Continuous formation

Sigh. It's tough to disagree with Fawn Nguyen. (http://fawnnguyen.com/maybe-less-tech-in-math-and-school/) She wrote, in particular: I want them talking and interacting more than anything! Learning mathematics is a social endeavor. Here’s my perennial classroom routine, “Turn and talk with your neighbor.” I want to bring back the arts of speaking and listening, reading and writing, debating and presenting. Now, if you've ever dropped by my class (and, thanks to #ObserveMe you're always welcome to! I just realized, I never wrote about #ObserveMe ... something to correct over this March Break) you'lll notice a lot of devices. My classroom has 1:1 pen-based Win10 TabletPCs -- everyhone thinks of "Surfaces" but they're actually made by Fujitsu. My classroom has OneNote, which captures as much as everything that gets written and a part of what gets said/displayed/acted out using audio/video capture. This means we have access to digital ink - so e...

So, Alice Keeler -  @alicekeeler - who is an  amazing blogger  and an incredible resource for those using Google products, posted  60 Ways Math Teachers can use Google Classroom  last April.  It came across my desk the other day and, since school hadn't started yet, I thought it might be a good reflection for me on how one could do similar tasks with OneNote Class Notebook. I went through the list and checked that I could accomplish them all with OneNote and re-wrote her post with those modifications ... but it was looking a little "plagiarism-y" so, just to check, I emailed Alice to see if she was okay with it.  She was not, but encouraged me to do my own brainstorming. So... Math Teachers & OneNote (including OneNote Class Notebook).  My top five...  1) The Under-valued value of scribbles & notation If you really want to be "paperless" (and that should never be a goal - you want to be digital so that content is ...

I'm an occasional participant at the Math Forum at the Fields Institute in Toronto. It's a meeting of folks interested in math education research held monthly; I'd get there more but academic and other responsibilities often overlap. Even today I was supposed to be at school for Homecoming but it's been a year since I made it and the topic, on teacher-coaching, was well worth it. At lunch, I sat myself amongst some folks I didn't know and the conversations ranged wildly. At one point, the conversation turned to how teachers had lost the respect of the public, that it was different in the past, and so on. Blame was placed on the former provincial government for taken an aggressive and demeaning approach to teachers. And I'm certainly not denying there is some truth in that effect that government had on the perception of our professionalism. But there's more to it than that. The woman who initiated the conversation gave the example of a parent who had c...

Once we're done the morning of math (with a brief coffee break) the teachers all get back together for an hour of math education pedagogy. Like the mathematics we cover, each year is something a little different. For example, in previous years we've focused on Lesson Design (with Drs. Nicole Bannister & Gail Burrill), Teaching through Problem Solving or Learning the Open-Ended Approach (with Dr. Akihiko Takahashi). This year the organizers tried something a little different; they tapped six of the returning participants to look at Questioning in the Classroom from the practicing teachers' perspective. As one of those teachers leading the professional development it was a considerable challenge to not only meet the expectations of the participants and the organizers but also our own expectations -- my colleagues are amongst the premier educators in the States (National Board certified, AP consulants, you name it). We began with a working weekend in Denver in the spri...