I thrilled to say that today
I achieved a professional goal that I had set for myself back in the summer of
2015. Today I presented at the NCTM regional
conference in Kansas City.
As I sit here tonight, I
wanted to take a moment to reflect and record my thoughts much like Jennifer Fairbanks did a few weeks ago. I found
Jennifer’s reflection and tips very helpful when preparing for this conference,
so thank you Jennifer. People helping
people…
The realization that I might
actually be a quality presenter at an NCTM conference came to last October when
I attended the NCTM regional in Orlando.
It was there where I gained the confidence and motivation to take action
toward being a presenter. I attended a
couple of sessions put on by Desmos Fellows and saw how powerful their
presentations were. I knew I could
present something on Desmos and it would be helpful to whoever attended. I noticed that Kansas City was hosting a
regional conference this year. Kansas
City is a short 6 hour drive from Brookings; I knew I wouldn’t find an NCTM regional conference
much closer anytime soon.
When the session proposal
window opened, there was a lot of buzz in the Desmos Slack about people planning
to attend the three regional conferences this fall. Fellow Jessica Breur (@BreurBreur) and I agreed to present
together and we decided to submit two proposals, with our fingers crossed at
least one would be accepted.
One proposal, “Facilitating Productive Classroom Conversations with Desmos Activities,” was approved. I shared the news with Jessica and we were
excited.
Jessica and I have both
presented a number of times and various conferences on this topic. We both had same idea of how the session
should run. I need to give Jessica a lot
of credit for taking the lead on the planning and preparation. We used an older presentation of hers as our
starting point and made appropriate adjustments to fit our needs. On the eve of our presentation, we met after
dinner to practice and made final tweaks.
Our presentation was
scheduled for 9:45 am this morning. I
arrived at the room plenty early. Jessica
arrived a few minutes later. Once the
session before ours ended, we headed into the room and set up. Jessica connected her computer to my phone’s
hotspot to ensure we had strong WiFi for our presentation.
Jessica and I had planned to
float around the room to introduce ourselves as people started to settle
in. Our goal was to get a feel for the
Desmos knowledge and experience in the room in case there was a need to adjust
our presentation at all. We correctly
assumed there would be a wide variety of users in attendance. As the room started to fill, we began to fail
at our goal of introducing ourselves to everyone. Soon every seat in the room was taken and
people were being turned away at the door.
We began our presentation
with brief introductions and then jumped right into Marbleslides. We asked participants to team up with a neighbor
and to complete the activity. We soon
found out that the WiFi was going to struggle to support the 90+ users in the room. Some people started using their phones for
hotspots, while others simply tried the activity on their phones.
After about two minutes of
floating around the room and seeing a lot of people struggling to get into the
activity, we decided to go off script.
Our original plan was for participants to take on the role of a student and
complete the activity in pairs. Instead,
I went into the activity as a student and talked them through what the students
would be doing in the activity. I also
modeled what a teacher would be seeing on the dashboard and showed off some of
the conversations tools. We were able to
answer a few questions from the audience before moving on.
Jessica then led the next piece
focused on the Pool Border Problem. It
is such a great activity to use to generate a variety of responses. Jessica did a superb job of demonstrating how
to use Snapshots and modeled so many great teacher moves.
We then had participants
play Polygraph: Quadratics for a few minutes.
While walking around the room, I could sense the enjoyment from the participants. Polygraph is a pretty simple activity to
understand and when have a room full of math teachers and ask them to play with
math, the results tend to be pretty solid.
Jessica and I had a Card
Sort ready to unleash if time allowed for it.
Unfortunately, largely in part thanks to the WiFi issues, we were behind
schedule already and decided to bypass the Card Sort activity.
Next on our agenda was to
give an overview of the teacher.desmos.com site. Jessica handled the discussion of how to
search for an activity and how to navigate around the teacher site. I spoke on what it looks like when you go to the
activity screen and how to preview an activity and generate a classroom
code. There was a lot of information presented
in a short amount of time; I wish we had a bit more time to talk in more detail
about those features.
Lastly, we gave participants
about 10 minutes to create a Desmos account if they didn’t already have one,
browse around the teacher site, and search for an activity they could take back
into their classroom. Some participants
headed out the door to their next session (there were some overlapping times
for sessions). We were able to answer a
lot of questions on an individual basis.
Overall, I thought the
presentation went very well. I hope the
people who attended were able to take something away from it. I really hope those who had not heard about
the Desmos activities will take a chance and use one in their classroom. Their students will thank them if they do.
A couple of quick shout outs. First, thanks to Joel (@joelbezaire), Hedge (@approx_normal), and Annie (@mrsforest) for
attending our session and for the positive vibes on Twitter. Second, shout out to Jessica for being a
superb co-presenter. It was great
working with you. Third, thank you to the administration at Brookings School District for supporting the professional growth of your staff and allowing me professional leave to attend these conferences. I learn a lot while at these conferences and always bring back something new for my students.
Finally, a shout out to my
wife Stephanie and my kids for allowing me to chase my dreams. I’m no SuperDad, but I know it’s not easy
when I leave town for a few days. I love
you all!
