Des-blog

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!

Typically the Friday Fave features a new activity, but not this week. This week, the Fave points your attention to the button in the upper right-hand corner of an activity’s webpage.

Teacher Guides are automatically generated for each activity, and include these features:

• A checklist for lesson planning
  
• Activity screenshots for planning the flow of your lesson
  
• Teacher tips and space for notes on each individual screen
  
• A space for reflecting after the lesson
  

Because they are static content, you can print them out (if you’re old school), annotate them in your favorite tablet software (if you’re newer school), or display them in your Google Glass (does anyone still have that?)

Truly, Teacher Guides are invaluable tools for planning, teaching, and reflecting. But don’t take our word for it! Leanne Branham recently wrote about using a Teacher Guide for Parabola Slalom.

Teacher Guides are a great place to start with any Desmos activity. They allow you to think through what you want to get out of the activity, the teaching moves you will make, which things you can skip and which things all students will engage with.

Click through to read the rest of her piece. Together with Teacher Guides, her blog post is this week’s Friday Fave. And then look for that Teacher Guide button on your next Desmos activity!

(Note: Teacher Guides not yet available for Polygraph or our legacy activities that include Function Carnival, Water Line, and Tile Pile.)