Your tasks:

1. Ask someone how they stay organized in the MTBoS.
2. Choose a way to stay on top of your blog reading.
3. Choose a way to stay on top of your Twitter.
4. Comment on this post about what you’ve set up.

So you’re reading blogs! You’re tweeting! Awesome. We knew you could!

Hopefully you’ve found some resources you like and some voices online that resonate with you.

So how do you keep in touch with all of this? How do you keep pace with all of the tweets and posts and ideas that your online colleagues are generating? Let’s talk about tools and time.

But first: Everyone wrangles the MTBoS differently. We all have our favorite tools and methods and apps and haunts. You’ll figure out what works for you. A great first step is just knowing what all is available and possible. The run-down below highlights a few, but you should really get a diversity of opinions from people who you suspect might operate similarly to you. So your first assignment is to ask someone how they stay organized in the MTBoS. You can tweet to them, leave them a comment on their blog, write them an email, or ask them in person. We grant you 100% permission. 😀

Tools:

There are a number of tools that you might use to help collect and streamline your online feasting.

There are better ways to keep up with blogs that you like than just visiting them on occasion to see what’s new. For blogs that you like, you might subscribe to them by email. Whenever the blogger publishes a new post, you’ll get an email with the blog post pasted right there in it. How conveeeeenient!

As you follow more blogs, you may want to have a special place for blog posts other than your email inbox. That’s what an RSS reader is for. Whenever someone publishes a new post, the RSS fairy pushes out magical dustings of…well, I don’t know all of the technical details of RSS. The important thing is that a RSS reader is like an inbox for blog posts. It gathers every new blog post from blogs you want to keep track of.

There are lots of different RSS readers. I use Feedly, Tina uses Digg Reader, and others like The Old Reader. You’ll find one that works for you.

For Twitter, there are many options for reading your feed. You can use the twitter.com website. On computers, there are two clients that Twitter produces, Twitter and Tweetdeck. Twitter is simpler, while Tweetdeck allows you to have multiple columns. There are also clients that third-party companies have created, like Hootsuite, and there are also a variety of phone apps available for you to keep up with tweets on your mobile device.

All of these are a little different and can be configured in bunches of ways. Find the right combination for you!

Time:

Having a MTBoS routine can be helpful. I mean, you’re going to fall into some kind of behavior pattern anyway, so why not take some conscious control over it?

Maybe you’ll have a weekly check-in time. Maybe you’ll look at your Twitter feed every morning. Maybe you’ll have as a goal to read one blog post a week and comment on it. Maybe there’s a regular Twitter chat that you’d like to make a regular appearance at.

Who knows what you will do! You’ll have to figure it out. Get ideas and opinions from others about how they wrangle things, and just pay attention to your own habits and what feels productive, uplifting, and energizing to you. Participating in the MTBoS is not an obligation. You’re doing it for you—for your professional growth and to be a part of a inspiring math ed community. Also, know that if you take a long break from the MTBoS, you will be able to pick things right back up whenever you return, and people will be glad to see you.

Strategies Shared:

Let me leave you with a couple of blog posts by MTBoSers who have shared some thought about their own systems and strategies for managing their online resources and feeds:

• How I Organize this Vast World by Jasmine Walker
• Organizing on Tina’s #matheme page

Know of one that’s not listed here? Please leave a link on the comments!

Once you’re armed with an organization strategy, it’s time to discover even more resources!

tldr: There’s going to be a MTBoS booth at NCTM Boston! We could use your help in the following ways:

• Sometime soon, you can tweet on the hashtag #WhyMTBoS a reason why the MTBoS is great.
• If you’re attending NCTM Boston, you can sign up to spend time staffing the booth.
• If there’s an MTBoS project or endeavor that would be great to highlight at the booth, let us know about it!
• Let us borrow your internet browsing device for NCTM— iPads would be excellent.

And we’ll be running a new Explore MTBoS online excursion after NCTM Boston, so watch this space!

---

As you might have seen, on Sunday we tweet-announced some small parts of our booth plans and made some requests:

We’re gearing up for the #MTBoS booth at #NCTMBoston. Will you tweet your own #WhyMTBoS so we can share your thoughts with attendees?

— Explore MTBoS (@ExploreMTBoS) March 15, 2015

We’re gearing up for the #MTBoS booth at #NCTMBoston. Are you involved with a project you’d like highlighted there? Let us know!

