What I’ve Been Up To

To all of my friends who haven’t heard from me for nearly two years: I apologize. Sorry. I owe you a beer.

But I have a good excuse. I’ve been very busy trying to do something revolutionary.

In fact, I have a sign on my office window that explains what we’re trying to do.

I work for a great company.

We’re developing an incredible curriculum.

And I work with the most incredible math team ever assembled.

• Marjan Hong, who knows more about Common Core and effective teaching than anyone I’ve ever met.
• Peg Hartwig, who never met a piece of technology she didn’t love, and who just may be the greatest Algebra II teacher in the history of ever.
• Shelley Rosen, who’s a master of math representations, as evidenced by the Tallies, Ten Frames, and Baseball Games resource that she created for Illuminations.
• Brenan Bardige, who keeps it real by developing astounding, authentic, real-world problems for kids to solve (and he should know; his graduate research looked at assessment problems that kids would solve with a method other than the one the problem was trying to assess).
• Sia Robinson, who understands how kids learn math, and who reminds me daily how important it is for kids to learn math effectively.

I’d love to tell you all about Math Techbook… about all the amazing math tools we’ve built into the web-based curriculum… about the 200+ interactives we’ve woven through six courses… about the teacher dashboard and the inquiry-based approach we’re using and all the other good stuff… but there’s just no time! Tomorrow, we’re having a big release party. Really big. I mean, MASSIVE. But good news! You’re invited! Lots of cool people will be there, like Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years but then got a Ph.D. in math from UCLA; Skip Fennell, past president of NCTM; Portia Wu, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Labor; Mark Edwards, superintendent in Mooresville, NC; and, Michele Weslander-Quaid, innovation evangelist at Google (and a very powerful woman).

As well as hundreds of our closest friends from districts all over the country. And thousands more will be joining us on the web.

I hope you can join our live-streamed launch event, too.

Register Here – Math Techbook Launch Event

If you can’t make the launch event, I hope you’ll still check out what we’ve been up to.

Learn More About Math Techbook

And if you’re one of the people to whom I owe a beer, gimme a call on January 9.