Week 7 - Building and Refining your PLN

Feedly

Upon searching for blog posts related to mathematics education, I was able to find quite a few interesting blog sites to follow. I decided to add the following to my Feedly account:

http://math4teaching.com/ : I chose to follow this blog because it contained a lot of great math resources for classroom. These resources included math videos, Geogebra lessons, math games, printable worksheets, and math problems of various levels to be investigated.

http://realteachingmeansreallearning.blogspot.ca/ : This blog incorporates numerous open-ended upper level math projects and lessons that would be great for the math classes that I teach.

http://blog.hoodamath.com/ : The Hooda Math Blog discusses how to use math games to help  students from 1st grade to high school, learn math curriculum related to the Common Core State Standards.

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ : Dan Meyer’s blog contains a lot of useful information on how to incorporate technology into education. He has been blogging since 2006, and has numerous blogs that relate real-world math examples.

Twitter

When searching through Twitter to find math related educational accounts, I was amazed with how many resources were available. I have not used Twitter at all prior to this class, because I was under the misunderstanding that Twitter was simply used for people to follow celebrities, or brag/whine  about things that they are doing on a minute to minute basis. On Twitter, I quickly found many accounts that support mathematics education, and would be very useful in my classroom. I starting following a lot of new people/organizations, the following is a list of some of the accounts that I thought looked like the best resources for math, education, or technology use in the classroom:

https://twitter.com/GoogleForEdu - Google for Education - Supports technology use in an educational setting.

https://twitter.com/khanacademy - Khan Academy - Contains supplemental resources that include video presentations of math topics.

https://twitter.com/themathforum - Math Forum - This site has numerous math activities to help engage students.

https://twitter.com/mathletics_usa - MathleticsUSA - An organization that discusses math topics and how to engage students.

https://twitter.com/danielle6849 - Danielle Hartman - An educator who wishes to help instructors Integrate technology into the classroom.

Reflection

So far this semester, I really have not had a lot of time to try to use these resources in my own classroom. However, I would like to begin to incorporate some of the wonderful lessons and strategies that I have recently found on Twitter and blog posts into my curriculum. I plan on sharing these resources with my colleagues at our upcoming PLC meeting. In order to help improve my information gathering skills, I would simply like to have the time to devote to explore what is available on the the Twitter and blogger accounts that I have found. I also think that I will need to come up with a way to organize the information that I find.