2015 Remainders

Let’s close out 2015. In this remainders edition:

Eight new blog subscriptions from November & December.
Five essential 2015 posts from this blog.
Three bloggers I envy.
Seventeen Great Classroom Action posts I never got around to posting.

Blogging

We successfully goaded Brett Gilland into tweeting and blogging. His writing features art, wit, and insight for days. Best follow of my fall quarter.
Jason D’Arcangelo is an elementary math coach, making him rare company online.
Kendra Lomax does interesting work in elementary math education also, most recently with the University of Washington’s Teacher Education by Design project.
Damian Watson just came off a two-year blogging hiatus with a post featuring Malcolm Swan, Andrew Stadel, and cognitive conflict, which pushes all three of my buttons.
Meryl Polak likewise came off a maternity leave to post about her experience designing and implementing a 3 Act Math task.
Geoff Wake was one of my colleagues at the Shell Centre when I set up a tent in their offices several years ago. Great guy. Interesting thinker. I’m excited to see him maintaining a blog.
Jenn Vadnais does consistently interesting work with the Desmos Activity Builder. I’m tuned in, hoping to learn how she works.
Glen Lewis blogs thoughtfully about technology, learning, and engagement in math education.

These blogs are each low volume, producing maybe one post per month. There is zero risk of getting overwhelmed here. Just toss them in Feedly or some other RSS reader and enjoy their insight whenever they find the time to share it.

Honorable Mentions

I don’t have a lot of envy in me for other Internet math ed types — their followers, retweets, subscribers, etc. Just keep working. What does turn me green, what I do covet, though, is another blogger’s ability to stir up conversation, to mobilize and collect the intellect of his or her readers. In 2015, that was Dylan Kane, the blogger whose posts invariably had me clicking through to the comments to see what he managed to provoke from his readers, then scratching my head trying to figure out how he did it.

If your heart belongs to elementary math education, the best moderators I have found there are Tracy Zager and Joe Schwartz.

My Year in Review

If you’ve come to this blog only recently, here are five posts that received a lot of traffic and commentary this year:

Looking for favorites from the wider online math education community? Check out the #MTBOS2015 hashtag. If I had to award my own MVP, it’d be Elizabeth Statmore’s “How People Learn” and how people learn where she turns essential research into manageable practice.

Great Classroom Action

And now, shamefully presented without commentary, seventeen posts I read in 2015 that had me check myself and think, “That classroom action is great!” I haven’t shared these yet and it’s time to clean the cabinet.