President's Message - March 2019

OAMEtalks

As I have mentioned in previous messages, part of my vision is to use online tools to enhance mathematics in Ontario. Something else we are working on is finding ways to bring added value to having a membership in this organization. One of our new initiatives tries to address both of those ideas. This is the creation of OAME talks.

One of the crown jewels of OAME is our annual conference in May of each year, but not everyone can physically attend. Our idea was to ask some of the popular speakers to repeat their sessions in an online environment exclusively for OAME members. This way, if you cannot attend the conference you can still experience some of the great math ideas that are discussed. We are starting with four presentations from OAME 2018:

• Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr – Going Deeper with Memorable Math Moments
• Marian Small – Teaching with Intention: Focusing on What Matters
• Fawn Nguyen – What If We've Been Teaching Mathematics All Wrong?
• Mark Chubb – Building Your Students' Mathematical Intuitions

Our plan is that for each session, we will have a podcast and a webinar. Each podcast will feature a brief conversation with the presenter(s) in which they will summarize their respective session These podcasts will be available for anyone to listen to and will usually be released on the first day of the month. These have been fun to record, but it's the learning I gained that came out of those short conversations that made them the most worthwhile.

If you want to listen to the podcasts, you can do so in a couple of ways. One way is through your own podcast app. They are available now on iTunes and Google Play, so please subscribe and never miss an episode. It turns out that our first couple of episodes are popular in the K–12 podcast category, trending as high as fifth in the top 200. If you are not a regular podcast listener then you can hear the episodes any time you want on our OAME talks website (www.sites.google.com/oame.on.ca/oame-talks). Just click on the Season 1 tab to hear them all.

In addition to the podcasts, webinars are the main parts of OAME talks. This is where these speakers repeat their sessions from the OAME conference. These webinars are exclusively for OAME members, run on the second Wednesday of the month, and participants must register ahead of time on our MCIS registration site (www. oame.on.ca/mcis/). If you weren't at the conference, or if you were and you missed some of those sessions, you will have a chance to see the sessions in webinar form, although I think we can all agree that seeing a session in person is always better than seeing it in webinar format. As I write this, we just had our first webinar with Marian Small, and by all accounts, it was a great success. We had about 45 people attend, and many participated in the discussion. If you didn't get a chance to participate in any of the webinars, you will find that we have recorded them and they are available in the Members Only section of the OAME website.

Please note that we only had a podcast and no webinar with Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr. This is because they had already done webinars of that session for the Ontario Teachers' Federation and the Global Math Department; hence, we linked to those sessions instead. The plan, however, is for every future session to have a podcast (released on the first day of the month), followed by a longer webinar (taking place on the second Wednesday of the month). This year, our March webinar will be on the third Wednesday due to March break. Our hope is for this to become a regular feature after each year's conference. Therefore, you can look for Season 2 starting up in September, and keep up-to-date with the latest OAME talks schedules and news by checking out our website or following us on Twitter (@OAMEtalks).

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