Happy New Year. This ThinkUp outfit told me which of my tweets were “biggest” in each of the months of 2014. Twelve “big” tweets, in other words.

Here were my new blog subscriptions in December 2014, some of which might interest you.

• Steve Wyborney posted his animated multiplication table, a very thoughtful tool highlighting interesting patterns for young math students. So I subscribed.
• Steve Leinwand has a blog! I’d subscribe if I knew how. [BTW. Commenter Sadler found the feed.]
• Thinking Math is a group blog written by four elementary math educators. Go encourage them to post more.
• Kassia Omohundro Wedekind blogs about elementary math education also (subscribed!) and posts interesting observations and analysis to her Twitter feed (followed!).
• Khan Academy’s crack data science team has a blog, which might be Khan Academy’s most valuable contribution to my life so far. Fancy tools, sharp analysis, well-written.
• Off Anthony Carabache’s post, Education Should Step Away From Apple Devices, he seems like a cautious, thoughtful technologist, which is my favorite kind.

What did you fill your head with in December?

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.

Awesome Internetting from the last month.

New Blog Subscriptions

• I met Nicholas Patey at a workshop in San Bernardino. He wrote up a summary of some of our work that made him seem like a solid addition to my network.
• I added Amy Roediger to my blogroll (my short list of must-reads) because more than most bloggers I read she has an intuitive sense of how to create a cognitive conflict in a class. (See: two sets of ten pennies that weigh different amounts. WHAT?!)
• I subscribed to Dani Quinn. My subscription list skews heavily towards North American males and she helps shake me out of both bubbles. She also wrote a post about her motivations for teaching math I found resonant.
• In her most recent post, Leslie Myint wrote, “Apathy is the cancer of today’s classroom.” Subscribed.

New Twitter Follows

• I met Chris Duran in Palm Springs. Liked his vibe.
• Leah Temes plunked herself down at my empty breakfast table in Portland last month and started saying interesting things. Then she told me I should follow her on Twitter with the promise of more interesting things there. With only two tweets in the last week, though, I’m getting antsy.
• I subscribed to Peg Cagle because she understands the concerns of Internet-enabled math teachers and she also understand the politics that concern the NCTM board of directors.

Press Clippings

• I was interviewed for the New York Daily News about PhotoMath, which at one point in Fall 2014 was going to be the end of math teaching.
• An interview with some kind of education-related Spanish-language blog.

ICYMI

• My favorite post of the month was Raymond Johnson’s analysis of NCTM’s difficulties adapting to the present day.
• John Golden crowdsourced a list of free curricula.
• Michael Pershan hosted an open comments thread where he had a conversation with himself about the difficulties of carving out a career as a classroom teacher.
• Tim McCaffrey set up Agree or Disagree, which I hope will produce some interesting fight-starters.
• Kyle Pearce created the most interesting iBook I have ever seen for math class. It overclocks all the built-in features (video embeds, etc.) and then goes over the top, including collaborative student data displays. Awesome. Not easy.

Awesome Internetting from the last month.

New Blog Subscriptions

• Tracy Zager has been one of my favorite math voices on Twitter this school year and she’s now blogging. She’s also recently announced a fight with breast cancer and has requested that we “Please help me remember that I have thinking and ideas to share, and am involved in a world bigger than this right now.”
• Annie Fetter’s work at the Math Forum has always been impressive and it’s a total oversight I hadn’t realized she writes a blog until now.
• Tim McCaffrey and I share a lot of the same enthusiasms. He helps districts run lesson studies around three-act tasks and just started blogging about it.
• Matt Bury had positively invaluable commentary during last month’s adaptive learning discussions.
• Dan Burf, a/k/a Quadrant Dan, is a new teacher who has been using my old, old lessons, which is kind of fun to watch.
• Amy Roediger, whose writing on Classkick was extremely useful.
• Julie Wright is full of promise.
• Just Mathness is full of promise.

New Twitter Follows

• Patrick Honner: “I’m sure Benny would do quite well at this.”
• Bob Lochel, who is a regular in our Great Classroom Action features.
• Kelly Stidham, who lit up my blog this month with a comment about online professional development.

Multimedia Math

I make an open offer to my workshop participants to help them with their video editing. A couple of newcomers to multimedia modeling came up with these two tasks:

• Candy & Chips, for systems of equations.
• Apples for All, for unit fractions.

Great Tweets

Max Goldstein:

Proofs are social documents not compiled code.

Press Clippings

• The Ontario Ministry of Education filmed an interview series with me and other math education-types in Toronto.
• An interview with a teen writer from The Santa Fe New Mexican.
• An interview with AFEMO, a Francophone group of math educators.