— Explore MTBoS (@ExploreMTBoS) March 15, 2015

You also may have noticed that these tweets came from @ExploreMTBoS and that we’ve woken up this blog. Did we pique your interest? We hope so!

 The Math Twitter Blogosphere has an official booth in the exhibit hall at the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Like, table, banner, curtains, chairs, the whole deal! This booth might serve many purposes:

• Let’s meet at the MTBoS booth and decide where to go for dinner!
• OMG, I lost my dongle. Can someone pretty please run a Mac adapter to the MTBoS booth that I can borrow for my presentation?
• I heard Christopher is working the booth at 3:00. I hope he’ll sign my shapes book download!!

But the real goal of the booth is to share the wonders of our community with the wider world of math teachers. The hope is that the booth will be an entry point for teachers who might not find our online community otherwise. But this community is vast and multi-faceted. A two minute spiel at the booth or a handout of a few resources is a great first step, but there’s so much more to see! So, we will be running a new Explore MTBoS event after NCTM to help people explore and participate in our community. Stay tuned!

To convince people they want to do that, we need some help:

If you aren’t attending NCTM, we still need your help! You can tweet or comment why you participate in this community (use #WhyMTBoS so we can find your tweet). And you can give suggestions of MTBoS projects and endeavors to highlight and items to have on hand in our booth space. 

If you’re attending NCTM, you can sign up for a time slot to work the booth. And you can also come by the booth early on to grab a #MTBoS sticker to alert other teachers that you’re in the know—because you don’t need to be standing under a banner to talk to people about why having on online math teaching community is great!

So what will the booth be like? Picture this: You’re walking up and down the aisles of the exhibit hall and you spot an interesting banner:

#MTBoS: Math Twitter Blogosphere

There’s a live twitter feed projected onto the curtain tracking the #NCTMBoston and #MTBoS hashtags. On one end of the table there’s an array of business cards and stickers representing many of the projects in our community. There’s a stack of sturdy info sheets to browse at the table, highlighting many aspects of our community (e.g. Twitter chats, TMC, Global Math). Plus there will be books to flip through and enticing baskets of prizes for raffling. (Note: we won’t sell anything at the booth because taxes and complicated stuff.)

Here’s a run-down of our plan for the booth so far. Please let us know if you have some specifics to add in or a new idea that could be incorporated!

• Lovely and welcoming decor
  • A big blank hanging poster for people to sign with their twitter handles, blogs, names, and greetings.
  • #WhyMTBoS curtain mini-posters (half size sheets with color photos of avatars)
  • Poster of MTBoS events and meet-ups happening during NCTMBoston (including Shadow Con: Thursday, 5pm, Room 258A)
  • Schedule of who is working the booth, and when
  • Schedule of NCTM presenters who are involved in the MTBoS
  • Schedule of MTBoS presenters at other conferences
• Browsable things
  • Foam-core info objects (in a pile or magazine holder)
    • Schedule of the Twitter Chats with some avatars and topics
    • Global Math schedule and highlights
    • One-stop Resources
    • Samples of things like printouts of visual patterns that people can hold (and toothpicks to play with the toothpick patterns?)
    • Tweets about #WhyMTBoS (more of them!)
    • Tweet-ups (including social events at NCTM’s)
    • Announcement and description of upcoming Explore MTBoS event
  • Projection from tweetdeck onto the curtain or a large paper, allow people to tweet questions as @ExploreMTBoS
  • A computer or two (ideally tablets) (Can we borrow yours?)
    • with feedly up (and matheme and virtual filing cabinets)
    • tweetdeck open with #NCTM and #MTBoS
    • people can ask questions from @ExploreMTBoS
  • Copies of Nix the Trix, Common Core Math for Dummies, Powerful Problem Solving
• Informational takeaways
  • Cards that point to Explore MTBoS info page
  • Business cards/stickers for individual projects and sites
  • Handout of steps to making a Twitter account
• A Raffle/Estimation Task – doing an Estimation 180 is like way better than the ol’ jelly bean jar.

We’re looking forward to it. Thanks for your help, and we hope to see you at the conference!

You’ve blogged. You’ve tweeted. You’ve collaborated, listened, and chatted.

You are loving it.

But you’ve also begun to wonder: is this too much of a good thing?

