Numerical Analysis and Computation Commons^™

Informal Professional Development On Twitter: Exploring The Online Communities Of Mathematics Educators, Jaymie Ruddock

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

Professional development in its most traditional form is a classroom setting with a lecturer and an overwhelming amount of information. It is no surprise, then, that informal professional development away from institutions and on the teacher's own terms is a growing phenomenon due to an increased presence of educators on social media. These communities of educators use hashtags to broadcast to each other, with general hashtags such as #edchat having the broadest audience. However, many math educators usethe hashtags #ITeachMath and #MTBoS, communities I was interested in learning more about. I built a python script that used Tweepy to connect …