Des-blog

This past weekend Desmos invited 50 math educators from North America to join us for our 3rd annual Desmos Fellowship Weekend. We were grateful for the chance to hang out during the weekend with this group of incredibly talented and inspiring educators, and we are looking forward to the journey ahead.

Some highlights from the weekend included:

• Sessions from the Desmos Teaching Team and Desmos Fellows helping educators learn how Desmos supports teachers in using Desmos tools.
  
• A keynote from Eli Luberoff.
  
• Desmos Trivia hour and other after hours outings.
  

Above all else the weekend focused on community and helping teachers learn from each other. From sharing activities to discussing next year’s textbook adoption and how to use Desmos for assessment, Desmos Fellows gathered ideas to bring back to their schools, and built relationships that will sustain them throughout their careers.

See what the Desmos Fellows had to say about our Cohort 3 Weekend:

I am humbled to be around so many thoughtful, like-minded teachers at #desmosfellows weekend. I have learned so much from everyone here in just 1 day. - Steve Phelps

This is where the #DesmosFellows magic is happening. Every presentation is not only filled with aha moments, but is also a lesson in HOW to present. #LifeChanging Thank you @Desmos from the bottom of my heart. - Audrey McLaren

#desmosfellows weekend is over! How to encapsulate the experience? Empowering, overwhelming, challenging, gratifying, inspiring. There is so much I want to do now. #iteachmath #mtbos Thanks to @eluberoff @stcarranza @ddmeyer @mjfenton @Trianglemancsd and so many more! - Liz Caffrey

#desmosfellows saying goodbye! Thankful for this math-loving community! Thank you to the Desmos Faculty for providing a fertile soil that allowed us all to grow in security and with authenticity. Blessings to all. - Lauren Baucom

Check out reflections from the Cohort 3 Desmos Fellows below, and head to learn.desmos.com/fellowship if you’re interested in participating next year!

• I’m in the Wrong Room… by Joseph Dziuba
  
• Do No Harm by Annie Forest
• Reflections on the Desmos Fellows Weekend by Liz Caffrey
• The Desmost Longest Post about the Desmos Fellows Weekend by Lauren Baucom
• Becoming a Desmos Fellow by Lauren Johnson

The Friday Fave spent three of the last seven days in the company of large numbers of classroom teachers taking time to connect with each other, to deepen their mathematical knowledge, and to enrich their teaching practice.

Two of those days were with the third cohort of Desmos Fellows at Desmos HQ in San Francisco, and the third of them was with in Cleveland, Ohio at a pre-conference event for Twitter Math Camp.

These were days filled with people and work that embodied and enacted the phrase lifelong learning. Consider the following questions that are but a sample of those the Fave encountered at these events:

• How can we hack Activity Builder so that the calculator plots in the complex plane a complex number that a student types in the math input?
  
• How can we solve this problem using only middle school math, not anything you might expect to learn in high school?
• If you could have secondary teachers understand one thing about elementary school math learning, what would that be?
• What are some different ways of thinking about and representing proportionality?

These questions the Fave encountered in the last week—and more…so many more—are evidence of the dedication and care with which teachers approach their work. And that’s why the professionalism of teachers is this week’s Friday Fave.

A while back, we were very proud of our system for placing labels. “Works every time!” we trumpeted on our blog. We are still proud of this system, and it works every time if you’re using labels in the ways we had in mind back then.

But our users were determined to use labels in new and innovative ways for which that system didn’t work very well at all. Sometimes when you’re making a graph, you want to put a label in a particular place and not have it budge.

Now you can.

Once you have a label, you can click the wrench to adjust its location. You might want your label to the left, or the right, or above the point. You can do that, and you can change its size while you’re in there.

That’s what makes new, improved label placement this week’s Friday Fave.

Now here are a few activities that make use of labels…

Click Battle

Sugar Sugar

Predicting Movie Ticket Prices

Integer Game