Des-blog

This week’s title leaves us wondering if there are ever FIVE Fridays in February. Gotta be, right? Will any of us ever live to see such a February? Can you answer this question with Googling it? Please show your work.

Either way, here’s your Friday Five, including exponential functions, dilations, calculus, composition, and regressions.

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What happens when you blend two of our guiding principles, trust teachers and design for delight?

In this case, a new feature for the teacher dashboard!

Wrapped up in the principle of trusting teachers is the idea that when teachers have great suggestions, we do our best to turn them into digital reality.

Imagine this: Your students are in the middle of a teacher.desmos.com activity. As you navigate the room, you’re also keeping an eye on the teacher dashboard.

You notice something—an insightful response, a thought-provoking mistake, a pair of graphs to compare/contrast—and you’d like to draw everyone’s attention to it, maybe even to launch into a brief class-wide discussion.

But you’d also like to keep things anonymous so students can focus on the math, and not on who was right, who was wrong, or whose work is on display.

So you click our shiny new “show fake names” icon in the top left corner of the dashboard, and your students’ names are swapped out and replaced by the names of famous mathematicians. (Delightful, right?)

From the sidebar, to thumbnail previews, to individual graph screens and text responses, every inch of the dashboard is now anonymous and display-ready.

And switching back to real names mode is just a click away.

Our goal with this little feature is to make it easier for teachers to facilitate meaningful discussions around actual student work in real time. Let us know if we’ve hit the mark here, or how we can continue to make this—and our other tools—better and better. We’re always just an email or a tweet away.

Cheers!

This week we have circles, reflections, two activities about velocity and a winking boy.

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