Friday Five: #1

On Fridays I plan to list five highlights from the #MTBoS and the internet at large. I could have discovered them in the last week, or the last year, but for some reason want to share them with you this Friday. I know it might be Thursday in your part of the world when I post this; what can I say — Australians know it’s important to get to the weekend as quickly as possible.

By the way, I toyed with working another f-word (no, not that one) into the title, but three words in an alliteration is bordering on f-crazy.

1. @Kelly_Zinck and @TheErickLee‘s blog: pbbmath.weebly.com. Not only does it have a really cool name ‘(Parentheses), [Brackets] and {Braces}’, but also a recommendation from Dan Meyer, and some really good posts. In the latest post ‘Deleting the Textbook‘, Kelly relates a seemingly simple but very empowering activity. I loved this quote:“Each time I took a question, I asked students “Why do you want to know that?” or “How will that information help you solve the problem?”
2. This story in Australia’s The Age newspaper, in which special-needs teacher Sophie Murphy demonstrates to a plane full of tired passengers the impact that teachers have beyond the classroom.
3. Jamie Duncan, who first appeared on my radar when I gorged on Matt Vaudrey and John Stevens’ new book, ‘The Classroom Chef‘, on the post-NCTM flight from SFO to LAX. Check out Jamie’s awesome First Grade Math Fight involving cookies.
4. #MTBoS30. 30 blog posts in 30 days. Because Anne Schwartz and Fawn Nguyen say so.
5. @RobertKaplinsky‘s NCTM16 ShadowCon talk, asking us to consider the difference between power and influence.