Category Archives: #MTBoS

Mission #8: Sharing is Caring in the MTBoS

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It’s the LAST MISSION! Go out with a bang! Even if you haven’t had the time to do even ONE mission – you should just go for it and complete this last mission! Or, at least fill out the survey! Thanks so much!

samjshah's avatarExploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere

It’s amazing. You’re amazing. You joined in the Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere set of missions, and you’ve made it to the eighth week. It’s Sam Shah here, and whether you only did one or two missions, or you were able to carve out the time and energy to do all seven so far, I am proud of you.

I’ve seen so many of you find things you didn’t know were out there, and you tried them out. Not all of them worked for you. Maybe the twitter chats fell flat, or maybe the whole twitter thing wasn’t your thang. But I think I can be pretty confident in saying that you very likely found at least one thing that you found useful, interesting, and usable.

With that in mind, we have our last mission, and it is (in my opinion) the best mission. Why? Because you get to do something…

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Official Twittereen Entry Form!

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The amazing and incredible Hedge created an official entry form if you want to participate in Twittereen.  We are really gettin’ fancy as the years progress here in the #MTBoS!

To see the official rules and enter in the fun, click here!

To read even MORE about Twittereen, visit Megan’s blog.

Yes, we are Twittereen crazy!

Let the games begin!!

Mission #4: Listen and Learn

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Mission #4 is live! Come on and Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere with us!

I Speak Math's avatarExploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere

Don’t worry if time has been your enemy and you have not been able to complete (or even participate in) the first three missions. Please jump in anytime!  The goal of the Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere is to introduce teachers to everything this vast community has to offer. 

Hello all!  It’s Julie Reulbach, and I’m soexcited to share Mission #4 with you – Listen and Learn!

In the first few missions we connected through the written word via blogs and twitter. But for this mission, we are going to listen and learn, with a Global Math Department Webinar and an Infinite Tangents Podcast!

Below I’m going to explain what the Global Math Department and Infinite Tangents Podcast are all about. Then when you’re interested is piqued, I’ll introduce the actual mission at the bottom. And for a cherry on top, we have a bonus mission for you…if you choose to…

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#GlobalMath Autumn Special

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Don’t miss the Global Math Autumn Special!

nik_d_maths's avatarMaths is Not a Spectator Sport

That’s right folks; you’ve heard about it on twitter; you’ve heard about it on the blogs; you’ve heard about it IN THE STAFFROOM (maybe). It’s finally here – the event of the quarter! It’s the:

GMD Autumn Special Poster

Come and join us on the 2nd November for the first of the Global Mathematics Department seasonal specials. This TWO HOUR basket of presentations, ideas sharing and collaboration is the first foray into making #GlobalMath happen at a time that is more convenient for folks across the globe, on a different Day.

The presenters we have on this time are a really special mix of teachers, curriculum specialists and department leaders; there should be something there for everyone from questioning, to lesson ideas, to ways to use software in new ways, to opportunities for recreational mathematics.

I’ll be hosting the event and it would be amazing to see as many folks as possible there to…

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HOWTO Participate in #Twittereen

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It’s #Twittereen time! Thanks so much to Megan for blogging all about it! Head over to her blog to read how to participate and even how it all started (pictures included)! And don’t feel shy about participating, tweeps LOVE it when you dress up as their avatar. It’s so much fun! 🙂

Megan Hayes-Golding's avatarMegan Hayes-Golding

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 2.52.30 PM

#Twittereen is a virtual costume day for the mathtwitterblogosphere and beyond. The rules are simple:

  1. Change your avatar to “be” someone else for Halloween (that’s Thursday, Oct 31 in 2013).
  2. Tweet something about being in costume with the #Twittereen hashtag.
  3. Obsessively read Twitter all day long to see everyone’s costumes.

How did all this get started? I gotta be honest with ya, last year was my first year participating. I knew there was at least one before that. Thankfully, our #MTBoS-historian and Twitter Math Camp organizer, Lisa pinned down the origins for me: #Twittereen began in 2009, where it looks like Sean (@SweenWSweens) dressed as Sam (@samjshah).

