Des-blog

Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun is shining (at least part of the time). The days are getting longer.

In the United States, state testing is on the horizon. This deep into the school year, the classroom can feel a little restrictive; a little crowded. Maybe we need to break up the routine a little and get outside.

While we at Desmos are enthusiastic about leveraging technology to help students develop deep conceptual understanding, we are also enthusiastic about students taking advantage of the flexibility offered by using paper, whiteboards and even sidewalk chalk.

You know that practice task the class was going to work on? Maybe print one set of problems— one question per page—laminate them or use plastic sheet protectors. Tape these to a wall in a library, gym, hallway, or even to the outside walls of the school building. Students can walk around and answer each question on their own paper.

Or you could get outside to use proportional reasoning comparing actual distances to measurements a map, measure tall objects using similar triangles, engage in a Barbie bungee activity for linear equations or Barbie Zipline for right triangle trigonometry.

When there are no large outdoor projects that fit your curriculum, there is always the option of practicing math outside using sidewalk chalk.

Learning outside is this week’s Friday Fave.

So let’s say you’ve been using the activities at teacher.desmos.com for a while now, and you decide you’re ready to start building your own activities from scratch.

Having sketched out the flow of the activity and made some decisions about what your students should be doing on each screen, you head to your Custom page, click “New Activity” and start building.

Maybe somewhere along the way, you end up building a complex screen—one that you want to modify and use in a different activity. Back in the old days, that meant you’d need to build the screen a second time.

But lucky for modern-day you, these aren’t the old days! Now you can copy that entire screen from one activity and paste it into another.

Your usual keyboard shortcut to copy; your usual keyboard shortcut to paste. Easy as Pi Day. That’s what makes screen-level copying and pasting this week’s Friday Fave.

We know that feedback is valuable. It is necessary for helping students improve rapidly. But not all feedback is created equal.

For example, consider evaluative feedback in which the student is told whether their response is right or wrong. In many circumstances, this can be frustrating and unhelpful—especially if the student is really struggling to understand a concept. In such cases, “wrong” may offer no guidance for improvement besides “guess again”.

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