Online Professional Development Sessions

2015 Year in Review

And for a preview of next week’s talk ‘PCMI: The Experience’, try to work through problems 2-8 of this problem set. Don’t forget to read the directions!

Online Professional Development Sessions

Something to Read on Those Long Winter Nights

A Notable Progression

Whenever I write for GMD, I try to do so from a middle school perspective.  This week, the elementary teacher in me screamed at The Progression of Multiplication written by @gfletchy.  Not only does it give a quick but powerful view of multiplication from 2nd to 5th grade for elementary teachers, but I feel it will be as equally helpful to my middle school friends.  6th grade teachers need to know from where students’ understanding comes.  6th and 7th grade teachers alike will find a method for simplifying and factoring expressions within the strategies discussed within 3rd and 4th grades.  8th and 9th grade teachers can glean ideas for teaching the multiplication of binomials and polynomials from a conceptual perspective.  So much to learn here.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Career
 

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – or at least the most wonderful time to be a math teacher. There are some really smart people out there creating truly great tools for math teachers. The tools I’m writing about this week came to us from Desmos and GeoGebra.

This week, Christmas came early, thanks to Desmos. They released their new delight, their new game-changer, and it was literally a delightful game called Marbleslides. It’s easy to deploy to your students, it’s easy for them to jump right into it, it’s addictive, and it’s chock full of math goodness. It’s as if a really cool video game married the Desmos activity builder. You can read about it here, or you can just search #marbleslides on Twitter.  Or just sign up at teacher.desmos.com, and play it yourself!

A couple of weeks ago, GeoGebra released their newest feature – GeoGebra Groups. As if GeoGebra hadn’t already transformed my life enough, they’ve now made it really easy to combine many media, like for example a GeoGebra or a video, with a task, send it to all your students with one click, see their work, and have a discussion about it with them all in the same space. You can read more about it here.  All my students are now signed up, and I can’t wait to use it in the New Year.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

Count With Me
 

This week Joe Schwartz (@JSchwartz10A) shared the story of Alex, a 1st grader who is having some issues with counting. Is Alex counting 14 or 100 dogs? He thinks it’s both! Read Joe’s excellent blog post to hear more of Alex’s story.
Oh, and this is one time where you totally should check out the comments. No, seriously! Counting is something we might take for granted as adults, but it’s quite the complex and multi-faceted skill for young children to grapple with. The #MTBoS community came out in force to offer their thoughts and support.

Check out Joe’s post and the fantastic conversation in the comments at his blog.

Written by Brian Bushart (@bstockus)

The Global Math Department is looking for individuals who are interested in planning the Tuesday night webinars hosted on Big Marker. GMD bookers contact potential speakers regarding speaking opportunities, and provide them with details on planning sessions. If you are interested in being more involved with the Global Math Department, contact Heather at heather.m.kohn@gmail.com or Dylan at dkane47@gmail.com.

Online Professional Development Sessions

Things to Check Out

The Hour of Math…wait, Code! The Hour of Code!

Last week was marked on the educational calendar as computer science week. If you are not hip to coding in the classroom please go now to code.org, but then come back!

Now that you’re an expert at coding in the classroom you may be wondering, “What if I don’t have 30 devices for each student to become the next Mark Zuckerberg?” Well, they’ve thought of that too. Thinkersmith in partnership with code.org has devises a litany of “unplugged” coding activities for the device-less to also become programming wizards.  

Also Brian Aspinall has posted numerous activities to his blog about “unplugged” coding, here and here. Luckily for us coding shouldn’t just be limited to just one week during the school year. Code.org has a beyond the hour of code, which consists of courses and activities meant for what they refer to as ages 8-108.

For you geometry teachers, code.org also has something called Artist, where students explore geometry through coding.

Happy Coding!

Exploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere

In January, Jon Orr will be a mentor to help support math teachers new to this online community known as the Math Twitter Blogosphere. In his recent blog post, Jon says,

Following this weird #MTBOS hashtag on twitter has changed my teaching practice in so many ways. The people are amazing and always willing to share a lesson or strategy…

His post shares a glimpse of why he’s excited to mentor other teachers and how his collaboration with other teachers has benefited his students and teaching. Whether you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution or a way to deposit some good karma coins in your math teacher bank, join this initiative as a mentor or someone to be mentored.

Why say no, when it will feel so good to say yes? Exploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere.

The Global Math Department is looking for individuals who are interested in planning the Tuesday night webinars hosted on Big Marker. GMD bookers contact potential speakers regarding speaking opportunities, and provide them with details on planning sessions. If you are interested in being more involved with the Global Math Department, contact Heather at heather.m.kohn@gmail.com or Dylan at dkane47@gmail.com.

Online Professional Development Sessions

Great Blogging Action

Talking about Numbers

The proliferation of Number Talks in elementary schools across North America is astonishing.  As teachers scramble to learn and implement Number Talks, GMD’s Brian Bushart threw down a Number Talk PL gauntlet that shouldn’t go unrecognized. 
Whether you’re a savvy veteran of Number Talks or just diving in, you’ll walk away smarter than when you woke up.  You could take Brian’s post and immediately turn around and implement it at you own school.  Kudos to Brian and thanks for making us all a little smarter.
 

 
Last week Pierre Trancemontagn unveiled another beauty of a crowdsourcing website that supports the power of the #MTBoS and the work of effective Number Talks.  Number Talk Images is sure to follow the success of Which One Doesn’t Belong.  So check it out, fire up your camera, and spread the love.

