The first two weeks of summer have been quite a whirlwind!
On January 12 I received an email from an old college friend and classmate, Bob Batty. Bob is currently the Pk-12 Math Specialist for Darke County (Ohio). He'd been talking with another college friend, Scott Mitter, a teacher and department head at Kettering Fairmont High School about running a one-day conference for math teachers about using Desmos in class. They were wondering if I would want to jump in and help. And thus the Southwest Ohio Desmos Institute was born.
We put out a request for speakers and got an amazing response. After setting up a tentative schedule of sessions varying from a Graphing Intro to Creating Your Own Activities to Applications in Your Classroom on a google site, we opened up registration. We thought it would be good to cap attendance at 200 because of the facility (Scott offered to host); I don't know about the other two, but I never thought we'd hit that number.
And yet hit it we did. We even had to set up a waiting list!
There was an awesome variety of attendees...
On January 12 I received an email from an old college friend and classmate, Bob Batty. Bob is currently the Pk-12 Math Specialist for Darke County (Ohio). He'd been talking with another college friend, Scott Mitter, a teacher and department head at Kettering Fairmont High School about running a one-day conference for math teachers about using Desmos in class. They were wondering if I would want to jump in and help. And thus the Southwest Ohio Desmos Institute was born.
We put out a request for speakers and got an amazing response. After setting up a tentative schedule of sessions varying from a Graphing Intro to Creating Your Own Activities to Applications in Your Classroom on a google site, we opened up registration. We thought it would be good to cap attendance at 200 because of the facility (Scott offered to host); I don't know about the other two, but I never thought we'd hit that number.
And yet hit it we did. We even had to set up a waiting list!
There was an awesome variety of attendees...
(The big blue piece is the "I can spell Desmos" group. Apparently Dan isn't tweeting anyone for ideas.)
I'm not going to say that we didn't have some problems on the day of. Of course there were some tech issues (aren't there always?!), the building was in summer-cleaning mode and so the bathrooms were a little hard to find, but for the most part things went great.
We had a 10-minute intro to start the day, then two 75-minute sessions. Scott had arranged for some food trucks to arrive for lunch (that was cool!) and then we were happy to have a Google Hangout with Dan Meyer as our "keynote". People were pretty excited to see him! It's not every day you get to see a math "celebrity". :) We finished up with two more 75-minute sessions.
Of course there are things that we would do differently (if this happens again). But for 3 math teachers to organize this I think we pulled it off pretty well!
And the feedback seems to agree.
(I have to say, I looked to see what the person who ranked the day as a "2" said. The complaint was that the day only addressed using Desmos for math, not for other subjects. I don't feel too badly about that because we only billed it as a way of learning how to use Desmos in a math classroom. The person didn't leave any feedback about individual sessions.)
Scott, me, and Bob post-conference
(Scott even had shirts made!)
So we'll see what happens next summer... or maybe during the school year?
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