I was learning.

In December, 2011, I watched the CMC-North Ignite! talks in Asilomar. I continued to watch, listen, and learn. In April, 2012 Annie, Max and Steve again performed at Ignite! in Philadelphia at NCSM.

I was still learning.

On October 29, 2012 I received an email from Karen Cowe and she wrote,

“You knew that one of these days I’d come knocking.” … “This will be the last Ignite! for me, so it would be great to finally get you up there!”

I decided this was my opportunity to use what I had been learning from watching. One way to cope with the pressure was not to tell anyone at the Math Forum what I was planning to do!

On Saturday, December 1, mission accomplished!

The next day I emailed:

“My Ignite! talk was successful according to several accounts. I was in good company. I was #5 out of 9 [Avery, Jennifer, Harold, Bill, me, Lew, Ruth, Scott, and Mike. There were about 400 in Merrill Hall where it’s held in Asilomar. Even the balcony seating was full. The good news is that I didn’t even think about that. I can’t really say it was fun but I told Karen Cowe I was honored that she asked me and satisfied that I managed to do it without getting too stressed. As Ruth Parker said to me, she can’t remember putting that much prep time into something that only lasts 5 minutes! I agreed!”

“Well, we’ll see what the video looks like first since I have absolutely no memory now of what I said! It really is an amazing experience. You’re sitting there watching the four that are presenting in front of you and each of their 5 minutes “feels” like a real 5 minutes (or maybe even longer). Then it’s your turn and the fourth speaker comes over, hands over the mikes, you get them clipped on, you walk over to the spot, and suddenly you go into time warp and it all speeds up so quickly — it’s really, really weird — it all seemed over in about 5 seconds.”

Now that I have proof that I actually did it: Suzanne Alejandre at CMC-North Ignite I know that I really belong to the Math Forum Ignite! Club.

And, as often happens, I am thinking of connections between my experience of watching and learning and how that might play out in a mathematics classroom. There are students who may take time before being ready to perform. Are they watching? Are they learning? When they’re ready, will they perform? I believe there are and they definitely will. And, as I talk about in my own performance, if we create classroom environments to help unsilence their voices, there is even more of a chance that they will perform!

NCTM 2011 – Indianapolis

NCSM 2012 – Philadelphia

I wanted to be like them and give an Ignite! talk but I didn’t want to feel the pressure … so … I kept it a secret. It really happened, though, and I have the poster to prove it:

A PDF version of my slides are here and soon we may be able to view the video from Key Curriculum’s YouTube channel. Fun!

Solar Walk – 3D Solar System model
By Vito Technology Inc.

I realize that it’s science but I figure if you’re an elementary teacher you teach science and if you’re a middle or high school teacher you have colleagues who teach science!

What is SO COOL about this app is to think about how it could be used along with the “Notice/Wonder” activity. Imagine that you have a class set of iPads. You’ve downloaded this (free!) app on each of them. You hand them out to the students and just ask them: “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” and just let them wander. Judging from what happened when Lee showed my husband and me this app, we immediately got lost in it — and what was so fun was that we each got lost in a different section. How could you help but learn?

Next would be sharing — best would be if in your classroom you have a way to share what an iPad displays on a classroom display but even if that’s not something you’ve figured out, I can imagine students taking turns talking about what they found.

The planets just come to life in this app. It’s quite incredible!

Display the two paragraphs.

Another idea instead of displaying the two paragraphs would be to say, “I’m going to read you a story.” Read the first paragraph and ask “What did you hear?” Read the second paragraph and ask “What did you hear?” And then, perhaps display the two paragraphs to do a “Noticing/Wondering” activity.

If you try this idea of using either student solutions or our solutions from the Packet, please leave a comment to tell your story. What did you notice as your worked with your students? What did you wonder?

• The problem [requires a Math Forum PoW Membership].
• Information about accessing “Baking Blackberries″ (and all our current PoWs) for two weeks with a free Math Forum trial account.
• Information about becoming a Math Forum Problems of the Week Member. Compare prices – consider starting with a $25 membership giving you access to all of this year’s Current PoWs — and you can create 36 student logins as well!