 
And last but not least, Christy Sutton recently shared Always, Sometimes, Never questions her blog for k-5 folks.  K-2 teachers are screaming for more #MTBoS-like resources that support the lower grades and Christy delivered.  When you stop by…tell her thanks.
 
Written by @gfletchy (Graham Fletcher)

100 Numbers to Get Students to Talking

Group work has forever been the bane of my existence as a student and it continues into my teaching years. As a student, I was always the one who ended up doing all the work. As a teacher, I see one student who ends of doing most of the work while the others just copy the “smart one”. This past week Sara Vanderwerf (@saravdwerf) shared an activity to get all of her students talking just by finding 100 numbers within a given period. The goal, in Sara’s words, is to teach students “how to work in groups and teach them how to talk to one another”. The following highlights the activity:

• Students work in groups to find numbers in consecutive order, highlighting them in different colors.
• Students are timed with the goal being to get to the highest number possible.
• Time is set aside for multiple rounds so that groups attempt to reach a higher number each round than the previous round.
• While students are working, she takes pictures and shares them with her students after the activity, many of whom are so focused they didn’t even realize their photo was being taken! 
• The day ends with a reflection by students responding to, “What does great group work in math look like?” 
• The following day students work in groups to practice great group work!

Check out Sara’s blog for details as well as Megan Schmidt’s (@Veganmathbeagle) adaptation of the activity in her latest blog post. And do it! 

The Global Math Department is looking for individuals who are interested in planning the Tuesday night webinars hosted on Big Marker. GMD bookers contact potential speakers regarding speaking opportunities, and provide them with details on planning sessions. If you are interested in being more involved with the Global Math Department, contact Heather at heather.m.kohn@gmail.com or Dylan at dkane47@gmail.com.

Online Professional Development Sessions

Don’t go yet! We have great things to share.

Educating the Heart

One of the wonderful things about being a part of #mtbos is the opportunities to glean ideas and information from others.  This time, @lisabej_manitou post of notes and scattered thoughts from a recent brain based teaching and learning conference enlightened me.  In Notes and Scattered Thoughts from Learning & the Brain Conference, Lisa shares information about the correlation between stress and learning, building student resilience, tackling anxiety and educating the heart.

Implications for your math instruction

This post reminded me of articles and blog posts I’ve read about social emotional learning.  If we meet the needs of our students emotionally, or educate the heart, students will be in a better position to learn.  It is a matter of seeing them as real children first, versus a group of emotionless and sometimes nameless faces we much teach a list of standards before an arbitrary deadline.  (By the way, if you don’t know the names of the students sitting in your classroom, put yourself in their shoes, how would you feel if someone who is supposed to be investing in your life didn’t know your name.)

Equally important, Lisa’s post discussed building resilience and two key statements stuck out to me.

1. Build resilience by allowing time for information to stabilize and take root.

2. Nothing discourages mastery more than an adult who steps in and says: “Let me do that for you.”

How often do we spend two days on a concept and move forward to the next before students have time to digest the new material?  They are left in a state of confusion trying to make connections between the multiple concepts which can lead to anxiety.  How many times do we show students a procedure or process and in the end, it is only us who has the understanding of the concept?  Building resilience screams SMP 1, SMP 2 and SMP 3, which makes yet another argument of why the Standards for Mathematical Practice should be in the forefront of your teaching.

Lisa Bejarano’s post has stoked a fire I’ve had burning inside me for a while.  Perfect timing as I’m heading back to school after a week’s break.  I’m going in armed with strategies and information which will help me meet the needs of the students I will encounter.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

What’s Your Elevator Pitch to the Federal Government?
 

Tracy Zager posted a fascinating exchange she had with a potential congressman:

It’s not often that you get a politician genuinely asking “What should we be doing?” So what’s your elevator pitch to the federal government? What should the US Congress (or any country’s legislature) do to improve teaching and learning in our schools?

Join the conversation on Twitter. The thread starts here.

Written by Kent Haines (@MrAKHaines)

Some GeoGebra Love

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Desmos and the activity builder, and some folks have been under the impression that I have therefore lost my love for GeoGebra. As if! As I sit at this desk, I have a digital pile of gorgeous student-created GeoGebras to give feedback on, so believe me, I’m still a GeoGeholic. This week I’m writing about some great GeoGebra posts I found using #ggbchat. Here’s one by Neil Dickson (@GeoGebrain) about using it to introduce trigonometry.  I particularly loved how Neil combined the hi-tech with those old trig tables.  Jenny Krzystowczyk’s post (@jennyktechin) is about combining Google drive with GeoGebra to create an isosceles triangle lesson that engaged her students. The post that keeps pinging in my brain, however, is this one by Daniel Pearcy (@DanielPearcy) about the need to talk about good pedagogy when we talk about GGB, or any edtech tool.  He includes a link to a series of videos on that subject, based on his own presentation. I’m currently working my way through them, looking forward especially to “GeoGebra Pedagogy Part 5: Student-Centred Tasks”.  And I love that he made these videos for people who couldn’t be there in person!

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

The Global Math Department is looking for individuals who are interested in planning the Tuesday night webinars hosted on Big Marker. GMD bookers contact potential speakers regarding speaking opportunities, and provide them with details on planning sessions. If you are interested in being more involved with the Global Math Department, contact Heather at heather.m.kohn@gmail.com or Dylan at dkane47@gmail.com.