I still feel kind of weird saying this but, I just gave a keynote at Twitter Math Camp! Actually I gave it a day ago, but I had to process the whole thing, travel home, and help @BwalkerQ get his blog up and running. So anyways, here is the stuff from the presentation for anyone that is interested, and a little explanation of my process after that.

Presentation info

Video:

Slides:

Periscope:

Forgot to put this up easier. Thanks to Sadie Estella for recording this!

Part 1 & Part 2

Desmos Activity:

The people at Desmos gave this one some extra juice, so I can’t share the activity builder yet, but if you want, you can go through and participate it in here.

MTBoS Roll Call

This website links the pictures of people with their first time posting on #MTBoS. This is a temporary thing, as the data is going to get stale, which you can see in the missing profile pictures, so check it out while you can!

Pre MTBoS Interviewees

I was super lucky to be able to interview Andrew Stadel, Christopher Danielson, Michael Pershan, Sam Shah, Dan Meyer, Fawn Nguyen, and Sadie Estrella. whose quotes are included in the presentation in that order. They were super generous with their thoughts and their time. I didn’t mention them on the slides because I wanted people to focus on the words, and not where they came from, but I am very, very grateful.

MTBoS Data

For this talk I used a chrome extension to scrape information from twitter’s website. Twitter doesn’t have a way to get your old tweets, unless you just want to download your own tweets. The scraper led to some errors, and my data isn’t all that great, but if you’re interested in playing around with it, I have a database that I can query with other questions.

Summary

Sharing your teaching online in a community like the #MTBoS has lots of research-supported benefits. Potential new educators are often hamstrung by lots of barriers, the biggest of which seems to be feeling like they are not ‘Whatever’ enough (Witty, photogenic, cool, smart, etc.). Data on #MTBoS hashtag shows that these problems haven’t stopped the #MTBoS from growing much larger especially in recent years. A set of interviews with teachers who shared years ago described a community of support, comfort, bravery, and a commitment to reflection, feedback and learning. Lastly, my own journey to sharing online illustrates how important connecting with people are, and asked the audience to think of new ways to make connections for other members of our continually growing community.

Takeaways

My whole plan was to make a big twitter chat, and it worked! Except that the twitter bots came on strong at the end and after the #pushsend hashtag started trending. It got more popular than anyone imagined, way too quickly, and now we have to figure out ways to make sure people’s voices didn’t get lost. Seemed fitting.

I got Sketchnoted!

This whole process left me feeling very vulnerable, and also very supported. Thanks to Lisa, Tina, Kate, Ben, All the people I mentioned earlier, and everyone else who helped me with this. I learned a tremendous amount from the process of making this talk and I’m forever grateful.