Wednesday, December 12, 2012

A day at the Chicago NCTM Conference

When will it ever end. NCTM continues to need to provide an Internet station because the Chicago Hyatt Regency hotel where all of the sessions were held charges $12.95 a day for Internet access. What is it about fancy money making hotels charging for Internet while the Motel 6s of this world provide it for free? This continues to be my pet peeve ad nauseum especially after I was spoiled in Philadelphia last April at the NCTM meeting where Wifi was not only ubiquitous, but also free. The way it ought to be. How did attendees handle this travesty? One way was to use their smartphones or  tablet with 3G Internet access still not all that evident as I peeked into sessions.
On the positive side the conference appeared to be  well attended. Here is a shot of the audience attending the talk "Math Blogs: Creating a Virtual Community of Problem Solvers" which focused on student blogging at the grade 3-5 level. I was hoping for more discussion about math blogging in general but the turnout was promising for more sessions in the future.

After a quick run through the exhibit hall, I joined Neil Cooperman to prepare for his session entitled The Great Green Globs Contest, and More.

We had a small, but enthusiastic group of educators who once again convinced us of how special this program is in motivating students to do advanced mathematical thinking. The program is available from the authors at Greenglobs.net. Information about the contest is available here.