Accolades to NCTM for Tools and Technology Addition in Final Form

In the original draft of the Principles to Action that was available for review this statement appeared on page 81 of the Tools and Technology section:

"While non-mathematical technologies and tools (e.g., word processing, presentation, and communications software) have a role in the mathematics classroom (Cohen & Hollebrands, 2011), they provide a more supportive role and do not have the direct potential to promote student reasoning, sense making, and mathematical thinking found in mathematical action technologies."

In the final version (now available from NCTM in book & eBook form) which I highly recommend purchasing*, the paragraph above was replaced with the following on page 79-80:

"Non-mathematical technologies and tools (e.g., word processing, presentation software, and communications applications)  can also support interactions in the mathematics classroom (Cohen & Hollebrands, 2011). For example, student responses to an interactive poll can be quickly gathered through the use of either a dedicated clicker system or applications on a range of mobile device platforms, to provide teachers with informative information that may help guide instruction.  Interactive whiteboards, document cameras, and web-based presentation applications can help students communicate their thinking to classmates and receive constructive feedback. Students sharing of work can occur beyond the boundaries of the face-to-face classroom through the use of secure Web-based platforms to post and comment on student-made podcasts, digital images of student work, and student presentation files. Students might use text messaging, cloud-based shared documents, virtual whiteboards, blogs, or wikis to collaborate on mathematical problems within the school or with students in other states or provinces or even countries (Rochelle et al. 2010). By making use of these electronic tools, students have a greater sense of ownership of the mathematics their learning, since the applications promote a sense of shared enterprise in the learning of mathematics. 

Finally, a wide variety of web-based resources support the teaching and learning of mathematics. Teachers are increasingly using personal and shared pages to organize and categorize the resources they find most useful. These lists allow them to quickly locate resources that they have found useful in the past and share these with others through social media. Their capacity to do this represents, in a sense the virtual opening of the classroom door to allow for collaboration among classrooms and teachers. Furthermore teachers can organize shared pages to enhance communication with their students and their students’ parents or caregivers."

Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All

(2014: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Reston, VA. p. 79-80)

Thank you NCTM for making the chapter on Tools and Technology relevant to today's Web 2.0 world!

*the eBook version is available for $4.99 ($3.99 if you are a member).

Wanna do Games, STEM and Mr. K

At this week's Global Math Department session, Tim Kubinak shared something "outrageous" that he does with his students on Fridays. He let's them play games for up to 45 minutes. The actual time depends on how well their group did on their math during the week. What games and why? "Let's face it," Tim said, "We're not good at teaching problem solving. We're good at teaching them to solve problems, but not problem solving. If we want to teach them problem solving, we have to exploit their interests. And that's what games do for kids." For that reason Tim makes available a variety of player games for his students. The main goal is to learn problem solving with a STEM theme. He calls it PYG (Play Your Games) which is a gameplay program designed to exploit the interests of students, within the context of reinforcing STEM methodology and problem solving acuity. Students work in groups of three. The amount of time that students are engaged in these activities is determined by results on these quizzes.


Tim has assembled an ecletic collection of playergames, hand held devices, MaKey MaKey touch pads and BYODs as part of his platform for teaching problem solving. Time frame is usually 8:15-9:00 when groups meet to get their equipment for game play. They check on the chart to see how much time is allotted to their group. They are also responsible for filling out the PYG sheet which has instructions for helping them make their session productive.

Though I do the question the method used to determine time for playing (the high scorers get the most time), Tim treats it as a game and I'm sure the kids are motivated to do better on the next grading period so they get more time the following Friday.

The open time for game playing with appropriate rubrics is an appealing way to engage students.

To learn more about Tim's class listen to his webinar at GMD.

Global Math Department Launches

Global Math Department

Are you tired of your math department meetings? Are they prone to put you to sleep? Well, there is a cure in the clouds. Its called the Global Math Department and it is housed conveniently on the Web as part of the Bigmarker.com community.

GMD’s About page tells you all you need to know about the group:

We are math teachers who share what we've learned, cause we don't want our classes to suck the energy from students. Professional development among friends, not just colleagues. Fun! Immediately useful! Interesting!

Reading that intro I bit and attended their weekly meeting last night. Chris Robinson, a middle school math teacher from northeast Pennsylvania, was our host and introduced the evening’s presenter Ilana Horn a researcher at Vanderbilt University.

Her topic was: Findings from Research.  Tonight, she presents five findings from research that have influenced how we think about teaching. Ilana Tweets at @tchmathculture and blogs at
http://teachingmathculture.wordpress.com/

You can experience this lively presentation and chat with a small, but very active group of math educators who attended here.

