At last summer’s ISTE conference we met many wonderful teachers looking for new educational tools they could bring back to their classrooms.
Here’s one story from Laura Conley (teacher at Clarksville Public Schools, Arkansas) about how she began using Desmos this year with her math and ESL students.
Reblogged from lconley86.blog.com
While attending ISTE 2012 in San Diego this summer I visited the booth of Desmos.com. Since I work with high school students in 3 different math classes I was very interested to see what they had to offer. It was more than interesting! I was in awe watching how fast an equation could be graphed.
After only 5 weeks of school Desmos has become part of our vocabulary at Clarksville High School! The home page of Desmos.com states “Beautiful, Free Math”. I think this is a perfect description. We use it almost daily in Algebra 2, Calculus, and Transition to College Math. All of our classrooms are equipped with Smart Boards so when we project Desmos for the class it is a great visual. The students and staff love how fast it is also. It’s creating a line while you are typing in the equation. It’s a great to watch it change during this process. Students can really “see” the line being graphed unlike on a regular graphing calculator. If you are graphing more than one equation you may want to try this:
- Type in each equation.
- Turn all the equations off by touching (on the iPad) or by clicking (from your desktop or laptop) on the small sqaare with a line in it in front of your equation. (This sounds harder than it really is!)
- Then turn one equation on at a time to see exactly where the solution area will be. You can also change the color of the lines for an even better visual.
I use this simple easy method to visually teach this to all students. It is especially effective for our ESL students. This could never be achieved with a regular calculator because of the display size and it doesn’t offer the color display that Desmos does.
Read the rest of Laura’s story on her blog (lconley86.blog.com) and be sure to join her on Twitter, @lconley86
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Amazing stories like these are what keep us motivated at Desmos. Teachers, if you have similar stories to share about using our calculator, let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or at calculator@desmos.com! We’d be more than happy to set up a conference call to help you make the most of Desmos in your classrooms.