Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Rich Math Tasks & 5 Practices in Online Teaching

Presented by Theresa Wills

Explore strategies to implement rich mathematical tasks and discussions in your synchronous online classroom. In this webinar, you will engage in interactive slides to complete a task. You will incorporate multiple representations such as using concrete, pictorial, and abstract. Then, all participants will engage in a math talk that utilizes the 5 practices. Register to see how to transition your pedagogical practices into the online environment and keep your math class fun, interactive, collaborative, and rigorous.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for this webinar click here!

Next Week 

Making (Math) Thinking Visible: Embracing Edtech to Help Students Demonstrate Understandings

Presented by Stacey Roshan

This session will examine specific examples using Pear Deck, Flipgrid, and Sutori. Participants will learn how to create student-paced Pear Deck activities with embedded Flipgrid prompts to create exercises that allow students to reflect on how they are understanding the new information they are receiving. At the conclusion of the Pear Deck activity, teachers can use Pear Deck Takeaways to have students revise errors and talk about how their understanding of the topic has improved to help them arrive at a new solution to the problem. Having students evaluate how they approached problems done in the past is an important component of the learning process. By actively reflecting on what they learned and how they learned it, students are able to grow their understandings beyond rote memorization. And in the reflection process, students become aware of holes in their knowledge. This awareness is a powerful component in helping students learn how to learn.

Sutori is another edtech tool that will be showcased in this session. Participants will be walked through an activity asking students to look back on past work and document how it relates to their new knowledge. Reflection is key to learning, and this project provides students the opportunity to tap into prior knowledge and form a deeper understanding of connections between the chapters being studied. As with the Pear Deck activity, Flipgrid is infused into this activity to allow students the opportunity to talk out their thought process directly to their webcam.

Register ahead of time by clicking here!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

Shared with permission from Bean, this is a different kind of article written for the GMD Newsletter…
 

I love grappling with everything related to mathematics education. I dream about it in all of its puzzling, perplexing, and messy glory and shortcomings. It preoccupies my every weekday-thought; who am I kidding, it also seeps into all of my weekend thoughts. 
 
So it breaks my heart every time Bean and I sit down to do math homework and my little one cries out with frustration. This little kid, who for years has been my eager partner in #tmwyk, now dissolves into tears every time we log in to Google Classroom. I’m serious. She’s a puddle on the floor at my feet. My arms cannot begin to gather the viscous pool of disengagement and defiance spreading across the carpet at my feet. (@MathStudio_Usha says she is “her Mother’s Daughter”.) I can’t help but feel like an abysmal failure both as an educator and a mother that the love I have for learning and the joy I experience when mucking about with mathematics isn’t shared by my only child. 
 
We sit in seething resentment, my mind spinning with all the strategies that I would normally try and wondering if I should in turn threaten, cajole, punish, surrender, my mini me into getting the worksheets done so I can feel better about it. 
 
“Mama, I want to show you the Coronavirus tracker.”
 
I’m still angry and don’t give a sh_t about the tracker of this stupid disease that’s ruining my life. (See how in the midst of a global pandemic, we continue to center ourselves?)
 
She goes on to show me anyways; comparing the total confirmed cases in Canada to the total confirmed cases globally. (By the end of Grade 4, she only needs to be able to read, represent, compare, and order whole numbers to 10000.)

She reads, describes, and interprets the secondary data presented in this image, pausing to pose purposeful questions to ensure I understand the magnitude of the information she’s sharing.

She effortlessly toggles back and forth between the chart view and the table view in the section below, carefully reviewing the labels on the axes while drawing conclusions from the comparisons between provinces.

It took me longer than I care to admit to really hear the depth of understanding my daughter has developed for herself; the complex data she has unpacked and was now offering to me as an olive branch. A glimpse into the learning she was choosing to engage in and generously inviting me to enter.
 
I have no profound words of wisdom, no wonder-filled revelation about humanity. This is simply a story that I wanted to share. An experience that gave me some comfort. A reminder that we don’t need to force learning because children (and grown-ups) will learn about things that interest them when they are ready.

@HKhodai

Wealth, Shown to Scale

Megan Bang (@meganbang3), an education professor who has written incredible articles on indigenous STEM practices (among other work), shared this website of wealth inequality, shown to scale. The authorship is not clearly indicated, but the website is hosted through Matt Korostoff’s github account, so he may be its creator. Scroll through everything. It takes time. But then again, that may be the point.

mathartchallenge

This has been covered already in the GMD, but it’s worth plugging yet another reminder that #mathartchallenge continues, thanks to the incredible work of Annie Perkins (@anniek_p) and everyone else who has been creating math art from their homes and other spaces.

Math Summer 2020

Howie Hua (@howie_hua) is organizing two hour-long sessions of low-floor, high-ceiling problems every Wednesday from 10am to 12pm (PDT) from June through August. If you would like to host a problem, please sign up in the google doc.

On a separate note, Howie has been killing it in the math twitter humor department recently. You can find a repository of some past tweets that have been well-received. For some, a little bit of humor can go a long way to help through these rough times.

@melvinmperalta