To become an active member of the Global Math Department go here and sign up and subscribe to their newsletter.

It was fun being a participant and I look forward to future sessions and will comment about them here at CLIME central.

NCTM 2015 New Members Resolution at Delegate Assembly?

After the panel discussion on Friday at New Orleans Conference a young teacher LeAnn Allen approached me and asked me how she can get more involved in NCTM. I shared with her that membership in NCTM would be a good first step and shared some of the benefits of being a member. I didn't think much more about it until I read her blog post which I share with you here:

Title: NCTM14 -> NEW MEMBERS?
NCTM 2014 left me ON FIRE. (Almost literally, it was so hot walking around on Saturday.) But seriously, it left me hungry for more: more PrBL in my classroom, more student conversations, more teacher online collaboration, more ed conversations, more all of it.
One conversation that I am glad to see continuing is the one centered around getting younger teachers in the classroom to participate in NCTM. An NCTM rep said the average member of NCTM is 57. Whether or not that statistic is true, here is what I’m interested in exploring from that conversation. 

A lot of young teachers I personally tried to cajole/blackmail/etc into coming to NCTM wanted to come, but couldn’t find the $$$. So, how can we make that more accessible to them? Give a “new teacher” discount” a la student discount (how do you define/prove “new teacher”)? Give a first-time attender discount? Give scholarships? A quick look at the NCTM page gave this single conference scholarship for first-time attenders as well as a similar one for prospective teachers. There’s also some other grants and scholarships but most of them have a requirement that you have to have been teaching for at least 3 years (which disqualifies me until next year). What if MTBoS banded together to come up with a scholarship or 2? I’d be willing to chip in a few bucks. 

Comment:
April 14, 2014 at 8:30 pm
As a first time attendee, I was also energized, and frustrated with the lack of younger membership and participation at NCTM when it clearly has so much to offer. That said, I think back to Dan Meyer’s point at the start of his talk (you were there, right?) about whether the conference would exist in a few years as we gain the capability to do that over the internet for next to no cost and with more accessibility. I think that might be the direction I’m heading — GlobalMathDepartment, twitter chats, etc.

Source: https://diymathpd.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/nctm14/

This is obviously a major concern of NCTM. I'm wondering if the Affiliate-at-Large groups (hopefully soon to be called Special Interest Groups) could address this issue through a resolution at the next Delegate Assembly meeting in Boston.

Any ideas or thoughts on this?

Ihor Charischak
Council for Technology in Math Education
CLIME
White Plains, NY

Maria Droujkova - Make Math your Own

This morning I listened to a recording of Maria Droujkova giving a keynote address at the Learning Revolution Conference Online. The title of her talk was "From adventurous learning to disruptive innovations: brave design in mathematics education." Here's her description of the talk:

Robert Lang is building a space telescope as long as the island of Manhattan. His out-of-the-box origami play helped to figure out how to fold the telescope into a rocket’s tiny storage box. Vi Hart is a mathemusician. Her whimsical sculptures, videos, and workshops are deeply therapeutic for hundreds of thousands of people suffering from math anxiety. Hans Rosling is a doctor, a statistician, and a data superhero who influences the decision-making of millions with interactive infographics. The issues our society faces require innovative, brave solutions. We already have a lot of creative dreamers and doers: our kids! At Natural Math, we design education that recognizes and supports students as creators of their own math. We grow local and global communities of math learners. We advance the view of the mathematical education as an adventurous journey. We develop tasks that are rich and complex, yet easy. And we introduce advanced math concepts to young children, including calculus for five-year-olds.

Maria really captures what young people should be doing: to make math your own, you need to make your own math. Listen to her presentation and be inspired. I was. Here is the link to her slide presentation.

Teachers Leveraging Technology in the Classroom Panel Discussion

Do you think this conversation is happening in Finland,  that the Finnish Council of Teachers of Math is having sessions about leveraging technology in the classroom?

-Karim Ani

At the NCTM conference last week I attended a panel discussion and was struck by Karim's comment. He continued with "sometimes I'm a bit of Luddite because often times we use technology as a thing to pursue in lieu of the thing that we actually want to pursue." [That thing being children learning math.] It reminded me of what Seymour Papert wrote back in 1990.

