Des-blog

We asked the Desmos Fellows this week to pick an upcoming or completed activity and tell how they would use the teacher dashboard during the activity. Responses fell on a spectrum, with many of the fellows describing how they use the dashboard during the launch, explore, or summarize part of a lesson. We also got ideas for using the dashboard to analyze student work and to extend an activity.

Launch

• Dave Sabol recently used teacher pacing in Charge for screens 1-4. This encouraged participation from all students and allowed Dave to select students to share their thinking.
  
• Scott Miller also used teacher pacing for the first three slides of an activity to enable an informal introduction to a task that would later be completed algebraically. This allowed students to ask clarifying questions about the context before they got to more challenging parts.
  
• Jenn Vadnais used teacher pacing at the beginning of an activity to model the use of and give students practice with a tool that would later be useful in solving fraction challenges.
  
• Paul Jorgens recently did an activity with his class on transformations that started with a “which one doesn’t belong” prompt where the students had to pick a cow. He used teacher pacing on screen 1 to give students a chance to argue for their selection. The histogram and responses for this screen were both valuable, showing that each cow had been chosen by at least one student and allowing strategic selection of students to share justifications.
  

Explore

• Bob Lochel found that adding a couple of “yes/no” multiple choices questions to an activity gave a natural spot to pause for discussion and sharing out.
  
• Anna Scholl has been intentional about designing activities with natural stopping points for discussion. She’s found that creating 2-3 slides for students to work and think through followed by pause makes for a nice balance. She’s also found that a card sort with extra answers that are wrong, or multiple correct answers based on unknown information helps generate discussion in her class.
  
• Adam Poetzel designed an activity for students to represent multiplication problems as arrays that is intended to be entirely teacher paced. For screens 3-5 Adam lists a series of questions in the teacher tips that teachers can pose to probe and extend students thinking. On Screen 5, when teachers ask questions such as “Make a parade that has 24 faces, and write the matching math sentence”, there may be several possible parades made by students. When ready, the teacher can pause the class and display several different student screens. The class can decide if the parade does have the correct number of faces and if the math sentence is correct.
  
• Nolan Doyle shared two activities with us this week that he used for an informal exploration of domain and range as well as increasing and decreasing intervals of quadratics. Nolan used teacher pacing after the initial exploration to build on student thinking as he introduced interval notation. He shared that “it worked really well to allow students to explore the concepts through Desmos and use those exact graphs for their notes as we came together as a class to formalize their thoughts and discoveries.”
  
• Nick Corley uses a tablet while circulating the class to see if any students are struggling and to guide them in the correct direction. He also projects the dashboard during a card sort screen so that students can identify when they are correct.
  

Summarize

• Tony Riehl also uses a tablet to monitor student progress as he walks around the room. This helps him check in with students as well as pause and pace for class discussions as needed. Students in Tony’s class work in groups and provide each other support throughout the activity. Tony further supports student learning by using pause and pace at the end of the activity to help summarize the activity and ensure that students leave with the same information.
  
• Sarah Blick Vandivort paused her class after slide 12 of Systems of Two Linear Equations to drive home the idea that the point of intersection is the solution and it makes both equations true.
  

Extension

• Paul Jorgens designed Translations and Reflections so that students that finished early had a chance to created their own challenge. He chose a few of the student created challenges at the end of the activity and had students discuss in groups how they might solve the challenge from their peers.
  

Analyze Student Work

• Teachers in Patty Stephen’s district used Desmos for an assessment, and used the teacher dashboard to look at student responses and analyze student work together. Patty notes that the ability to share a dashboard with another teacher in her district would have been helpful to the collaboration process.
  

How have you used the Teacher Dashboard to monitor student learning and increase classroom conversation? Let us know on Twitter @desmos.

The Friday Fave is settling in for what may be a long, cold winter, and in such times nothing is more comforting than powerful algebraic thinking.

Linearity is a big and important idea in algebra. When you are learning about thing, it is often important to contrast that thing with against what it is not. This is what makes Card Sort: Linear or Nonlinear this week’s Friday Fave.

Don’t let the title mislead you. The card sort kicks things off, but students cycle through thinking about tables, graphs, and equations of their own design and how they can know which are linear and which are nonlinear.

When they enter equations on screen 4 and 5, we show them what those look like as sets of discrete points on screen 6—they see the consequences of their thinking.

The thought of teachers using our classroom conversation tools to engage students with each others’ ideas creates enough warmth in the Friday Fave’s heart to keep everyone toasty until next week.

We asked the Desmos fellows to reflect on how their practice has changed after participating in the Desmos Fellowship and attending our weekend retreat at Desmos headquarters in San Francisco, California. Here are some of their reflections.

Content Knowledge

There are many ways that you can increase your mathematical content knowledge, from taking courses to attending workshops to joining your local math teacher circle. In the Desmos fellowship, we increase our content knowledge both by using Desmos as a tool to solve math problems and by rebuilding graphs from other Desmos users. The Desmos Potluck activities have been a great way to both share what we are learning and to give others ideas to try on their own. Last week Patty Stephens recreated a ferris wheel shared originally by Jenn Vadnais. Glenn Waddell added on to what Patty built, also teaching Jenn something new about representing math in Desmos.

Activity Design and Student Experience

During the fellows weekend and in the weekly prompts we spend a lot of time talking about best practices for designing Desmos activities, as well as how to structure the student experience to maximize conversation and learning.

• Julie Reulbach and her colleagues have started using a brainstorming process before building activities which involves using Post-Its to map out your goals and main interactions. Many thanks to Desmos designer Jenny Wales for sharing this process with us during the fellows weekend.
  
• Patty Stephens values the different approaches and ways of thinking around building activities. Meg Craig appreciates that even though we have very different backgrounds, we are able to come together to help each other improve activities. Having a space to ask for feedback and reflect has been instrumental in improving our use of Desmos Activities and making powerful learning experiences for students.
  
• Allison Krasnow has used her learning to begin redesigning each of her past activities to be more open-ended at the beginning and include challenges at the end.
• Dave Sabol reminds us that activity builder is just a platform, and that the medium doesn’t make and teach the lessons, the teachers do. This is a helpful reminder that as we improve our design skills, it’s important to plan for class conversations and the student experience as well.
  

Collaboration and Continuous Growth

As mentioned above, collaboration is valued in our community. We accomplish more by sharing ideas and receiving feedback. No community can function successfully though if it’s not a safe place. We’ve been working hard to build a safe community from the start. Many of the fellows attribute their growth and willingness to participate in the community to the fact that it feels like a safe place.

• Stephanie Blair shares that Desmos Fellows program has helped her be a more effective teacher of mathematics by having a safe place to ask questions to learn and grow.
  
• Kendra Lockman and Tony Riehl appreciated the time spent together at the fellows weekend. Tony says “Getting to know the team and other fellows personally makes a huge difference in developing trust and the willingness to share ideas.”
  
• Nolan Doyle saw that one of the biggest benefits to the Desmos weekend was building a culture and connections with others that can’t happen through the the online community. During the weekend Nolan and others talked about the benefits of going outside your comfort zone and being vulnerable in meeting new people and staying open to new perspectives.
  
• Scott Miller appreciates that our community of learners has a passion for trying new things and self-improvement. The Fellows program has given him a space to ask and explore questions such as “what if…”, “yes, and…”, “have you tried…”, “I am having trouble with…”, “my students loved…”, “is it possible…” and have the forward thinking stance of “not yet”.
  

Whether or not you’re a member of our fellowship, we hope you have a community that helps you grow in similar ways. If you’d like to become a fellow, keep an eye on our Twitter feed for application details.