This Week in Math Ed: February 26, 2016

Math Ed Said

February 19: Last Friday, six people shared the growing list of "Cool Things We've Done Together." Most everyone was retweeting John Stevens:
Shared by: Regan Galvan, Christopher Parrish, Deidra Baker, Andrew Gael, Shauna Hedgepeth, Carrie Muir

Tina Cardone and Ilana Horn
February 20: Ilana Horn shared the plans for The Best of the Math Teacher Blogs 2015, a book that she's assembling along with Tina Cardone. They're looking for a little bit of help with the project, so see Lani's post if you're interested in lending a hand.

Shared by: Egan Chernoff, Nat Banting, David Coffey, Sherri Adler, Brian Bushart, Malke Rosenfeld, Jonathan Schoolcraft

February 21: Nine people shared Brian Bushart's post "Purposeful Numberless Word Problems." Brian has written in the past here and here about numberless word problems, and he's been thinking about how to present problems to students in a way that reveals the numbers only as students understand the structure of the problem. In the latest post, Brian took the next step of thinking about how numberless world problems might map to the problem types described by Cognitively Guided Instruction. If you're looking for a large collection of numberless problems, there's S. Y. Gillan's classic Problems Without Figures, and an updated take on that called "Numberless Problems for Today" by Farrar Williams. There was also a recent article called "Problems Without Numbers" in the December 2014 issue of Teaching Children Mathematics.

Shared by: Brian Bushart, Mark Chubb, Brett Parker, Bridget Dunbar, Graham Fletcher, Jennifer Bell, Norma Gordon, Jennifer Lawler, Kim Webb

February 22: Lucy Brownstein got a letter published in the New York Times disagreeing with the Andrew Hacker interview from a couple weeks ago. It was a proud moment for her teacher, Patrick Honner, and others were happy to share along.

Shared by: Patrick Honner, Andrew Gael, Dan Anderson, Sherri Burroughs, Danny Brown

February 23: Problem Strings was the topic at the Global Math Department as Pam Harris was this week's presenter.


Shared by: Pam Harris, Tyler Anderson, Sadie Estrella, Brian Bushart, Global Math, Gregory White, Tyler Anderson, Sadie Estrella, Megan Schmidt, Jessica

February 24: Two resources were popular on Wednesday, both involving favorite math-specific tech tools. The first was "Constructions Crash Course for Teachers," from the folks at GeoGebra, and the second was "Cellular," a resource from NRICH.

Shared by: Jen Silverman, John Golden, Nicholas Smith, Shauna Hedgepeth, Simon Gregg, NRICH maths, Mark Chubb

February 25: Patrick Honner did me a favor and wrote "An Introduction to Desmos." I admit, I do not know Desmos very well as (somewhat ironically) I don't do nearly the amount of mathematics as a graduate student in mathematics education as I did when I was a full-time math teacher. I worked through all the examples Patrick provided on his quick handout and I feel a little more comfortable, but nothing quite replicates using a tool in real problem-solving situations.

Shared by: Math for America, Dan Anderson, Eddi Vulić, Patrick Honner, Bridget Dunbar, Martin Joyce, Shauna Hedgepeth

Around the Math Ed Web

The clock is ticking on these March 1 NCTM deadlines!
The Global Math Departmenthas been been busy refreshing the GMD website. Next Tuesday's GMD talk will be Desmos Activity Builder: Best Practices for Charging Up Lessons, presented by Shelley Carranza.

Research Notes

New in Teachers College Record:
New in Teaching and Teacher Education:
New in the previously dormant Technology Innovations in Statistics Education:

Math Ed in the News


Math Ed in Colorado

The Math on the "Planes" conference is in Greenwood Village today and tomorrow, Feburary 26-27! I looked for hashtag activity on Twitter and saw none, so if you want in on the action I guess you'd better be there. I'll be at the conference tomorrow and hope to share during and afterward.

Rebekah Ottenbreit from CDE's Office of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Education is offering a session focused on helping math teachers and ESL/bilingual educators use tools and strategies to make mathematics content more accessible to English learners. The session is scheduled for March 8, in Greeley, and registration closes March 3rd. Scroll to the bottom of this page for location and reservation details.

The Front Range Math Ed Seminar (FRaMES) is on Twitter at @FRaMESMathED. The latest from Spencer Bagley on the listserv is that the next meeting may happen on Friday, March 5, if it's possible to get it organized by then.

There is a CCTM workshop for Region 7 on March 12. The topic of the workshop is fractions, ratios, and rates of change.

Nominations for CCTM board positions are open and will close on February 26, 2016. The CCTM board is also seeking to appoint a technology integration specialist to the board. See the link for details. CCTM is also taking nominations for their leadership award and teaching award, both of which are due by March 11.

The next session of the Northern Colorado Math Circles is March 7. See their website for more details. The Rocky Mountain and Northern Colorado Math Teachers' Circles are teaming up for a summer workshop in Winter Park from July 11-15. There's also a Rocky Mountain Math Teachers' Circle listserv you can sign up for to receive updates.

The "Expanding Your Horizons" symposium for middle school girls interested in STEM registration begins March 1.

The Colorado Math Leaders (CML) met in Englewood on Tuesday, February 23. The main topics of discussion were Principles to Actions, our goals and ideas for CML, and we discussed the possibility of becoming an NCSM affiliate. For our next in-person meeting, we're looking at an all-day (9-3) session on Friday, May 6.