Greenhaus Education and Other "Effects"

NCTM is coming up in April and is in San Francisco, which has me very excited because I get to have a Key Curriculum reunion (i.e. my colleagues from my years working for Key Curriculum mostly live in the SF area).  It's hard to describe the amazing connection those of us who worked with Key, (Keysters, as we fondly refer to ourselves) have, and I have yet to find another place or another group of people that I so deeply connect to on both a professional and personal level. With this math conference and potential to see so many of my former colleagues, I have been a bit nostalgic about some of the things I loved from Key - i.e. Sketchpad and TinkerPlots to name a couple.  Sketchpad , now owned by McGraw-Hill, is still around thank goodness, but without the support and push in math education it deserves.  Thankfully, some former Key folks are still out there making a difference with Sketchpad - check out Daniel Scher and Scott Steketee's most recent article in The M...

I am preparing for my final face-to-face meeting with the two cohorts of middle and high school math teachers I have been working with the past 6 months.  We will still have one more online component, which ends in June. I am a little sad about the fact that our journey is coming to an end, as it has been one of my most rewarding professional development experiences, in large part because I was able to really get to know these teachers both personally and professionally and actually see the progression of change and confidence as they learned and integrated Sketchpad into their mathematics instruction. A quick recap of the five previous face-to-face lessons, or focus you might say: Lesson One: Begin professional development experiences assessing background skills of participants. Lesson Two:  Work on building a sense of community and support among participants, where they feel comfortable sharing their struggles, their experiences, their ideas and expertise. ...

I have been thinking and planning for my upcoming NCTM presentation on taking the hands-on, physical math manipulatives we use to help students learn and model mathematics to the virtual realm in order to provide  unlimited capabilities to explore and understand. It's something that I think is often thought of as an either or - either teachers use hands-on, physical models or they use virtual models, such as The Geometer's Sketchpad , and my thoughts are we should be using both. It's a way to help students see and understand the power of technology by exposing them to the limitations of the physical and then providing them the opportunity to see the capabilities to go beyond with technology. Some simple examples of what I mean: 1) Geoboards - students begin to explore polygons with geoboards, but are limited by the number of pegs on the geoboard, the number of rubber bands and the physical limitations of both (you can only stretch a rubber band so far before it snaps...

 I am sitting here in the beautiful Hilton in Pearl River NY after 6 long hours of flying - rough day in the air with all this crazy rain and thunderstorm action. I am just going over my thoughts and practicing my presentations for tomorrow - you'd think I wouldn't need to do that after all these years, but I am definitely a worry-wart and want to just make sure I have my stuff together! I am doing two 1-hour presentations tomorrow at the Ten County Mathematics Association Conference in Orangeburg, NY. Both presentations are geared for elementary math teachers, focused on the Common Core Standards - one on TinkerPlots and one on The Geometer's Sketchpad .  I love doing these hour long sessions because they are quick and fun - it's so rewarding to work with teachers and show them exciting, hands-on, engaging software that really helps students 'get' math.  But - of course, the downside being it's only an hour.  The most you can realistically do in an hou...

I am in the third online unit of my hybrid/blended PD so wanted to give some feedback and updates on how things are going online.  For those of you who have been following my hybrid/blended professional development series on integrating technology into math instruction (see a listing of all posts in the series at the bottom of this blog), you will remember that we just finished our third face-to-face meeting a couple weeks ago. My focus for this third unit (both f2f & online) is relevancy: Lesson Three: Make the activities and learning relevant to the teachers every-day teaching practice. By providing activities that focus on learning the skills, how to integrate technology appropriately, and also cohere to the specific content and curriculum the teachers must follow, it is more likely that they will begin to change their own practice. If they can see the relevancy to their own daily experience, they are going to be more willing to implement new tools and strategies....

In my most recent post in my hybrid/blended PD series, Planning for Hybrid PD (part 3) - Make it Relevant , I was about to embark on my 3rd face-to-face meeting with the teachers. I have met with the groups and have to say, I think relevancy was definitely the thing to focus on, for two reasons. 1) After almost 3 months working together, with 2 previous face-to-face meetings and 2 online components, the teachers are feeling comfortable with each other and really willing to voice their frustrations, ask for help or ideas, and share strategies. 2) They feel much more comfortable with the software themselves and are actually thinking of how it could work with their students, so they are want lessons that fit what they teach, since that's an easier stretch as they try something new. How did these two reasons fit into my goal for this third face-to-face meeting of making it relevant?  As I said previously Lesson Three: Make the activities and learning relevant to the teachers every-d...

Read an interesting quote yesterday in my research book, which comes from Jakob Nielsen about the 90-9-1 Rule for online community participation, or open-source.  Basically it says that even though open-source and free online communities are open for anyone to contribute, so in theory provide a wider audience to contribute the content, making it a diverse resource, in fact this is NOT the case.  90% of the users are passive consumers, with only 9% willing to comment or contribute content periodically, and most of the content and commentary being contributed by 1% of the users. Who is that 1%?  To me, a scary question. This finding is not surprising but is a little disturbing in the educational arena, where free and open-source are becoming more prevalent options due to the tight economy.  It begs the question, who is this 1% of the population that is contributing to the content being used by educators/education sites, and is it really reliable, res...