Des-blog

Applications for Cohort 3 of the Desmos Fellowship are now open, and we think you should apply! Here’s what our current Desmos Fellows are saying about the Desmos Fellowship:

The Desmos Fellowship is a great opportunity to become a better teacher and better educate your students by learning more about Desmos and joining a huge collaborative group that is there to support each other.

It’s an awesome experience which will forever change your view of teaching.

The most wonderful aspect of this community is the “pay it forward” vibe - we all learn from each other, inspire each other with our ideas, and strive to help colleagues improve their practices.

Apply! It’s where you’ll meet your people.

Last May we invited 40 educators from the US and Canada to be part of the second cohort of the Desmos Fellowship. We brought them all to San Francisco for a weekend of learning and community building, and we’ve continued that work online ever since.

Desmos has benefited enormously from the Fellowship’s counsel and criticism. Our Fellows receive the first look at every new feature and activity we produce and we fold their input into the public releases. Our company wouldn’t be the same without them.

Applications for Cohort 3 are open during the month of February and we think you should apply. We’ll learn lots from you, and we’ll also make sure you get as much as you give. For example:

Access to the best resources, collaboration and feedback.

Fellows receive membership in a private Slack channel where some of the sharpest educators gather to trade awesome activities and resources.

I feel like I am constantly gaining new ideas, am always able to get help from a fellow or Team Desmos faculty member, and I can also get constructive feedback on activities. This fellowship has really reignited my passion for professional growth and student thinking…it is game changing.

Professional Learning and Community

Desmos Fellows share more than great activities. We select Fellows who demonstrate capacity in technology and pedagogy, but who also demonstrate a willingness to learn and to help others learn. The result is a chat channel full of people who help each other daily to become better teachers and coaches.

One of the best parts about this experience has been the continued connection (thanks to Slack, personal relationships, etc.) and on-goingness that extends beyond the weekend and models what professional learning and networks can really look like — and hopefully will look like more and more in the future.

And More

• Early access to our newest features and activities.
  
• An all expenses paid trip to Desmos HQ in San Francisco from July 13-15, 2018, to meet some of the most passionate and interesting math teachers around.
  
• A chance to join the Desmos team and earn income as a Desmos Certified Presenter.
  

Interested in joining Cohort 3 of the Desmos Fellowship? Apply now at learn.desmos.com/fellowship. Applications due March 1st, 2018, 12:00pm PST.

The Friday Fave would like to tell you a secret.

Lean in close and listen.

Are you listening? Are you ready?

YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN MARBLESLIDES!

Many know this; many do not. Here’s how…

When you’re signed in at teacher.desmos.com, look for your name in the upper right hand corner. Click on the triangle to drop down a menu, and find “Desmos Labs”.

Check the box next to Marbleslides (and then the one next to Card Sort while you’re here). Click “Save”. You’re good to go! The next time you build an activity in Activity Builder, you’ll see options for adding those components.

Labs is our place for parking features that we’ve been using for a while, but that we aren’t quite ready for every Desmos first-time builder to run into. We want to be careful and make sure that building in Activity Builder is a good time for everyone, so we wait until the rough edges are sanded down.

If you’re the sort of person who enjoys playing with un-sanded toys, keep an eye on Labs. We have maybe a few new things going in there in the coming months.

Finally, here are some activities that use Marbleslides and Card Sort, including a super-creative game of Mini Golf that we definitely did NOT expect when we built Marbleslides.

Enjoy the beauty of Desmos Labs, this week’s Friday Fave!

Marbleslides: Parabolas

Mini Golf Marbleslides

Card Sort: Functions

Card Sort: Exponentials

It will likely surprise no one that the Friday Fave is a big fan of Which One Doesn’t Belong?— that simple adaptation of an old Sesame Street routine, updated to offer students an environment for noticing a wide variety of properties, and to use the properties to discuss sameness and difference, and to begin asking new mathematical questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FClGhto1vIg

In Activity Builder, we have made it easy to build your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets using multiple choice images and graphs. Get a new screen, select the multiple choice component, and insert four graphs or images as the choices.

We’ll put them in a two-by-two array and ask students for an explanation.

In the dashboard, you’ll see how many students made each selection, and the explanations they offered. Having gotten these initial informal ideas from your students, you can take the conversation from there!

Of course, there are several activities on teacher.desmos.com that incorporate Which One Doesn’t Belong? screens, including Commuting Times (which scatter plot doesn’t belong?), and Inequalities on the Number Line (which inequality doesn’t belong?) And what is Polygraph besides a giant game of Which One Doesn’t Belong?

Whether you make your own Which One Doesn’t Belong? sets, use some you find on the internet and build them in Activity Builder, or use existing activities that incorporate them, know that Desmos wholeheartedly endorses this use of multiple choice!

Creating space for students to notice important features of mathematical objects whether they know the formal words for those properties or not, this is what makes Which One Doesn’t Belong?—and image-based multiple choice in general—this week’s Friday Fave!