#MathTeachCollab

I love teaching and I love teaching math. My whole life I couldn’t imagine ever doing anything but teaching. The connections I have made throughout my career with other teachers at my schools have created amazing friendships that helped me bridge going from college to my first job, from my first school to a new district and from one school to another. All of those teachers who have become great friends have shaped who I am as a teacher. I can tell you that since March, I miss those connections…seeing the people I work with on a daily basis and talking about whatever was on our minds, or whatever we needed to deal with.

What I never expected as a teacher was that I would have a whole other amazing group of math teacher friends through social media. I first met them all through their blog posts, then Twitter and now even Facebook. We even used to get together in the summers at Twitter Math Camp, organized by teachers, for teachers. We use the hashtag #MTBoS on Twitter. The stress of this crazy time has taken its toll on me and all the teachers I know. Shelli (@druinok)and I missed seeing the faces and collaborating with all of these amazing math teachers and about two weeks ago put in motion a plan to create a day for teachers to collaborate virtually. We even told ourselves if no one showed up, we could at least collaborate together.  🙂

Today was the first #MathTeachCollab day…a full day from 8-5pm CST on Zoom with discussion topics chosen by those attending during the last week or so. You can see the details below. We had over 140 sign up and throughout the day always had over 50 participating, sharing and collaborating with each other. People were able to come and go as they pleased, check out the sessions that interested them and provide ideas and thoughts when they wanted.

Shelli said it best when she said “We want it to be like a Twitter chat, but with faces.” We wanted it to be organic, open sharing so we could hear as many voices as wanted to participate. It turned out even better than I imagined and believe me, when I couldn’t sleep last night because of excitement and nerves, I considered ALL bad scenarios that could happen.

So THANK YOU to all those Twitter (& now fb) math teacher friends that joined us in this idea and made it flow so easily, shared so many great ideas and made the day amazing. I have excitement about the school year now, when before I was dragging my feet and avoiding thinking about planning and how to teach remotely and there are so many ideas…I can’t wait to check them all out.

Check out the collaboration doc from today. 

Join us on Saturday, September 12, 2020 from 10:00-11:00AM CST for another #MathTeachCollab! (Topic TBD)

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This August, I’m participating in a monthly blog challenge called Blaugust. To see the participating blogs, check the hashtag #MTBoSBlaugust on Twitter. Please cheer on our participants with either a tweet or a comment on their blog. It can be hard to blog on a daily (or even regular) schedule! 🙂

If you want to join in the blogging fun, it’s not too late!  Go HERE to check out  “directions” from a few years ago and some awesome helpful prompts if you need something to help you blog!

Becoming a connected Math Educator

Many times in blog posts, in facebook groups or at face to face conferences, people suggest Math teachers should jump on Twitter and check out the #MTBoS to find helpful people and info. I couldn’t love that idea more.  Creating a blog and joining Twitter have had the most impact on my teaching, my lesson planning and my reflection than anything else in my career.  That’s because of the people whose blogs I read and activities I used, who would respond to my questions and share their ideas freely. And because of the people who I followed and interacted with on Twitter by asking for help or feedback on something I needed.  You don’t have to have a blog to read others blogs and check out their activities and ideas.  You don’t have to have a Twitter account either because you can find information through the blogs as well; though I do highly recommend joining Twitter to connect with others and create your online PLC.

