MTBos

Ever-loving Evernote – #ExploreMTBoS 6

When I started discovering the math teacher amusement park that is the MathTwitterBlogosphere, I quickly found myself so excited about what I had discovered and so overwhelmed about what I had discovered.

My first instinct was to bookmark, bookmark, bookmark.  I made bookmark icons on my ipad, bookmarks on my web browsers and bookmarks on my desktop.  I had bookmarks inside bookmarks inside bookmarks. The problem:  I couldn’t find resources when I got ready to use them and I now had more bookmarks on my ipad than I had actual apps.

Then an angel appeared in the form of Kate Nowak at a Global Math Department session last spring.  Kate suggested Evernote as a method of organizing all of the resources I had found.  I had a few things in Evernote and had used it very infrequently as a medium for holding a few PDF files or interesting articles.  Kate Nowak uttered the words I was waiting to hear when deciding how to organize my mountain of resources:  Tagging and Searchable PDFs.

Many of you might be thinking “there are plenty of sky drives that are searchable.”  (Maybe you are now wondering what a sky drive is.)  Anyway, none of the online storage platforms have been as versatile, flexible, and easy to use.  I’ve tried Adobe Reader, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, the works.  Evernote surpasses them all.

A bonus:  Evernote and Adonit joined forces and created Jot Script, a one-of-a-kind stylus for note-taking.  Now, I can handwrite notes into Evernote and they are searchable as well! It’s like Christmas and my birthday!

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Vegan Teacher Crazy about Cheeseburgers

A year and a half ago, I made the best dietary decision of my life and decided to try a vegan diet for 30 days.  Fast forward to now, I love the vegan lifestyle and I’d never go back to a diet filled with animal products.  I know too much.  But that’s a story for another post.

A couple of weeks ago, I logged into Robert Kaplinsky’s presentation on Global Math Department.  He started off with a visual, which is usually good to draw listeners into the presentation.  However, this visual was a cheeseburger.  And he went through more and more visuals, and the cheeseburgers kept getting bigger and bigger until finally I’m face to screen with 100×100 cheeseburger from In N’ Out burger.  I try very hard not to be one of those ‘enlightened and superior’ vegans who constantly judge the dietary choices of others, but these burger pictures were not how I envisioned spending my Tuesday evening.  His methodology had my attention however.

After explaining his problem solving process and distributing his problem solving template, he threw this photo into the mix and asked,

“How much would that 100×100 cost?

Now I was hooked and needed to figure out how much that 100 x 100 cost.  I didn’t care if it was a cheeseburger or a truckload of kale.  The wizardry of Robert Kaplinsky drew this vegan teacher into the problem solving process and made me care how much this monstrosity of a cheeseburger cost.  Brilliant.

Then Robert Kaplinsky threw down the dynamite:

That’s right.  The actual receipt of this 100×100 cheeseburger.  A boatload of kudos to Mr. Kaplinsky for presenting something that was simple, with some great mathematics to go with it.

I’m glad this weeks ExploreMTBos mission was LISTEN and learn.  This was a great presentation, a great lesson, and a great resource.  I’m glad I took the time to listen to Robert Kaplinsky’s presentation, even if it wasn’t so appetizing on the outside.

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Olympians, Tweagles, & Friends in my Phone

I started tweeting in 2008, around the Beijing Olympics. It was cool that actual Olympians would respond to my tweets.  When Summer Sanders responded to one of my tweets, I about fainted. Twitter was new, they probably didn’t know any better.  

I followed a few celebrities. I found some of their off-color honesty hilarious and sad at the same time.  In the meantime, my hilarious brother managed to rack up tens of thousands of twitter followers. (@sucittam if you are looking to add some hilariousness to your timeline). Here’s one of his tweets being featured on Ellen:

He opened my eyes to the idea that following actual REAL people is more entertaining and fulfilling. He was absolutely right.

I went through a phase where I followed a bunch of people who tweet as their beagle.  I’m pretty sure I was the first one to use the term Tweagles, although I have no proof of that. 

Then in January 2013, my indifferent view of people on twitter changed forever. My 29-yr old sister in-law, Danielle, suffered a massive brain aneurysm and it wasn’t certain she would recover.  She was in the ICU at the University of Iowa for almost 6 weeks, and while my brother stayed by her side every day, his twitter followers rallied support that went viral. All of these people, most of which he’d never met, wanted to reach out to help. Benefits were organized, gifts were donated, and memorabilia was auctioned all to benefit Danielle whose recover was slow, but steady. 

Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke) wrote a beautiful article illustrating that the people we interact with on twitter are not just cyber-acquaintances.  Danny Zucker makes the best point:

 “We’re willing to accept the concept that cyberbullying is real, and it is. But if you can accept the idea that the negative is real, then you have to accept the idea that the positive is real. If strangers can hurt you, they can be friends as well.”

And just like that I leaped head first into the T of the MBToS. I realized that people like Fawn Nguyen, Andrew Stadel, Kate Nowak, and Christopher Danielson were real teachers just like I was.  They had great blogs, and they were on twitter too. And if I wanted to get a real benefit from all of the resources I had found online, I needed to start posting feedback of how I incorporated them into my classroom.  And then tell the creator of the activity about how it went. Through this I’ve really been able to experience the genuine human behind all of these @ symbols. These are not only great teachers who don’t just shine on their own. They want to freely share what they’ve done so that others can shine just as brightly. 

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Nrich Love Affair: MTBoS challenge #1

I told my husband that if we weren’t already married, I’d run away with nrich in a heartbeat.
That being said, it’s probably no surprise that my favorite problem comes from nrich: consecutive sums and is my response to the explore the mtbos mission 1.
I’ve used this problem a few times, with high level students, low level, and in between as well.

Here’s a poster with a general overview of the problem.  The link from nrich provides starting help as well as teacher notes and a solution.

Some things I love about it:
1. So many points of entry and a low barrier.
2. So many paths. I’ve had so many different conjectures arise from this problem because of the open-ended nature of it and its ease of exploration. The numbers are not intimidating so students are unafraid to explore some of their findings.
3. Multiple extensions. For example, do consecutive differences work similarly? What about consecutive products? Or better yet, the difference of consecutive products!
4. Students organize their work in so many different ways. It’s completely fascinating to see it happen.

When doing this with a lower level class, I usually have them make a list of noticings and/or wonderings. This way, the patterns they learn to communicate what they believe to be true in their head. I may challenge them to generalize a little, especially with odd numbers always being a consecutive sum.

The most exciting thing that happens when I do this problem is the “what ifs” that students can’t help but think up themselves.  For example, What if we took the difference of consecutive numbers?  What if we took the sum of consecutive odd or even numbers?  Consecutive square numbers?  Triangle numbers?  Negative numbers?  It’s pretty amazing to be part of.

If you have tried or try this problem in the future, I’d love to collaborate on it.

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