"Well, how many more [conferences on computers in education] should we have? Isn’t it time for us to grow up? And as we grow up, we should stop seeing ourselves as specialists of computers in education, because that casts us in the role of a kind of service profession. Accepting the role allows that other people are the ones to decide the big goals of education, what the curriculum is, how learning happens, what’s a school. And at our conferences we talk about how their decisions can be served by the computers. Well, fine, up to a point. This certainly allows revolutionary actions as long as we are at the stage of crafting Trojan horses to throw into the system. But at some point we have a responsibility to break out of that marginal role and take on our true vocation, which is not one of service but one of leadership. At some point it will be as ridiculous to have a world conference in computers and education as to have a world conference on pencils and education." Perestroika and Epistemological Politics, Seymour, Papert - Sydney, Australia – July 1990

Has Finland turned the corner and "grown up" focusing on learning and teaching? Just like Karim I'm not sure. But it's clear that we as a nation have not achieved that kind fluency with technology that these young panelists exemplify.

Technology can be a distraction. Because unlike a pencil which can be mastered in minutes, technology takes a bit longer and it's easy to get lost in its intracacies and one can lose sight of the prize we are after. But all the panelists on Leveraging Technology in the Classroom embraced technology as a strategy for winning the hearts and minds of children and teachers in our classrooms.

I think at this session there was an attempt to focus on the prize (students learning math). There weren’t any debates about which software was better (e.g. Sketchpad vs. Geogebra.) Though there was consensus that the Desmos calculator was a productive tool in helping children interact with mathematics in a genuine way.

Each panelist contributed something essential in this endeavor to transcend leveraging technology from a “thing” to a support system for the pedagogical idea that teachers value.

Ashli Black reminded us that teachers interacting face to face is still the ideal mode of the learning process. This NCTM conference provided that for educators. So do regional and local conferences. Maybe we need more conferences she suggested.

Conferences are great, but they are expensive said Karim. He’s right. Unlike 1990 when Papert wrote his article pre-Web 2.0 the online platform for collaboration was not available especially via blogs. It’s still not common mode for communication for most teachers, but it is growing steadily.

What’s NCTM’s role in this? Jon Wray said NCTM's mission simply put is to promote successful teaching and learning of math. One concern is that the average age of an NCTM member is 57.5 years. This has to change. I spoke up at the session and encouraged younger participation in NCTM. But NCTM also has to encourage younger teachers to get involved. The NCTM journals need to become more Web-based and interactive to appeal to a younger audience. Also to encourage math blogging and highlight math bloggers in their e-blast publications which tend to focus on what the President is saying rather than what the young teachers are doing. (Their Illuminations effort is more aligned with this, but needs to be better promoted.)

Blogging clearly needs to be promoted. Kate Nowak shared three components of blogging: (1) it has to be sustained over time (2) directy linked to classroom activity and (3) interaction with colleagues is crucial. Don’t do it alone.

The panel was asked what tools they found useful. The response was the technologies that promote communication, discussions and debates.

Raymond Johnson offered that building simulations that helped textbook problems come to life is important. He mentioned Simcalc and the Freudenthal institute as two groups that are making this kind of software available at a minimal cost.

Technology is not yet seamless in schools, but this panel made me more optimistic that blogging will be a powerful tool in encouraging more powerful conversations for students and teachers. That bodes well for the future.

Panelists and their blogs:
Chris Hunter - http://reflectionsinthewhy.wordpress.com
Ashli Black – Illustrative math
Karim Ani – http://mathalicious.com
Dan Meyer –  http://blog.mrmeyer.com
Kate Nowak – http://function-of-time.blogspot.com
Raymond Johnson – http://blog.mathed.net

Jon Wray - panel moderator

Noon Day Adventure at Panther Academy

Nestled in a nondescript area of Paterson, NJ surrounded by aging warehouses and auto repair garages lies Panther Academy a high school I visited last Thursday and was fortunate enough to watch a small group of high school students - budding future scientists and engineers -  recreate an experiment that Eratosthenes did 2200 years. Mr. Salama helped his  students use the shadow angles and some trig functions to come up with the central angle of the earth. The class partnered with a school in Kuantan, Malaysia to get their sun angle. By subtracting Paterson's sun angle  from Kuantan's they determined the angular separation at the center of the earth known as the central angle was 37.2 degrees. They also knew that the Malaysian school was 4130 km away by comparing latitudes.  So they were able to figure out that there were 360 / 37.2 = 9.68 "Kuantan to Paterson distances" that circumnavigated the globe. Making that calculation 9.68 * 4130 = 39,937.1 km the students discovered that their measurement was very close to NASA's listing of the circumference as 40,030.2 km.

Mr. Salama helps steady the meter stick as the students
determine the shadow length.

Shafi Ahsanul gave the summary report.

In May, the class will go on the field trip and use Al-Biruni's method for determining the circumference of the earth. I'm looking forward it.

Diagram illustrating a method proposed and used by Al-Biruni
to estimate the radius and circumference of the Earth