Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Celebrating Math Awareness Month - NCTM's technology themed annual conference

CLIME Connections continues to chronicle the road to the Final Four days of the 2011-2012 NCTM's Technology themed conferences culminating in Philadelphia this month. It all started last fall with the regional conference in Atlantic City where CLIME exhibited, followed by events in St. Louis and Albuquerque where attendees participated in a one day Learn/Reflect strand of technology themed sessionsFour guiding questions were posted and were used as talking points at a debriefing session held later that same afternoon. This will be repeated in Philadelphia on Thursday, April 26th starting at 9:30am with a kickoff presentation given by Thomas Dick and followed by 24 sessions from which you can choose to attend. Though it's only possible to participate in few of these sessions, collectively we hope to gain from the "wisdom of the crowd" as folks will meet up later in the day for the debriefing session at 3:30. I hope you attend and let us know how it went. (See list of all 26 sessions.) If you are one of the speakers (of any technology themed sessions) and would like to update the listing let me know and I'll update it immediately.

Dan Meyer heads up a list of highlighted speakers in Philadelphia
There are plenty of other technology related sessions. Some of them were highlighted by NCTM. Here's CLIME's list of technology Linchpins who will be speaking out about effective ways to use technology that are changing the teaching and learning of mathematics.
Recent talk
Dan Meyer shared with me that "it would be great to recruit bloggers to attend each of those talks, write a review, take a photo, grab supplemental resources, etc. Something that will add value after the conference." I hope you can help with this. Let me know if you will be blogging about the conference sessions in Philly.
For those of you who haven't seen Dan in action, here's a recent presentation. His NCTM talk #474 on Friday is "Why Students Hate Word Problems."

My biggest disappointment about the upcoming NCTM conference is that there are no sessions (including mine which I just corrected on the CLIME listing) on how math blogging is changing the landscape of math teacher's professional collaboration. I definitely will bring it up at my session. Mike Thayer (session 153) has posted his thoughts about the upcoming conference here.

Conference highlights rewind from previous blog entries
  • See Conference online Program book. Unfortunately, the final physical program book won't be available until the conference starts. But you can get a listing of all the sessions from NCTM search page or if it's technology sessions you are interested in here's the full list
  • Speakers can upload handouts on the NCTM speaker site. Instructions are here. As of today only 9 speakers have posted. I hope NCTM will contact the speakers again about this before the conference begins.
  • What kind of technologies are showcased at the conference. Check out the stats at Blog 100.
  • Technology theme discussion blog 96.
Here's the comment/reply I just posted at blog 96:
Math Awareness month begins... what I would like to focus on is the third point NCTM made: Technology as a tool should [..] influence what mathematics is taught. So what mathematics should be taught in the 21st century? Should some of our "sacred cow" topics take a back seat? My take is that the math topics don't matter as much as long as they are embedded in interesting contexts that engage students in learning; mostly through well crafted projects. This will prepare students to effectively deal with the challenges of 21st century living. Can we collaboratively build towards this vision? Other opinions? Please reply.
cc blog 104

2 comments:

  1. Cassy Turner (who is speaking in Philly) just posted a blog entry about Singapore math sessions. Here is the link:

    http://singaporemathsource.com/nctm-2012-conference-singapore-math-sessions/

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm going to try and attend this conference next year. It looks like it is fantastic.

    ReplyDelete