Doing #Twittereen

How do you do #Twittereen? First of all, let’s bring Lisa (@lmhenry9) in to eliminate some stress:

Screen Shot 2013-10-25 at 12.14.50 PM

My approach is to first get inspired by browsing avatars of folks in the #MTBoS (or peripherally associated with us!). Then, I choose my…

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Mission #3: Collaboration Nation

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Misson #3 is now live! Don’t worry if you did not do the first two missions, you can jump in at any time! It will be beneficial for you to blog about the missions, but we understand if you get crazy busy with school and run out of time. If this happens, please don’t quit all together! Just jump in when you can and participate as much as your schedule allows. The payoff will equal (if not be greater than) the time you spend. I promise! 🙂

Tina C.'s avatarExploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere

Tina here, excited to share this week’s new mission with you.

The awesome part about this community is all the sharing we do. Last week you experienced Twitter – that’s all about conversation. Twitter works for the short things we want to share – ideas, links, questions. The character limit is a bonus, it means no one is carrying on a monologue; Twitter is meant for dialogue.

Many times, those conversations leave you wanting more. You wish someone would elaborate on the thought they started in a tweet or share the entire lesson rather than a snippet. That’s where a blog comes in handy.

Sometimes, though, ideas are even bigger than a single person’s blog and turn into a theme that we compile or a new blog entirely (kind of like this one). This week is all about the things the MTBoS has accomplished when we join forces. These projects…

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Why Teachers Pay Teachers Irks the MTBoS

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When I first decided to go back into teaching after taking almost 10 years off I was pretty excited. I was also pretty scared. I knew things had changed in education, and I was going from teaching high school to middle school. Luckily, I was accidentally exposed to math blogs at a NCCTM meeting that I had recently attended. It led me to Dan’s blog and then a host of others through blogs and twitter.

I was completely amazed, an incredibly grateful, that Dan and other math teacher bloggers openly posted everything they made FOR FREE on their websites. Sam’s virtual filing cabinet, Kate’s folder of Row Games, and Shelli’s I Love Math.org pretty much blew my mind. After teaching in a school district where teachers in my own building did not want to share their materials, I could not believe that I could find all of these amazing, editable lessons for FREE online. I admit that I freely stole and adapted as much as I could find. I can’t even express how much this helped me when I was brand new, and starting over. Exposure to this wealth of excellent teaching material changed my teaching practice forever.

Since I was desperately searching for resources, I discovered Teachers Pay Teachers soon after. However, it frustrated me. First of all, since I was starting over, I needed many lesson ideas and $3 a lesson would add up fast. Additionally, as a lesson modifier, I had trouble with the pdf files. I could convert to text or take screen shots, but that was a lot of work for a lesson I had to pay money for. I also noticed that many lessons on TPT were similar to editable ones found on bloggers websites for free! It just took a little more searching (or simply asking for ideas on Twitter) to find these lessons. But most importantly, every lesson on TPT did not come with a heart-filled blog full of methodology, pictures of their students doing the lesson, thoughts for improvement, and great commentary from other bloggers. THIS is what I had become use to, and treasured in each and every one of the lessons that I found for free on every bloggers site. These bloggers and their commenters are what inspired great ideas that helped me adapt their lessons to fit my needs.

Yes, I have had my bad experiences as well that taint me against TPT. I have had material that I developed reformatted and sold. I have seen other teachers original material treated the same way. And I have had tense conversations with TPT bloggers who even swear they created stolen materials. I like to look for the best in everything, so I am assuming that this is the exception, not the rule. No, my main worry with TPT is not stolen lessons but it is that the “lure of the money” for underpaid teachers will entice amazing new teacher bloggers to save their best work to sale, instead of sharing for free. This may be selfish, but nothing makes me happier than seeing a new math teacher blogger arrive on the scene. It is the reason that I have been involved with the blogging initiative for two years in a row. That initiative is an incredible amount of work for me. But it is worth it if I can get more math teacher bloggers online, freely sharing their incredible materials with others. THIS is the way that our community grows and helps each other.

Some great bloggers are using TPT, many of them before they even started blogging. This is not a blog against you. I admire how hard you work. However, I would like all NEW math teacher bloggers to realize that TPT is a business. In contrast, what I would like for our community is not more business people, but more volunteers, who freely share their time and work. I would like to encourage new math teacher bloggers who benefit from our gift community (explained best by Kate here and here) to freely give back as well.

I am sure that some will disagree with me.  But this is the community that I want to be a part of.

Megan Hayes-Golding's avatarMegan Hayes-Golding

The online math teacher community[1] has I have a problem with Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) and I intend to explain my own understanding of why.