It’s true. The MathTwitterBlogosphere is a bottomless wellspring of teach-y, math-y goodness. It can feel like drinking from a peppy, insightful, and insomniac firehose.

That’s to say: you’ve got resources pouring in from all over. And the MTBoS is gloriously decentralized. So how do you keep everything organized?

Take a deep breath. It’s time to get your ducks in a row. This is going to be a week of consolidation.

Mission #6: Borrowing and Regrouping *

Given what you’ve encountered so far while Exploring the MTBoS, what are the habits and processes you want to establish for yourself? And what are the tools you can use to make them happen?

Step 1: Some Tools

Get Your Feed On

If you find yourself tromping around to various blogs you love, hoping to find new posts, then do I ever have a wonder-product for you. It’s called a feed reader. It will gather new posts from the blogs you specify and plop them all on a page for you. Kind of like getting emails for new blog posts, but in their own separate little cubby.

In yesteryear the feed reader of choice was Google Reader, may it rest in digital peace. No one really knows what to do in its absence, but there’s been a lotta discussion, opining, and podcasting about it. For a few options: I use Feedly **, Tina uses Digg Reader, and others like The Old Reader. You’ll find one that works for you.

“Virtual” Filing Cabinets

When you find a lovely math tidbit that you want to hold onto for future planning, where should you stick it for safekeeping? You could bookmark it, email it it yourself, drop it in a Google doc—the possibilities are endless. One option is to make (or piggyback upon) a virtual filing cabinet. Sam’s is the original. It’s a page on his blog where he stores useful tidbits for his future use. And we all get to benefit from it! You can use it as a resource or as a blueprint to create your own—a place to keep your favorite resources, curated and collated by topic. Sam has even compiled a list of other people’s virtual filing cabinets—cabinet o’ cabinets!—so you can check out how other people make this idea work for them.

Step 2: The Cavalry

At Twitter Math Camp this past summer, some “trustworthy people” gave a presentation entitled Devise a Plan to Organize. Taking a gander at their slides would be well worth your time.

And folks have written blog posts about how they manage and thrive in the MTBoS . We’ll encourage them to reshare those posts on their blogs and on Twitter this week. We’ll collect ’em all at Tina’s #matheme page. If you have one or find one, you can submit it to #matheme here.

There are some good takes on how to tack your  path in the MTBoS. But who wouldn’t want some more schemes and words-to-the-wise? Which leads into…

Step 3: The Reflection

Because we’re own damn cavalry, dammit.

Take stock. Make a plan. Chat about it on Twitter. How do all of the different activities of the MTBoS coalesce for you into ongoing and useful professional development? What’s worked so far? What do you keep on your calendar? What do you hope for? What meshes with your workflow?

And then blog it out. Please. Because we’re all still figuring this out, and every idea and perspective helps.

Alternatively, you could write a post that could be a start on your own virtual filing cabinet. Find a few things around a topic, post about them, and tuck it all away for future-you and future-us to benefit from.

Either way, share your post like we’ve been suggesting: tweet it (with #MTBoS attached) and leave it in a comment below. Then, as we are wont to do, read and comment on the blog posts of the three commenters directly above you. Be sure that you are commenting on their blog and not here.

And this week, be sure breeeeeeathe. 😀

* Goodness, was that ever a deft punning of this week’s mission with multi-digit subtraction lingo. Bravo, Lanier.

** Admittedly, without any particular enthusiasm.

(Mission title runner-up: Tweet Yo Self)

Welcome back! This is Justin Lanier—on behalf of mis amigos—here to present you with your second Explore MTBoS mission. No worries if you haven’t finished Mission #1 yet—I haven’t—but let’s keep the ball rolling, shall we?

Mission #2: Twitter Me This

Your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to try your hand at Twitter. Maybe for the first time, maybe for the first time in a while, maybe in new ways, maybe with new people.

This mission, combined with our blogwork in Mission #1, will provide you a sure foundation for all future Explore MTBoS enterprises. You’ll be platformed up and ready to mingle by the week’s end.

Twitter is chatting with the world. It’s microblogging. It’s the world’s best teacher’s lounge. It’s a free-flowing and wide-ranging conversational tapestry, a place to ask a pressing question, let off some steam, share and reshare resources, find inspiration and encouragement, and crack hilarious jokes. It’s a great place to listen in, vet an idea, and let your colors shine through.

