Presenting at the VCTM Conference

** Update 4/10/12** We just received an email from someone how attended our presentation. She is giving an in-service presentation about The Best Thing [She] Learned From VCTM. She is presenting our manipulative! How sweet is that??

I just completed my second professional presentation as a teacher. Back in August of 2011, I presented a session called Smartboard Basics for my colleagues in Wythe County. Now yesterday I presented at the Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference in Roanoke.

Here are the videos that Valerie and I made in college which explain how the pieces work and describes  how they fit together (shape and color both play an intricate role in helping students understand simplifying and verifying trig functions).

The 20 or so people who came to our presentation (it was at 8:15 Friday morning so we weren't offended by the light crowd) were completely amazed by this idea and loved that they got the pieces to keep and play with. In fact, throughout the rest of the conference people kept coming up asking "Are you the sine and cosine people?" so much that Valerie had to hand out some business cards she had on hand so people could email us to get copies of our presentation.

It was so very exciting to present and then to be known during the rest of the conference. Word of mouth was definitely spreading that we had something new and exciting to share. I really hope this takes off.

If you are interested in watching how this progresses, I have created a separate blog called Miss Cody's Math World. My first post will be linked from the presentation and I am hoping that as teachers use this over the next few months they will share their experiences. Because we created this in college, and because I teach Algebra I and she teaches Algebra II and Pre-Calc (technically math classes don't have to be capitalized but I find them to be very important) we haven't had the opportunity to use these with students. I am really excited to see how this turns out!