First, a disclaimer: The MTBoS is a loose confederation of teachers all around the world. I don’t even know it’s fair to say “we” share beliefs and practices. However, I think our community has come to rally around this one idea probably more than any other single idea: we share freely. We share freely to help other teachers out, we share freely because we know we get more than we take, we share freely because we understand more users help make a better product.

Those ideas are more than a grand altruistic vision. It’s not about all the feels we get from sharing, at least not for me.

Part I: Why Share Freely?

mp5ov

If I offer a resource for sale on TpT, I get…

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One Good Thing

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My wonderful friend and teacher, Rachel, started a truly inspiration blog for teachers called “One Good Thing”. It is a compilation blog where different teachers post the great stories about their day! Just reading these stories can lift up any teachers spirits! She explains the concept best in her “About” statement on her blog.

“We are dedicated, fascinated, hard-working, inspiring. We teach. Our days are challenging. Some are great; some push us to the breaking point. Every day may not be good, but every day there is (at least) one good thing worth sharing. Here are our stories.” — Rachel —

Today I blogged on “One Good Thing” about my students singing the quadratic formula song. I hope you enjoy this blog as much as I am!

I Speak Math's avatarone good thing

This is my first time ever coaching a math club.  I have wanted to start a math club since I began teaching at my school two years ago.  However, as I went from teaching high school to middle school, all of my preps were new to me and I just didn’t have time.  I finally decided this year to start an official middle school math club.  We meet about once a week at lunch time.  It has been a lot of work for me, but I think it is amazing fun!  My math club students are very eager to learn advanced math concepts and they love competition.  I even bought buzzers!

At the last math club we talked about quadratic equations and parabolas, and I showed them the quadratic formula.  I played a quadratic formula song for them and we sang it a couple of times.  Quadratic equations are  pretty…

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An Amazing Response for “A Day In the Life…”

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THANK YOU TINA for putting together all of these Day in the Life Posts!  It was such a great idea and I know it was a huge amount of work for you.  Thank you for giving us all the chance to share with others (and even see ourselves) how busy we all actually are as educators.  OVER 50 teachers contributed!  The amazing Food Blogger by night, English teacher by day across the hall from me was even inspired to blog after reading my post.  AND, she included a recipe for pimento cheese cookies on her post!  Totally stealing Sam’s idea, I have copied Tina’s summary post below.  You can also read directly from the source, on her amazing blog, Drawing On Math.  If you would like to read the initial information for Day in the Life, you can find that here on Sam’s Blog.  It was an inspirational idea!

Day in the Life: Recap and Moving Forward (from Tina

THANK YOU for reading, writing, sharing your day or spreading the word.  Since the last update there have been 14 new submissions, which puts us over 50 total!  And it sounds like there are still more coming.  I’d love for this initiative to continue expanding, so I created a tumblr.  The latest submissions are below, but from now forward contributions will only be posted on DITLife.tumblr.com.  I’d never used tumblr before but now that I’ve set one up it seems most appropriate for sharing links.  You can still follow it by RSS and read the posts in google reader or similar, but it’s also searchable by tags and maybe we will discover a new community of tumblrs who can join the twitterblogosphere!

Now that the “Day in the Life” week is officially over, what’s next?  I’ve asked for ideas and come up with a few of my own.  I’d love to hear your feedback on these, other ideas and volunteers to kick these off!

  • Re-blog, re-tweet, share on facebook and send this to big people/media (Justin Reich, Dan Meyer, Diane Ravitch and Arne Duncan were mentioned specifically)
  • Continue getting new people to share a Day in their Life (try to reach different circles of educators)
  • Personally I found this challenging to do, so repeating the experience of logging an entire day is unappealing, but posting a snippet like I did on Sunday is doable.  Lots of short clips is just as good (better?) than a full day.  There’s a submit page if you’d like to contribute directly to tumblr.
  • Record yourself reading part of your DITLife post, it’s interesting to hear the voice behind the screen.
  • Make a video of yourself telling a story, no longer than 2 minutes, of something that happened to you that shares some aspect of teaching; good, bad, whatever.
  • Find a student to interview you, where the student asks questions they’re curious to know about, and the teacher responds. Then the teacher posts a podcast of the interview. (This wasn’t my idea, but I was talking to students about grading just the other day and it was interesting to hear their questions!)
  • Find another teacher to interview you on whatever and post a podcast of the interview.
  • Give awards to contributors: most papers graded, most hours at work, most uses of technology…
  • Compare our days to TV/movie teachers
  • Compare to each other (what was everyone doing at 7 am, noon, 3 pm, 8 pm?)
  • Running list of all the roles we play
  • Instead of recording everything in one day, record one thing every day and create a report a la Nicholas Felton
  • Link this initiative anytime you see anyone attacking teachers
  • Map where you go in a day or week (I know I never see some teachers since I don’t walk the same paths they do!)
  • Ask people what prevented them from participating (is that you? please comment!)