Unsilence Students’ Voices, September 2012, CMC ComMuniCator

I’ve presented these sessions with the title, Unsilence Students’ Voices:

As you read the ComMuniCator article and/or view the resources linked from the sessions, please comment here. How are you helping your students make their mathematical voices heard?

• the one iPad classroom
• best uses of my iPad as compared to my computer
• best uses of my iPad as compared to my iPhone

Second true confession — I’ve heard and read about folks who use readers and this and that to keep track of things and I know that @maxmathforum and others will think … good grief, Suzanne … but I’ve just not been at a point where it seemed like I needed to use anything. I wasn’t ready. I continued using my old ways of organizing myself to try to get in tune with some of the new ways that I was trying to learn about. (Yes, my mind makes an analogy immediately to the classroom. Kids who still count on their fingers. Kids who still use tables. I’ve been counting on my fingers but my “teachers” have been patient with me and believed that I would take another step.)

Why am I confessing, you might wonder? This morning I decided it’s finally time for me to get something to organize the blogs I’ve now found myself gravitating to and instead of just having extra tabs open all the time on my browser or depending on a tweet to remind me of a new post I might want to read, I downloaded Pulse. As soon as I started interacting with that app on my iPad, I knew I had made a good choice. It just seemed so intuitive to me. Here are a few things I did as I set things up:

I made two “pages” – the first one is news, sports news, and general things like that. The second page has blogs that I’m starting to follow. As I get into using this, I may add more pages but, for my purposes at the moment, this is enough. I’ve connected it to Twitter and that feature I find very cool:

(left) The tweets of folks I follow that have included a link to a URL in a recent tweet are included in my scrolling list.
(right) If I click on one of those blocks in the scrolling list, the URL opens to the right.

Often I found myself roaming through tweets thinking that I’ll look at the URLs when I have more time. This way, they’re all gathered in one place. And, if I want to save anything on any of this, I just click the “star” icon in the lower left corner.

My husband brought my morning latte upstairs as I was setting up Pulse on my iPad. I showed him and his reaction told me that this was worth sharing on my blog! As he went downstairs, I heard him say to our son, “Lee, go up and see what your mother found!” We all have third generation iPads and we each use them for different purposes.

With my true confessions this morning I’m hoping it helps some folks who are new to using an iPad, find a way to make things more manageable without getting overwhelmed. As I mentioned in An iPad in Class, Part 1, “easy” is key to making sure that you REALLY use it!

When I saw this (photo above) I suddenly saw symmetry. I’m taking @joshuazucker’s advice and not saying much more than that. Once I took the first photo this morning I continued walking to work and took these photos with that same theme in mind. What do you notice?

click on each photo to view a larger one

click on each photo to view a larger one

click on each photo to view a larger one

• as soon as I download it, I can make it do some of what it’s advertised to do
• when I try it the second time I can do even more things
• because of all that I can do (without reading directions) I actually take time to read (scan, at least) the directions and I quickly learn even more features

The best part, however, is how I’m thinking Air Sketch can help make the most of an iPad. It reminds me of when I tried to make the most of one computer in a classroom. Air Sketch lets you display on your computer screen what you draw on your iPad – so if we take that one more step, it allows you to display whatever you project from your computer! Fun. Here are some photos I just took at my desk showing my iPad and my computer screen (imagine that my computer is connected to a video projector instead of my monitor):

Step 1: opened Air Sketch on my iPad and a web page in Safari

Step 2: touched the tiny icon in the lower left corner of my iPad screen to open the controls and typed that URL in Safari

Step 3: whatever I draw on my iPad is “mirrored” on my computer screen

Drawing with my finger is fun … but … I’m focused on how to use this in a mathematics classroom and I consider,

• calculations — kinds of things that you might write on a whiteboard — instead you walk around with your iPad and students write on it
• take photos of student work and display
• display PDFs (or photos of papers)
• annotate

With the full version I can access my “camera roll”

Another cool feature is that you can save pages.

So, you could save things from one class to use the next day or you could prepare some pages ahead of time and make them visible when ready.

It took me some time to fully realize what the dominant mathematical theme for the day would be. Once I got over the fact that tessellations were not going to dominate, I took these photos:

I should have had a clue when I chose what to wear in the morning!