Des-blog

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere (and not everyone does, remember!) and are reading these words (again, not everyone does!), then it is probably back to school season. Some have been back for quite some time; others have a week or more to go. Either way, it’s the season of new learning, and the Friday Five is ready for you!

This week, it’s not activities or graphs, but resources for doing your Desmos work better and more powerfully. If you haven’t checked out learn.desmos.com—or if you have but not lately, then this is your week to learn!

Calculator Features

Here’s an alphabetized list of features—from derivatives to trigonometry—that you may not even have known existed. Click through on any one that interests you for videos, tours, challenges, and example graphs.

Card Sort

If you’ve seen card sort, you may desire to make your own, or edit one somebody else made. We’ll show you how here.

Marbleslides

Same deal here. Learn to build from scratch or tweak an existing Marbleslides activity (with one caveat, which is that for temporary technical reasons, you cannot edit any of the Marbleslides activities in the original Desmos release.)

You’ll know those uneditable Marbleslides activities by their URLs, which have the form teacher.desmos.com/marbleslides-[topic]

Sweet, sweet summer.

Fading fast.

Your days dripping like ice cream from the cone.

Back–to–school time always brings out the melancholy poet in the Friday Five’s personality. This week, we have five instances of one of our favorite new Desmos activities: Card Sort.

Read more

We’re pleased to announce our first cohort of Desmos Fellows.

Desmos loves teachers. Many of our family members are teachers. Much of our company is former teachers. And because our goal is to help the world learn math and love to learn math, we also need teachers. It’s through math teachers that we help math students. Math teachers tell us what their students need from our technology so we keep in close contact with teachers – engaging them in conversation at our office, at happy hours, at conferences, and online.

With our Desmos Fellowship, we’ve deepened our commitment to teachers. We have invited 39 teachers to participate in a program through which they’ll receive community, mentorship, early access to our best ideas and technology, and a free trip to our headquarters in San Francisco this November.

We selected those 39 teachers through an application process that drew 200 applicants. We looked for applicants with:

• Advanced experience using our free technology. Our cohort has created over 1,000 activities and used our calculator for tens of thousands of hours. We look forward to helping them get even more value out of those tools.
  
• Experience working with teachers at any level. Our cohort has given presentations at the local, state, and national level. They’ve taken on a variety of formal and informal leadership roles, including instructional coach, new teacher mentor, PLC, department, and school leader.
  
• Excellent writing and presentation skills. The Desmos Fellows will inevitably be asked by their colleagues, “Why Desmos? What’s special here?” We’re looking to equip effective communicators with effective answers.
  
• Diversity. We want a fellowship that reflects the diversity in the schools we want to help learn math. So we looked for applicants along the spectrum of race, gender, and geography

We look forward to supporting and learning from them the following teachers, our first cohort of Desmos Fellows:

• Adam Poetzel. University of Illinois. Champaign, IL
  
• Allison Krasnow. Berkeley Unified School District. Berkeley, CA
  
• Anna Scholl. Xavier High School. Cedar Rapids, IA
  
• Ayanna Ramsey. Chicago, IL
  
• Bob Lochel. Hatboro-Horsham High School. Philadelphia, PA
  
• Daniel Anderson. Queensbury School District. Queensbury, NY
  
• Daniel Henrikson. Topsail High School. Wilmington, NC
  
• David Sabol. Saint Ignatius High School. Cleveland, OH
  
• Gerald Smith. Indiana High School. Indiana, PA
  
• Glenn Waddell Jr. University of Nevada, Reno. Reno, NV
  
• Harsh Upadhyay. Jefferson County Public Schools. Louisville, KY
  
• Heather Bolur. Elmhurst Community Unit School District 205. Lombard, IL
  
• Heather Kohn. Marlborough Public Schools. Hudson, MA
  
• J.J. Martinez. Redlands Unified School District. Redlands, CA
  
• Jade White. High Tech High. San Diego, CA
  
• Jedidiah Butler. Perris Union High School District. Murrieta, CA
  
• Jenn Vadnais. Redlands Unified School District. Redlands, CA
  
• Julie Reulbach. Cannon School. Mooresville, NC
  
• Kendra Lockman. City College of San Francisco. El Cerrito, CA
  
• Linda Saeta. Boston, MA
  
• Lisa Bejarano. Academy School District 20. Manitou Springs, CO
  
• Mark Alvaro. Monongalia County Schools. Bridgeport, WV
  
• Meg Craig. Birmingham, AL
  
• Nathan Kraft. DHH Lengel Middle School. Pottsville, PA
  
• Nerissa Gerodias. East Side Union High School District. San Jose, CA
  
• Nickolas Corley. Northfield School District. Marmora, NJ
  
• Nolan Doyle. Chesterfield County Public Schools. Midlothian, VA
  
• Patty Stephens. Northshore School District. Bothell, WA
  
• Paul Jorgens. Palo Alto Unified School District. Newark, CA
  
• Samantha Falkner. Eau Claire Area School District. Eau Claire, WI
  
• Sara VanDerWerf. Minneapolis, MN
  
• Sarah Vandivort. French American School of Puget Sound. Seattle, WA
  
• Scott Miller. Naperville Central High School. Naperville, IL
  
• Sean Sweeney. Woodlynde School. Philadelphia, PA
  
• Serge Ballif. Nevada State College. Henderson, NV
  
• Stephanie Blair. Hillsboro School District. Hillsboro, OR
  
• Stephanie Woldum. Minneapolis Public Schools. Minneapolis, MN
  
• Suzanne von Oy. Newtown Public Schools. Newtown, CT
  
• Tony Riehl. Billings Public Schools. Billings, MT
  

Keep an eye out for their awesome work online and in person.