Des-blog

Check it out! We’ve made changes to your activity dashboards.

Before:

After:

We don’t make these kinds of changes lightly. We want our software and your classes to become tightly integrated, and a change of this magnitude isn’t far from coming to class and finding your furniture re-arranged. We want to explain why we re-arranged your furniture.

First, we don’t make these decisions in a vacuum. In the five years since we debuted our first activity dashboard, we’ve logged tens of thousands of support emails, thousands of feature requests over Twitter, and hundreds of hours of classroom testing, all of which gave us a very clear set of goals heading into the project.

Here are those goals, and how we tried to accomplish them.

Our activities have grown richer and more complex, and our dashboard needed to keep up.

We create activities internally using a scripting language we call Computation Layer, which enables very interesting interactions between students and mathematics. Our previous dashboard required you to click through to individual student screens to learn anything about those interactions. We wanted to make sure our new dashboard gave teachers a transparent view into student work.

We wanted to make sure teachers could see the class’s progress at a glance.

Previously, teachers had to look at one student screen after another in order to get a sense of the class’s progress. We heard from lots of teachers and we also experienced ourselves the need for a summary view.

We’re starting as simply as we can here. We could add lots of icons to these cells. We could surface the equation each student graphed, or their solution for a problem. But we decided this view should show as little it had to in order to help teachers do their work. We started with a blank summary view and made each icon we added clearly articulate its value to the teacher and fight for its place.

We needed to simplify our conversation toolkit – especially teacher pacing.

One way we separate ourselves from a lot of math edtech is that we design activities for classrooms, not individuals. Our ideal Desmos Classroom is a social, chatty space, where the teacher is using our dashboard to orchestrate productive discussions and arbitrate mathematical arguments.

That’s why we built our conversation toolset, not for classroom management, but for classroom dialog. That toolkit includes the ability to pace students to one or more screens, so that your class can mine those parts of our activities for all the value they offer before moving on.

That pacing is central to the value we offer teachers and students, but our classroom testing demonstrated time and again that it wasn’t as intuitive as it needed to be.

So we changed our pacing interface, adding a ribbon of thumbnails across the top of the screen so you can always see where the class is and where it’s going. We made it easy to advance every student a slide ahead and to change the boundaries on their exploration.

Early Feedback

Each of our teams at Desmos bring unique value to our work. The teaching team represented the needs of teachers, especially their need not to waste a single second trying to interpret a confusing user interface. The product team made those designs and our engineering team rigged it all up to work.

The early feedback has been extremely positive:

Summary view is brilliant, also the new pacing interface is much better – easy to set up pacing and also change the set of screens without removing pacing altogether.

I like that you can focus on one student’s work or one question’s answers. Much easier to give feedback.

It seemed easier to switch between different student answers when talking through some key misunderstandings with the whole class.

There isn’t a better time to try out a free Desmos activity. We’re so grateful to everyone who offered feedback that helped us develop this tool and we’d love to hear from more of you on Twitter @desmos or by email to feedback@desmos.com.

We built and sustain the Desmos Fellowship for lots of reasons. One of the biggest is that those 80 educators make us much smarter about important questions in math education.

At our Fellowship Weekend in San Francisco, CA, we realized that several of our members had been asked to teach support classes for Algebra students who need extra math help on top of their usual period of math. These teachers were wondering how they could help students generate necessary fluency and confidence in mathematics without relying on the kind of memorization and drill routines that diminish confidence and make for an inflexible kind of fluency.

We posed that question internally to our entire group of fellows and thought we should share the results with the wider world. Here is a digest of their thinking:

Growth Mindset and Confidence

Thao Phan spends time at the beginning of each unit helping students build a growth mindset and confidence through math talks and by solving tasks using “vertical non-permanent surfaces.” She said, “I want my students to have a toolbox of resources they can access and to see as many ways to solve and verify a problem as possible.” To accomplish this Thao uses different representations such as number lines and area models along with visual patterns, algebra tiles and other manipulatives to help students feel confident in their understanding of topics in her algebra class.

Vocabulary Support

Paul Jorgens has taught many support classes over the years, and in his experience, mindset, preteaching, reteaching, and homework support were the keys to success. He said, “It is so awesome when students come in [to their main class] with some knowledge to share to the group as a result of the preteaching.” Paul believes that vocabulary and achievement are tightly related and has lots of ideas for helping students develop that vocabulary.

Explorations

Veronica Enriquez views support classes as a place where teachers can do many of the things that there isn’t time for in the traditional Algebra class. She shared some strategies for helping her support students learn to enjoy mathematics: “We did a lot of hands on activities and explorations that related to what was going on in the regular classroom. They used shadows to determine the height of different buildings using proportions, launched paper rockets and used inclinometers to try do determine the maximum height and the path of the rocket.”

Support

Allison Krasnow has found that support classes allow teachers “the opportunity to make deep, lasting change in how struggling students view math, view their own math abilities, view their relationship with their math teacher, and their success in high school.” She spends time building a culture of learning, part of which involves goal setting and self assessment. Allison supports students in achieving goals by helping them develop habits of mind. She also posts goals on index cards so that students with similar goals can work together, and makes time for pair sharing of progress.

Here are some of the resources the Desmos Fellows have used in Algebra support classes.

• https://www.youcubed.org/ from Jo Boaler
  
• Bootstrap (teaching Algebra through computer science)
• solveme.edc.org
  
• nrich.org
  
• Exeter problem sets
  

Have a resource or strategy to add? Let us know on Twitter @desmos.

The Friday Fave is spending time at the State Fair in the waning days of summer and that has the Fave thinking about motion. And when the Fave thinks about motion, the mind wanders to calculus.

This week’s Friday Fave is a collection of activities about motion, change, and related mathematical ideas.

In Function Carnival, students can try their hands at sketching graphs of the motion of a Ferris Wheel, the Human Cannonball, and bumper cars, then compare their ideas to the actual trajectories. This classic activity works well with students from intermediate algebra through calculus.

In Graphing Stories, video replaces animation and students are invited to consider additional variables.

Polygraph: Distance-Time Graphs offers opportunities to describe relationships based on their graphs—Function Carnival in reverse!

In Investigating Rates of Change, algebra students formalize ideas about change by playing with slopes of lines.

In Intermediate Value Theorem, calculus students have to be careful about their intuitions about the behavior of functions as they lay the groundwork for the formalities and pesky preconditions of the theorem itself.

Oh, and if you’re looking to bump into the Fave this week, maybe check the line for Pronto Pups at the fair. But the large-scale family math event is a better bet!