All this in 140 character bursts. Day and night. With #copioushashtags and @KimKierkegaardashian.

Having timely, thoughtful, and charming interactions from a whole world of online colleagues? Yes, please.

Step 0: The Account

First of all, if you don’t yet have a Twitter account, let’s get you set up with that. Note that in addition to what I say here, there’s a Twitter sign-up how-to at the “Welcome to the MathTwitterBlogosphere” weebly site. (If you’ve already got a Twitter account, just scroll on down Step 1, demarcated by a picture of a cat.)

First up, head over to twitter.com and start filling in some info under New to Twitter? Soon enough, you’ll need to come up with a username. Remember, characters are at a premium, so you might prefer shorter over longer.

Next, Twitter has you go through a short tutorial. You can probably follow through with these steps on your own, but I’ll provide some commentary anyway. Twitter asks you start “following” people. These are the people whose tweets will populate your Twitter feed. We’ve made a little list of mathy folks to follow if you need help getting started, and there’s a larger list on the mathtwitterblogosphere weebly site.  And there’s a recently compiled list in this spreadsheet, which you can also add yourself to.

If Twitter forces you into following accounts that you aren’t particularly interested in, not to fear—you can unfollow them as soon as you finish the sign-up process. Note that after you follow ten accounts, you can “skip” following more with a small grey button at the bottom.

You’ll want to upload an avatar, or else present yourself to the world for the time being as a dashing and comely default egg avatar. And in your Twitter profile, it’d be a great idea to include the URL to your blog. That’s a great way for people to find their way to your site!

Your first tweet. What will it be? Anything you like. 😀

For funsies, here are our first tweets:

(Turns out Tina had no idea there was a math community on Twitter for her first two years of tweeting. Now she only twitters with math teachers. 😀 )

The next step in your mission will help you to get going further with Twitter, but if you’d like some further orientation on how math teachers can use it, there’s a great guide over at the weebly site. Here are just a few small thoughts that might be useful to you.

Different people use Twitter in different ways. You’ll find the way that works for you.

Don’t be discouraged if someone doesn’t reply to you. It may mean they are super busy and might not be checking their tweets a lot—Twitter is a funny combo of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Or it may be that they have a zillion followers and they get overwhelmed and they also have a mile-high stack of papers to grade. And sometimes, you know, they may just not have anything to say. Twitter’s a nutty, fragmented, free-for-all. Things get lost in the shuffle. But think of the insanity as a feature and not a bug, and please don’t take it personally if someone doesn’t respond to your tweets.

Since there are only 140 characters in a tweet, people sometimes write tersely, which can come across as very direct — but mainly that’s because of the lack of characters to type things like “oh wow, neato! one thing i was wondering is if…”. Often sentiments can get truncated. Tone can be tricky on Twitter, but practice helps and you can always ask for clarification. Also, don’t forget that you can always send multiple tweets if your thought needs more than 140 characters to be expressed.

For Twitter to really work, you are going to want to commit to trying it out for a week or more, and that means hanging out. If you just sign up, tweet the mission, and then sign out, you aren’t going to be having mini-discussions and reading other peoples’s mini-discussions! So for this week, at the very least, check your Twitter feed regularly! Write to people and reply to people! Toss out your random musings. Really give it a chance. See what it’s like —and we hope you’ll see what’s caused so many math teachers to fall in love with Twitter.

You might be tempted to make your Twitter account private/protected when starting out. This might provide you with a sense of security, but people can’t see what you tweet if you’re private. It’s a good idea when you’re first starting off and trying to find good people to interact with—and they’re trying to find you—that you should probably keep your account public. And in a while, when you have a good number of people to tweet with, then you can switch your account settings. Also, I’d say the majority of math teachers hearabouts have public profiles. Again, you’ll figure out what works for you

The advice on this page for getting started with Twitter is good to read if you’re still apprehensive. And if you think it will help, you can read the experiences of how some math teachers started out with Twitter here. But our hope is that with this flurry of people using twitter this week, you’re going to have a comfortable way to get involved. Jump in!

Step 1: The Mini-missions

So you’ve got a Twitter account, and you’re not afraid to use it. Fantastic. Below you’ll find a list of some mini-missions. Don’t dawdle, because they’ll self-destruct in three minutes. #jk You’ll engage with them as you wish—as many or as few of them as your schedule and taste admit—but here are two arbitrary goals for you that I just made up, one qualitative, one quantitative.

