All Good Things Must …

The Global Math Department’s Final Run

Written by Leigh Nataro with Support from the GMD Board
The origin of the phrase “all good things must come to an end,” is not clear. However, the Global Math Department has been a very good thing and now it will be coming to an end. The GMD has helped to provide free quality PD for many teachers over the past 11 years. We will be ending with our last session on May 30th with the amazing math educator and TikTok creator, Howie Hua.

The first GMD webinar “Interactive Notebooks” was held on August 7, 2012 with 17 people in attendance and no email invitations were sent to invite people to attend.  People learned about the webinars the same way I learned about the webinars – through Twitter.  Megan Hayes-Golding organized and led many sessions in the early years of the GMD.  Initially webinars were not recorded for future viewing.  Webinar recordings began in 2014 and some of the recordings were turned into podcasts. Certificates of Attendance were transcribed for live webinar attendance beginning in 2018. To have the GMD reach a larger audience, video recordings of the webinars were uploaded to the GMD YouTube channel starting in May of 2020.

At some point during the pandemic our viewing spiked considerably with multiple webinars having between 100 – 200 people in attendance.  The number of recording views by-passed the number of live views and the most watched webinar recording of all time on our YouTube channel was “Using Delta Math for Distance Learning” by Zach Korzyk with over 5,000 views.  We were truly global with participants from Australia, Canada, Thailand, Turkey, India and Indonesia.

I have enjoyed hosting the GMD webinars over the past eight years and I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to hosting, presenting, booking speakers and writing newsletter content.  Although our formal community sharing via webinars is ending, I look forward to rewatching the webinars on the YouTube channel and continuing to learn and grow from the ideas that have been shared.

The Newsletter Too!

If you’ve missed the Newsletter this year, we’ve missed you too!

The first ever GMD Newsletter was sent out on April the 28th 2014. You can see it here! Shout out to the original subscriber, admin, and editor Michael Pershan! For 8 years we continued to put out a weekly (and eventually biweekly) Newsletter highlighting the goings on in the intersections of the math, education, and math education worlds. Our subscribership grew from one to nearly 2,000 during that time with nearly 20% of our subscribers from outside of the US. It was a great run and we thank all those of you who read and grew along with us. #GMDWrites!

We our planning to put out a few more editions of the Newsletter as we celebrate the end of the GMD’s fantastic run. As always, we are hoping to get some contributions from our readers and folks who have attended the Webinars. See the announcement below if you are interested!