Wednesday, March 2, 2016

CLIME Conference Preview: NCTM in San Francisco (April, 2016)

Technology sessions - San Francisco NCTM Conference
Ever since I read Dan Meyer’s blog titled “NCTM Gets it” my optimism about the future of NCTM annual conferences returned. In his blog Dan highlights NCTM’s interest in recruiting young teachers into their fold by supporting the MTBoS (mathblogosphere) initiative. For the first time an NCTM president, Diane Briars, engaged in what the Twitter-types refer to as a “tweetup.” Also at the regional conference in Nashville the keynote presentation was “Game Changers: Rethinking the Way We Teach Math from the Math Twitter Blogosphere”  This is a heady, Bernie Sanders-like stuff. (Read about my optimism re NCTM here.) So I was looking forward to the San Francisco program committee coming up with more sessions introducing young teachers to the blogging/tweeting phenomenon. But alas, such is not the case. Other than the ShadowCon after-hours “conference within a conference” organized by Dan Meyer, Mike Flynn and Zachary Champagne there’s no mention of the mathtwitterblogosphere and only one reference to blogging and twitter! Fortunately, there will be a presence in the Exhibit Hall where the leaders of the MTBoS movement will have a booth encouraging new teachers to join. So a grassroots, disruptive movement will continue despite the lack of sessions about it. Annie Fetter of the Math Forum connected me to a useful listing of sessions given by MTBoS members. (Tyler Auer is the author.)

Here’s some data and analysis for the upcoming annual meeting:
  • There are 689 numbered sessions down from last year’s 819. (This  total includes 94 exhibitor sessions.)
  • Of the 94 exhibitor sessions 32 focused on technological applications. 
  • There are 118 technology sessions which is 17%. A low total in our opinion. (The highpoint was the Philadelphia conference in 2012 where there were 38% tech sessions.)
  • If you go to the NCTM listing of topics and click on technology you will find only 60 sessions
  • There were also 13 STEM sessions which we did not include in our tech count.
List of technology keywords noted in session descriptions along with frequencies.


There are collectively 36 sessions that focus on software applications. You will find the specifics for these keywords on this list. Just search for the keyword(s) you are interested in.
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CLIME's annual Meeting in San Francisco

The Future of CLIME
Moderator: Ihor Charischak
Location: Marriott Hotel - Nob Hill C
Date/Time: Thursday, April 14th, 6:00pm-7:00pm
Please come if you can. Important decisions will be made about the future of CLIME's role as an affiliate group of NCTM.
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On a personal note, I want to congratulate Ed Dickey on receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Mathematics Education Trust. Ed, a true champion of supporting the effective use of technology in math education, was my program chair on the NCTM program committee in San Francisco in 1999.

More to come in the next CLIME SF preview.

References

CLIME NCTM Boston 2015 Preview
CLIME NCTM New Orleans 2014 Preview
CLIME NCTM Denver 2013 Preview
CLIME NCTM Philadelphia 2012 Preview