I also got requests for future themes and gathered a few ideas for those:

  1. The best lesson I taught this year.
  2. What I want PD to look like.
  3. If I was not a teacher I would be a ___.
  4. Classroom tours (started in June, I want to see more photos!)
  5. Teachers take a photograph of something meaningful that they’ve gotten from a student, and describe what that is and why it matters to them.

Thanks to Sam, Kate, Ashli, Julie, Greg, Kirsten, James, Jonathan, Lisa and Tom for their contribution to these lists.

Submissions over the weekend:

A Day in the Life: Berlin Edition on I Hope This Old Train Breaks Down

My typical action-packed, no-room-to-breathe Fridays.

Week as Math Educator – Day 5 on Mathie x Pensive

Entire Friday, in third person plural perspective, to wrap up five straight blog days. This last was a PD Day, but not as one might expect.

A Day in the Life: cheesemonkeysf edition on cheesemonkey wonders

Serving students and serving the dog.

A day in the life… on crazedmummy

Thursday, blow by blow. Aaagh!

A Day in the Life: 11.14.12 on Epsilon-Delta

Just a normal day–nothing super exciting BUT nothing super horrible either. So, I’ll count it as a good day.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012 on Bowman in Arabia

Just a normal Tuesday in my life as a math teacher at a boarding school in Amman, Jordan.

This is It (Extended Version) on Those Who Teach

All in a day’s work: star-crossed lovers, a skeleton, and essays galore

A Day in the Life on Discovering Delta

This is my not-so typical day of parent-teacher conferences. It’s also my very first blog post. This initiative enticed me to take the first step into the blogging world!

A Day in the Life of a Mathematics Educator on Algebrainiac

24 hours in the life of an 8th grade math teacher who has two jobs and two dogs and not enough minutes in the day!

A Day In My Life – I’m Sorry Mom and Dad on I Speak Math

I was excited to blog about a day in my life. I’m a parent, a teacher, a 6th grade adviser and service leader, the math team coach, and the cheerleading coach. All three of my boys play competitive soccer. So, my trouble was actually finding the time to blog. I didn’t realize how much I do in a day until I typed this up. I am doing the best I can, but it never seems like enough.
My Typical Day (2012) on MathyMissC

I’m a second year teacher at an urban school in AZ. I teach Algebra 1 & Algebra 2. The teacher next door is on maternity leave, so I look out for those kids too. Then add co-teaching to the mix, my days are usually eventful!

A Day in the (A.D.D.) Life on Approximately Normal (in the classroom)

Just my perspective of the craziness of a random day in my life. No epiphanies, no revelations. My life isn’t perfect, but it is what it is.

Pimiento Cheese Cookies (A Day in the Life of a Language Arts Teacher) on Willow Bird Baking

I’m a language arts teacher who moonlights as a food blogger. My recipes always include an anecdote — whether it’s a memory from my childhood, a funny story from school, or an interesting tidbit from my daily life. Today, I decided to accompany my recipe for pimiento cheese cookies (they’re good, I promise!) with “A Day in the Life of a Language Arts Teacher.”

Day in the Life of a Math Teacher 2012 #DITLife on Technology Integration for Math Engagement

Looking back at my day, I recognize the importance of tech in my job. I use it to stay organized, provide feedback to students, and collect assignments. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to make my commute due to the paper weight in my car!

Blogging!

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This is another one of Sam’s initiatives that I love! I just hope I have time to do it! I encourage all of you to blog as well.

samjshah's avatarContinuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere

For anyone out there — I’m fine here in New York City. I spent the hurricane  [2] at a friend’s place in the city, and we have power and all good things. When I was trying to pass the time, I decided to do one productive thing.

I would like to present to you the start of a one day blogging initiative.

We are busy. We do a lot. We are professionals. And you know what happens when we talk about what we do… most people who don’t teach just don’t get it. That’s why we go to each other for support — either in real life by unwinding over a glass of wine (or a mocktail) at a local watering hole, or by talking with each other virtually using blogs, twitter, email, or something else.

But I think that needs to change. Three years ago, my school got me…

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