Success – A teacher in search of classroom
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I am a teacher (started in 2007), learning how to teach better and make myself the best teacher possible. Well, I used to be a high school teacher, and now teach at the University of Nevada, Reno in the NevadaTeach program.
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
I have a problem. Or rather, I had a problem. This problem has gone on for the last four years, and this year I am finally doing something about it. In my role as a Master Teacher, I have a role statement on file with my Dean at at the University. It says that I will spend 57.5% of my time on teaching activities, 17.5% of my time on service activities, and 25% of my time on “other” which is a lot of administrative and recruiting tasks.
But how much time do I actually spend on these activities? Am I even close? Is it 80% teaching, and 10% service and other? Who knows. I do my job, and I write w ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
Jennifer Fairbanks has been promoting the #MTBoS2020 hashtag, where you create a blog post on the 20th of each month this year. As my contribution for this first month, I thought I would continue my look at how hashtags are used on Twitter by the math community. My last post on hashtags looked at the quantity of tags (1300!) and this time I wanted to compare the top 10 clusters found in the downloads I made in December.
First off, the software I use to create the downloads and do the clustering is NodeXL. There is a free version, as well as the paid version. It goes through and clusters the pa ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
Back in November, Judy Larsen posted this tweet about math hashtags.
https://twitter.com/JudytaLarsen/status/1196519013985030144
Judy’s question got me thinking about all the math hashtags that really are used on Twitter. What are they? To answer this question, I downloaded the #MTBoS and #ITeachMath hashtags using NodeXL software, and went through all the hashtags mentioned in those data sets.
As it turns out, the math community uses a lot of very diverse and interesting hashtags. So, to date, as of December 2020, here is a list of hashtags used in by math teachers on Twitter. I will not clai ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
One of the most enjoyable thing I have done over my career is work with teachers from other countries. The university is a host site for the Fulbright Teacher Excellence and Achievement program which brings teachers from other countries to the US, where they spend six weeks in classrooms and university classes.
As a teacher, I had the pleasure to host teachers from Jordan, South Africa, and Poland. They spend six weeks in my classroom, observing, and teaching. It was amazing. This semester, I had a different role as the university instructor for one math teacher, Jurgita from Lithuania. She wa ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
For my dissertation, a statistic I used to determine who was at the “center” of the network was the centrality calculation. This was not done by hand. I used software called NodeXL to do the downloading, calculating, and visualization of the network. The statistic ended up choosing to use is called the Betweenness Centrality, which measures the typical shortest path length between each and all of the vertices. A vertex (or node) is an account on Twitter. I won’t call it a person, because it is possible that a vertex is a company, an organization, or even a bot.
In my data set, I had 1,319 vert ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
This is kind of odd to write, but I think I need to. I finished my dissertation, and defended in April. That was four to five months ago! I really have done nothing on this blog. I was stressed, and had my head down and working hard on the dissertation and defense.
Then, in August, I signed up with Shelli Temple and the Blaugust writing efforts and did nothing. It realize now that I was kind of depressed during the month of August. That has never happened to me before, so I didn’t really know how to handle it. I wrote nothing. I really have written nothing since the defense. I think the come d ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
Wow. So much to learn when dealing with software packages and analysis. It turns out that our computers do a TON of processing behind the scenes. When I send a tweet, Tweetdeck and / or Twitter shows the time of tweet as being a couple of minutes ago, and then the time counts from there.
However, what actually happens behind the scenes is Twitter stores the tweet at UTC 0, and the software platform we are using takes the time of the hardware we are using, checks the time, and shows the time in our software as adjusted. This means that when I download tweets, I am downloading every single tweet ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
What about the different clusters? The entire data set was 1348 nodes, but the software clustered them together based on the communication patterns. If you go back to the first post on this, you can see the different clusters shown. So, what do the individual clusters look like, and behave like?
Cluster 1 has a small, tight group of participants in the middle with a cloud of mostly remote participants (RP) on the outside. There are a few blue lines radiating outward, which show attending participants (AP) tweeting with other APs. The red lines show one of three possible communication patterns ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
In my last post I went through some of the graphs that NodeXL created of my data set. There are additional quantitative elements which need to be discussed.
For example, who are the most ‘influential’ people in the data set? There are several ways to indicate influence, and one way is ‘betweenness centrality.’ This measure calculates the shortest (weighted) path between every pair of nodes in a connected graph. So, for my data set of 1319 unique nodes, it calculates the shortest path between each of those nodes. The node with the largest number of shortest paths, ends up with the largest value ..read more
Success – A teacher in search of classroom
3y ago
First, some context. This is going to be rough. I am trying to wrap my brain around what is important, what is not, and how to frame the important to tell the story. First off, here are the three research questions I am addressing:
RQ1: What are the network behaviors of participants in TMathC in 2017?
RQ2: What is the human activity of conference participation of TMathC in 2017?
RQ3: How are the network behaviors and professional development activity of the participants interrelated in TMathC in 2017?
This blog post is a first attempt at answering the first question only. The second question ..read more