1. Make sure you do at least one Twitter mini-mission that sounds superfun to you, and do a Twitter mini-mission that is outside of your comfort zone—that gets you to try something new.
2. Pick a number between 5 and 10. Got it? Now double it. Add two. Cut it in half. Do at least that many mini-missions.

All right? All right. Let’s go.

Twitter Mini-missions:

• If you’re new to Twitter, announce and introduce yourself in a tweet and include the hashtag #MTBoS. (Note that a hashtag it’s simply a tiny phrase included directly after a pound symbol in your tweet. That way if you want to see all tweets about the mathtwitterblogosphere, you can tell Twitter hey, find all tweets with #MTBoS in it and Twitter can show you all tweets with #MTBoS in it! At heart, it’s a search tool. There are hashtags for all sorts of things, but no need to worry about then now.
• If you’ve done Twitter for a while, announce and introduce yourself in a tweet in a way that sheds some new light on who you are. Surprise us. Include #MTBoS.
• Pick three people you follow, but with whom you haven’t interacted—recently or ever. Say hello and introduce yourself to them, beginning your tweet with @theirname.
• Pick three people who follow you, but with whom you haven’t interacted—recently or ever. Say hello and introduce yourself to them, beginning your tweet with @theirname.
• Open up the #MTBoS feed and peruse it. Retweet something that you find compelling.
• Announce a blog post you’ve written, new or old. Include #MTBoS.
• Share a blog post that you’ve read recently that blew you away. Include #MTBoS.
• Share a question that’s been on you mind about your classroom practice. Include #MTBoS.
• Take a photo of your chalk-or-smartboard, or of a piece of student work. Tweet it and include #MTBoS.
• Share an online math resource you really love. Include #MTBoS.
• Tweet something mundane about your life. Include #MTBoS!
• #makeupawackyhashtagandtrytogetittocatchon.
• Respond to a famous person or guru’s tweet.
• Tweet a favorite quotation or fact about mathematics. #MTBoS it up.
• Share something awesome about your day of teaching. #MTBoS.
• Share something hard about your days of teaching. #MTBoS
• Open up the #MTBoS feed and find some new tweeps to follow.
• And while you’re there, send a reply to a few interesting tweets you see.
• Tweet a tweet that’s exactly 140 characters long. #sosweet
• Think of someone whose tweets you appreciate. On Friday, give them a #FF (Follow Friday) shoutout.

Step 2: The Blog Post

After you complete Step 1, you’ll have some new Twitter experiences under your belt. What better way to reflect on them than to blog about them? The interplay between the longer-form reflection and exposition of blogging and the rapid-fire conversation on Twitter is part of what makes the MTBoS tick.

Here are a few writing prompts that you might convert into a blog post.

• Pick a tweet that you read and liked. Blog about what it made you think about.
• Or maybe it wasn’t a single tweet, but a conversation you had. Blog about those ideas.
• If you’re new to Twitter, what is something that has surprised you about it?
• If you’re an experienced Twitter user, describe and reflect upon how you tend to use it.

Also, something worth noting about blogs is how to handle comments. In your blog’s Settings—perhaps under Discussion or Comments—you probably have several comment moderation options. This video explains it all. Moderating comments give you more control over what shows up on your blog—and not after the fact—but it can slow down conversation. Not moderating comments can let conversations proceed more naturally, but it may mean having to delete a little spam here and there. Just some thoughts for your consideration.

And speaking of comments…

Step 3: The Comment (Comment, Comment, Comment, Commet Chameleon)

Once you’ve written your Twitter-themed blog post, drop a comment at the bottom of this here Mission #2 post announcing it and offering it up for others to comment on. Also, you should tweet out your post on your Twitter account! Include #MTBoS.

Finally, just like last week, you’ll go comment on the blog posts of the three people who commented directly above you. You’re of course welcome to comment on any of the other blog posts, too, and we encourage you to browse the comments to see which posts sound most interesting to you. But, if you play along with this chain mail flashback, then everyone gets at least three comments on their blog—at their site, not a response to the comment here—and everyone likes comments. So please play nice!

Stay safe out there, agent. See you in the Twitterverse!