It’s amazing. You’re amazing. You joined in the Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere set of missions, and you’ve made it to the eighth week. It’s Sam Shah here, and whether you only did one or two missions, or you were able to carve out the time and energy to do all seven so far, I am proud of you.

I’ve seen so many of you find things you didn’t know were out there, and you tried them out. Not all of them worked for you. Maybe the twitter chats fell flat, or maybe the whole twitter thing wasn’t your thang. But I think I can be pretty confident in saying that you very likely found at least one thing that you found useful, interesting, and usable.

With that in mind, we have our last mission, and it is (in my opinion) the best mission. Why? Because you get to do something to help someone else. A random act of kindness.

We want you think about something you saw in the MathTwitterBlogosphere that you think might be useful to a colleague, a department head, an administrator, a student, whatever. And then let them know about it.

Some ideas:

• You have a colleague teaching Precalculus, and you saw a blog author that has posted a lot of good resources and thinking about Precalculus. You email this resource and why they might find it useful.
• You have a math coach who may be interested in the Math Mistakes blog. You share it with this math coach!
• You saw an issue of Math Munch that might spark some interest to one of your particular students (or maybe all of them).
• You saw an activity on fractions that your middle school colleagues would looooove. You share the wealth!
• You think a fellow teacher might benefit from joining twitter. You help them take the leap.
• You attended a Global Math Department meeting and you thought of someone who should have been there! You send the recording to that person.
• You belong to an AP Statistics list-serv, and there is a great activity you saw on a blog. You email the list-serv.
• You did an activity inspired by something in the MTBoS. You share that activity with another teacher in your school who teaches the same subject.
• You ask for 5 minutes in a department meeting to share what you have learned about the online math teacher community.
• ANYTHING ELSE! Just share, my little Care Bears, share!

In other words, spread the word about something in the MTBoS that you found. You should let someone else who doesn’t know about the stuff we’re doing (yes, we: if you weren’t before, you’re one of us now! mwahahahaha!) see it, and know that it’s out there for them too!

This is the coda to the work you’ve done over the past two months. We wanted to show you what was out there because all that good stuff out there helped us and inspired us as teachers. Now we want you to be in our shoes. We want you to show others what is out there in the MTBoS that helped you and inspired you as a teacher!

Your Final Mission

1. Share!
2. Write a blog post talking about what you shared, who you shared it with, and why you shared it!
3. Tweet out your blog post. Include the #MTBoS hashtag.
4. Include your blogpost in the comments here and then 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.
5. Please fill out our survey to help guide us in future missions.  We promise, it’s very short.  Don’t skip the survey as we are planning on compiling all of your fabulous blogs and virtual filing cabinets so we can share them with the world!  🙂

If the survey below is not viewable, please click here. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14iPYN03iRASddG2rurlUgZcXSLCNGfpjztC3PpE4udE/viewform

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/14iPYN03iRASddG2rurlUgZcXSLCNGfpjztC3PpE4udE/viewform

 

You’ve read about what other people are doing in snippets and snapshots. You’ve shared about yourself in 140 characters or less. This week is your chance to know more, and to share more. Just about this time last year, a concurrence of events led to people who were frustrated with the perception of teachers by the general public. We wanted the world to know exactly what it is like to walk a mile in our shoes. Some of our shoes drive a long commute while others walk across campus to get to class. Certain teachers’ shoes are tied tight to race from one class to the next as they try to beat their students. Others have a change of shoes as they get out on the track or court or field to coach. All of us have a different story to tell, but we all have tired feet by the end of the day!

While we started with an outside audience in mind, we were each fascinated by everyone else’s stories. The ways people balance home and school. The differences between public, private and boarding schools. The small, large, urban, suburban, rural… The project turned into a fascinating compilation of experiences from across the world. I still hope it opens peoples’ eyes who are outside of the teaching profession, but it opened my eyes to the variety of ways educators manifest themselves.

A fair warning: it’s really challenging to encapsulate an entire day. Some of us started with the alarm going off in the morning and ended with the lights turning out at night. Others stuck to a school day. Even detailing one full class period is a great insight into the mind of a teacher. So, with the challenges in mind, decide how much of your day you want to write about and set out with a notebook (digital or paper) to record one day this week.

If you’re not a classroom teacher, we still want to hear about your day! The prompt is “Day in the Life of an Educator” and if you’re reading this post you’re probably educating someone, somewhere.

You’re welcome to try to describe a typical day, but I think more of the character of teaching comes through when you decide “I choose today!” and write about that day, no matter what happens.

Bonus Options:
Write about the day from the perspective of your shoes.
Document the things you found interesting and examine their potential to be math lessons a la Michael Pershan.
Record yourself (audio or video) describing your day or living it!

And of course, your favorite paragraph: Share your post with a tweet (including #MTBoS and #DITLife) and leave it in a comment below. Then, 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.

If there aren’t enough posts here to satiate you, check out the archive from last year’s Day in the Life. And, because it’s Tina, here’s a form to add yourself to the archive!

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!

Coming in October 2013!!!

This year, we’re going to be holding a updated version of the Math Blogger Initiation that happened last year! We were crazy surprised by how many people were interested in joining up and trying something new — blogging with other math teachers! This year, we are planning to have a slightly different program for people to join called EXPLORING THE MATHTWITTERBLOGOSPHERE.

We’re designing it to help those who are just starting out with the mathtwitterblogosphere and for those who have dipped their toes in and want to get even more involved.  Or even if you have dropped off the face of the virtual planet and want to join back in!

Each week we will post a new adventure for you to participate in involving the online math teacher community. And we are planning a virtual reward for those who participate in every event! However you don’t have to participate every week — you have to do what’s good for you. By the end, we hope you feel like you know much of what’s out there. Ultimately, the end goal is personal growth (not comments and blog readership).

Join us on this exciting adventure!  Meet new friends!  Get tons of new ideas!

So y’all can start school smoothly, we’re going to be starting this in October, and we’ll release more information in mid-September.

Let the fun begin!

Julie, Justin, Sam, Tina

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.