It’s my annual tradition to scrape all the handouts and slides from the NCTM annual conference website and put them in a more usable form and location, including a single, massive download link [2.8 GB].

But this year I also found recordings from every session.

Not video, nope.

Twitter!

People were recording the sessions on Twitter. People were in sessions the entire conference tweeting key findings, memorable phrases, and impactful slides.

Those tweets were enjoyed in the moment by people who were near their computer during the session. But every session’s tweets were mixed up with every other session’s tweets from that same time period. Then they were lost immediately afterwards to a timeline that doesn’t stop moving.

So I re-captured those tweets and attached them to every talk.

I wrote a script that copied every speaker’s Twitter handle and the time of their session from the program book. Then the script searched Twitter for their handle and “#NCTMSD2019” and — here’s the thing! — captured the results only from the time period of their session. Not during their flight to NCTM. Not during the fantastic happy hour after their session either.

So at this site you’ll see the usual listing of speakers and sessions — but you’ll also see columns that let you know a) how many attachments those speakers made available and b) how much Twitter coverage their sessions received.

Here’s why this is a blast. Lauren Baucom gave a dynamite talk describing her work supporting the de-tracking of her high school. No handouts or video, but here are 34 tweets to help you connect with her ideas. The same is true for loads of other presenters.

I think a lot about Jere Confrey’s statement that “students are the most underutilized resource in our schools.” Students bring value to our classes — their identities, their aspirations, their early and developing understandings of mathematical ideas — that too often goes uncelebrated, unexplored, and underutilized.

Similarly, thousands of teachers traveled at great length and great expense to San Diego last week. Thousands of brains, bodies, and souls all together in community. What did we make of that experience? What do we have to show for it? Here’s one thing and I’d like to know more.