Teachers as Content Creators
In an ignite talk at the 2016 NCTM annual Meeting and Exposition, Max Ray-Riek warned of the risks of getting all your lessons from blogs (coherence, alignment, and consistency). But he also highlights why reading about and getting lessons from blogs feels like a successful endeavor for teachers across the country. You get a first hand account of the teacher who not only created the lesson, but how they used it in their classroom.
So, in order to heed Max’s sage advice, I will not encourage everyone to throw away their current expensive curriculum mandated by their district. Instead I will just list some teacher creators who are sharing lessons they’ve created and some first hand accounts of how they used them in their classrooms.
Carl Oliver and Kristin Gray recently made Desmos activities through teacher.desmos.com. Carl teaches high school and Kristin’s lesson is for kindergarteners. That’s pretty cool, in my opinion! The best part is, both of them asked and received feedback on their lessons from other teachers through twitter.
Graham Fletcher just posted how 3-act tasks are used in the elementary grades. If you’re interested in trying one out here are some from Graham, Kendra Lomax, and me.
Simon Gregg recently wrote about how he uses Cuisenaire Rods. These fantastic manipulatives can be used for a variety of mathematical content as well as a sense-making tool.
Also if you haven’t heard about Open Up Resources, then you don’t follow me on twitter! Many teachers from the #MTBoS have been recruited by Illustrative Mathematics to develop an open education resource curriculum for the middle grades!
Finally, let us know how you are creating or using teacher-created content! See you on the interwebs!
~by Andrew Gael (@bkdidact)
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