Hi again. It was a busy November. I spoke at the three NCTM regional conferences, keynoting two of them. That plus the Thanksgiving holiday, some family fun, some preschool volunteer work, and some forward progress on my dissertation has left blogging somewhere around eleventh place on the to-do list.
All of that makes your blogging more useful to me than ever. Please keep posting your interesting classroom anecdotes.
Here are all the blogs I subscribed to during November 2014:
- It’s my loss that I only just now found Cristina Milos’ excellent and evenhanded blogging on mathematics pedagogy and research. She blogs from the UK and tangles with educators across philosophical lines. “How to Argue with A Traditionalist — Ten Commandments” is one of her less evenhanded posts.
- Zach Cresswell wrote a great post about embodied cognition and the concept of a function — kids dancing around according to a graph.
- Kevin Davis asked for a shout-out for his new blog. All signs point to a blog about the flipped math classroom, which is a project — no offense, Kevin — I struggle to get excited about. In the first entry, Kevin assigns a video his students don’t watch. I’m curious what he does next.
- Taylor Williams is a statistics teacher who also knows how to program interesting computer simulations for his students. More, please.
- Sandra Corbacioglu is a former engineer turned math teacher in a 1:1 school. She also documents her practice with lots of pictures, so we’re all in luck. I see she also has excellent taste in graphing calculator technology.
- The C. Kilbane tag cloud would include #education, #design, and #making, with posts about 3D printing and video editing. So it would be awesome if he posted more.
- Zach Coverstone regularly blogs short, insightful posts about secondary math, recently asking What Makes An Engaging Task?
- Ve Anusic has exactly one post, but I think it indicates pretty good taste.
- Quadrant Dan is an older subscription but I bumped him onto my blogroll this month. Essential, fun reading.
5 Comments
Dan Meyer
December 1, 2014 - 11:03 am -I’m so cynical about the flipped classroom, I can’t even tell you.
Ve Anusic
December 1, 2014 - 12:45 pm -Thanx Dan! I’m working on it! New post coming today! Slow and steady…
I’ve had a lot of thoughts just trying to find time to share :)
Carlo Amato
December 1, 2014 - 9:03 pm -What is worse about the flipped classroom?
1. That it is purely passive instruction
2. That not all students can/will participate
Jason Dyer
December 2, 2014 - 1:52 pm -Also not sold on flipped classroom, but I’d like to see what happens when someone tries it from day one.
I feel like the video-watched-by-only-one-person problem is what I’d run into. I’ve had flip enthusiasts swear to me the students _will_ watch the videos (even my students who tell me they’ve never done homework for any class, ever?), but I’ve had other tech-for-students things end up only get used by a handful.
Dan Meyer
December 3, 2014 - 1:03 pm -@Carlo, there are lots of flavors of flip, but I generally find flipped instruction to misunderstand the conditions that make lecture useful (when you experience a need for it) and interesting (when it incorporates and builds on your own thinking).