I started reading blogs in 2005 starting with @ELanghorst‘s US History blog (http://speakingofhistory.blogspot.com/) because I was teaching US History and wanted to find better resources.  Then I started finding and reading math blogs in 2007 (like http://www.teachforever.com and fell in love (stalker-ish style) with @misscalculate when she started blogging in 2009. As I started to read more blogs, I would find more blogs to read…recommendations and favorite blogs listed on the side on the blog I was reading lead me to so many amazing people and resources. I had a blog reader set up and would spend time reading blogs newspaper style at night. I have 145 blogs in my blog reader that I follow now and I have a bunch more to add of educators I just started connecting with. I would email myself links of blog posts that had activities I wanted to try or ideas I wanted to incorporate into my classroom. (I still do this today, but I am working on using Google Keep instead.)  I became the crazy math teacher at my school because I was always saying things like “oh on this blog they did this activity.” or “I found this online and it looks awesome.” or “Let me do a google search for a blog post I remember.” or “I just watched this presentation about this topic, let me send you the link.” I used google, blogs and online resources like crazy to transform my teaching. And then I wanted to participate more and give back, so I started a blog and joined Twitter and the rest is history. 🙂

Teaching can be a lonely career because we are in our classrooms all day and while we may connect with our teams of teachers in our buildings, it’s usually about scheduling or behavior so we don’t get a lot of time to share and connect during the day the way we need to about curriculum, lesson planning or building rich tasks and activities. Therefore teachers have to look for it in other ways, through meetings outside of the school day, reading books, math conferences and connecting online with other math teachers, etc. It’s through these connections that I have learned the most and I have made amazing friendships to boot.

I think the key to become a connected Math Educator is to look for people, resources and help outside of your school, your district, your state.  At first maybe you just read, save helpful links or activities and try them in your classroom, but over time you will find more and more resources and (I bet) you will eventually want to give back or explain how a lesson someone shared was used in your classroom.  My evaluation system uses Danielson, which focuses on teacher reflection, creating my blog helped me learn how to reflect before it was part of my evaluation. Through Twitter and blogging I came across Global Math Department, which is a weekly webinar about tons of amazing math teaching topics. It started in August of 2012 and has SO many informational presentations!  The past two years I was on the board and for many of the weekly meetings you will hear my voice as a host and I’ve even done a few presentations. 🙂 I try to make it in person so I can interact and ask questions as needed during the presentation, but if I can’t the best part is they are all archived for future reference and easy sharing with teachers via email! You can find them all archived here, https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/GlobalMathDept/conferences .

Here is a little more to explain many of the things that are out there online for Math Teachers to help you start your journey to becoming a connected educator.

1. Check the graphic below for a great explanation of #MTBoS
   
2. Watch this video for even more info: https://youtu.be/AIZOGCuFuas
3. Welcome to the MTBoS site was created to welcome teachers new to the #MTBoS. It gives them support, some guidance, as well as helps them find some good tweeps (Twitter peeps) to follow and get to know. http://mathtwitterblogosphere.weebly.com
   
4. Find & connect with other Math teachers in your 2017-2018 subject area: https://goo.gl/6kt3VS
   
5. The MTBoS Directory lists teachers who are self-identified as members of the #MTBoS. Want to join? Just submit your name. That is all it takes. It has a map of members to help you find local math teachers, as well as multiple ways to sort and select people. http://mtbos.org/directory/
   
6. Exploring the MTBoS is a site created by math teachers to help organize, explain, and yes, explore the MTBoS. https://exploremtbos.wordpress.com/
   
7. Have you ever wanted a lesson on XXX, but googled it and came up with a bunch of crap? This search engine searches only math teacher blogs, K-12, and will pull up lessons that are tried and tested. If the lesson sucked, the blog post will tell you that, and how to improve it. http://www.fishing4tech.com/mtbos.html
   
8. Find blogs to read weekly by checking the list of bloggers from the link in #7.
9. Check out Robert Kaplinsky’s Problem Based Lesson search engine:  http://robertkaplinsky.com/prbl-search-engine/
10. Like the Facebook MTBoS page: Another way to connect with math educators – https://www.facebook.com/ExploreMTBoS/
    
11. Use this Chat list of Educational Chats to find chats that interest you. They list themselves as “official” but of course there is no such thing. It is rather comprehensive, and although the chats change times each year, it is pretty complete and accurate. https://sites.google.com/site/twittereducationchats/education-chat-official-list 
12. Check out some of the books that have been written: https://goo.gl/BQLXkA
    
