So…this was a thing that happened. The Central Alabama Council of Teachers of Mathematics is trying to resurrect itself and is holding monthly meetings again. I didn’t know about the first one, went to the second one in February, and volunteered to speak about the #MTBoS for the March meeting. Of course, as soon as I came home, I tweeted for other presentations and Sam linked this page o’ presentations.
But like I assume others are in the #MTBoS, why use something that someone has already perfected when you can cobble together something from everything that turns out to be less than the sum of its parts?
So here’s my presentation. Some key slides:
So here’s the good:
People seemed excited about edchats.
People seemed excited about some of the other MTBoS sites that I shared (WODB, would you rather, etc).Many participants said they enjoyed the presentation.
Here’s the bad:
I had planned for 45 minutes (talk for about 20, have them play around for about 20, share for 5), but ended up with 30 minutes and paid(!) wifi. I was able to stretch out the presentation but people didn’t get to play along and I haven’t seen any of them join twitter yet (or maybe they did and didn’t follow me which could certainly be the case). Then again, I’ve been reading blogs for years and last year was when I finally made the leap to twitter. I will have to follow up at next month’s meeting.
At the end of the talk, I had one person ask “so what IS the MTBoS?” which is really hard to explain. Maybe add something about how if you want to be a part of it, you are?
I seriously thought everyone at least knew about math blogs by now, but maybe 30% did? I should have added some screenshots of good shares from blogs.
Trying to get too much in? Focus just on blogs or just on twitter or just on the other stuff?
And here’s the handout:
Two things to note about the handout:
1) I hate putting my “favorite” blogs up in public because I know I’m going to leave someone out. Please don’t be hurt if yours didn’t make the cut when I put this together the night before the presentation after grading 70 Precal limits tests. Also, Math Teacher Mambo will always be my favorite forever and ever.
2) Google docs is THE WORST. See those funny little pictures at the bottom of the page? Yeah, they don’t print. They’re like a Google mirage. Don’t even get me started with “yeah, we’re going to put paste in the right-click menu, but don’t think that means you can actually, you know, PASTE by pressing it.” Oh, wait, you did get me started…. Ok, so if I have to ctrl+v to paste, why doesn’t ctrl+shift+c/v copy and paste formatting??? The. Worst.
So now maybe Sam will quit yelling at me all the time now I’ve that linked this to his page. And maybe I ended up getting one new #MTBoS member! 🙂
Shireen Dadmehr
April 4, 2015 at 4:30 pm
I seem to have the same conversations that you do. When I talk to other math teachers in town, they don’t seem to be aware of all the resources online. Maybe it’s also one of those things that if you don’t sit down and imMEDIATELY see how it helps your class, then you are not inclined to follow through with it. I’m wondering if an addition to an MTBoS talk could be: let’s take one example …. say, teaching _____ and then do searches through various twitter hashtags or blogs or google searches for that topic. Or maybe that still wouldn’t convince some people. … Anyway, thanks for the “plug”! Hope you are having a great spring semester.
#MTBoS Presentation | Improving Mathematics
April 7, 2015 at 3:41 pm
[…] lasted about 40 minutes. It was particularly helpful to have access to Sam’s and Meg’s previous #MTBoS presentations. To help the make mypresentation as effective as possible, I […]