Online Professional Development Sessions

The Blogosphere is Blowing Up

A few things I’ve noticed in 2017 thus far…
 
I love this tweet by Sara Vanderwerf, but I love her blog post even more.  We help students more by giving them the tools and direction to construct their own meaning in math rather than by lecturing them (most of the time); Sara suggests in this blog post that the same philosophy applies when we help each other as well.  Don’t you love her graphic?
 
Speaking of the geniuses at Desmos, they have added a long-awaited for feature – the ability to add a custom label to a point, and with their usual super-smartness, the Desmos programmers have made sure that multiple labels in your activity will not get in each other’s way.  Read the post, and go play.
 
Do you know what an octahectaennacontakaihexagon is?  Neither did I, until I visited solvemymaths first foray into YouTube land.  It’s a great (and somewhat psychedelic) start to what I hope will be many more mathily entertaining videos.
 
I’ve been reading Jennifer Wilson’s Easing the Hurry blog for years, and I’ve also read 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions more than once. In her post 5 Practices: Dilations, Jennifer elaborates how this important book has impacted her teaching through the lens of one lesson.  
 
Brian Palacios wrote about his earliest school experiences in Where it all began, which prompted me to write about mine, including my early impressions of learning math.  What are your earliest memories of school and math?  How about writing about them and sharing at #whereitallbegan?
 
Finally, thanks to Grace Chen at educating grace for giving us a list of math books to read in the coming year.

Cheers – Wendy Menard  (@wmukluk)

In the early days of 2017 people all over the world try to commit themselves to new resolutions in the new year. This year a number of teachers have committed to blogging regularly and just polished off 1 week of the #MTBoSblogsplosion. The first week focused on “My Favorites” here are some of those posts:
 
Greta, who blogs at Count it All Joy wrote the post  My Favorites: 2 Equation Activities. This post talks about an interesting web app, and an inclass activity that both involve balancing. Bilingual blog  Matematiche, written by Fracqua is the lastest example of #MTBoS’s reach. In the post “Blogging initiative” the author describes some veteran tactics to help make groupwork less painful. Melynee Naegele’s post One of My Favorites describes her experience as a teacher, and also some tips for working with instructional routines.
 
Exploremtbos is the homebase for those interested in blogging or following along, as blogger can find prompts for each week, as well as read the posts from other people’s classrooms. This week’s challenge is around soft skills, and it focuses on the ‘virtual’ soft skills conference that was held by Riley Lark. People who don’t prefer weekly challenges, but still want to participate, they can just state their commitment and post the blogs as they write them as I described in my blog post Get your 2017 blogging off on the right foot with #MTBoSblogsplosion.

Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)