13. Check out Global Math Department weekly presentations:  https://www.bigmarker.com/communities/GlobalMathDept/conferences
14. Check out Jo Boaler‘s site, youcubed.org, which is important to helping change your mindset and the mindset of your students in regards to learning math. The three week’s of Inspirational Math have some great videos and activities to share with your students.
15. Find and join a facebook group that applies to you, I really like doing BreakoutEDU in class, so I find the Math teacher’s breakout group helpful: https://www.facebook.com/groups/breakoutedumath/
16. And finally check out the Desmos Bank– a directory for Desmos activities http://mtbos.org/desmosbank/

Do you have suggestions or ways to help others become connected math educators? I am sure I missed some!  Toss them in the comments below!!!

Here’s to a great 2017-2018 year of being a connected Math Educator!

It’s July!!!! ????

Seriously, I can’t believe it’s after July 4th already.  Since my school year typically ends at the beginning of June and we start in the middle of August, July 4th is about the halfway point that starts the slippery slope to the school year.

This year I have SO much to look forward to…I am no longer the Math Specialist/Interventionist and will be teaching 7th grade this year with a fantastic team of teachers.  I have never taught 7th grade before, but I did co-teach it a few years ago, so the content isn’t foreign to me.  I took time the last few days of the school year to print new signs/posters for my classroom, get them laminated and cut so they are all ready to go for the new year. I then spent the first two days of my summer going through all my classroom stuff that was in my garage the last three years, tossing, keeping, donating and getting excited to start a new adventure in the fall.  (WHY do teachers keep SO MUCH STUFF?!?!)

I gave myself June to relax, travel, focus on my grad classes (getting my Administration degree/certification) and “think” about school…but to try and not take much action.  A lot of that was due to waiting patiently for the Illustrative Math Open Resources curriculum to come out…I am still waiting…but it will be out this month.  I didn’t want to plan a bunch of stuff and then see the IM stuff and want to redo it all, so I decided to wait. I spent a lot of June sending myself links, saving things to look at later, creating posters (that’s another post), reading all the edu books I have picked up in the last few months and enjoying the fact that it was summer.

But now…it’s July and it’s time for me to hunker down and start figuring out what kind of classroom I want to have, what kind of teacher I want to be and what kind of difference I want to make.  I love a new school year because it’s always a fresh start, I can change the things I didn’t like from previous years, try something new and raise the bar for my students. I think that’s something I love about being a teacher….I can always be better, do better and help my students be better…there isn’t an end to my learning and trying to be the best I can be for my students.  That’s also what I like about teaching middle school, by 3rd period my lesson for the day is solid and all the errors or issues made earlier in the day are worked out and noted for the next year.

I am already a little overwhelmed with where to start and how I want to kick off my school year because I don’t want to mess it up and I do want my students to know from day 1 that we think, do, create and challenge ourselves in my classroom.  I also want them to know I care and trust them to be good students.  I have done Jo Boaler’s iMath to help with growth mindset in the past, but our 6th grade teachers have used it before, so I am trying to avoid hearing “we did this before”.  There should be a new week of iMath out before the year starts, so that will be something I will definitely check out.

So I decided to take to Twitter, my favorite PLN, to find out how others start their school year.  The responses have been awesome and helpful.  Why do I forget about Sara VanDerWerf’s stuff??? I have now saved the links shared and will use it this year too.

It’s July–>means I can work on school stuff.planning 1st wk of 7th math…what are your fave ways to start? #MTBoS #msmathchat (@cmmteach?)

— Jessica (@algebrainiac1) July 7, 2017

The best part about Twitter is being able to ask a question and get helpful responses within minutes AND get helpful responses over the course of time because people see the tweet at different times and will respond on their own time.

So…it’s official…I have started planning for the school year and I couldn’t be more excited!