rolling. Make sure to check out some of the badge options to add to your blog if you’re participating in the challenge!

Start now by reading through the comments and picking a few folks to follow and support!
 

written by Ashli Black (@mythagon)

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