week 5: DESMOS

DESMOS is a software website that is a math teacher’s dream. It houses a free online graphing and scientific calculator. Additionally, there are hundreds of interactive mathematics activities most applicable to 6-12th grade mathematics. These interactive lessons often present a fun context or problem that students solve in the process of learning math such as playing battleship by graphing lines or correct the proportions of chocolate and milk in a cup of chocolate milk. In addition to many already prepared activities, you can also create your own lessons using DESMOS’ slide formats.

One of my favorite things about the DESMOS activities is the easy to use teacher interface. The teacher can pace the lesson, see collective class responses, see individual student responses, present preselected student responses and anonymize student answers. It’s also easy to share the student dashboard with other co-teachers. The graphing and scientific calculators are very user friendly and colorful.

This past week, I taught a virtual syroncous lesson over two days using DESMOS. It was an Engage New York lesson that was put into DESMOS form by a colleague at another middle school. I liked that it was easy for her to share her lesson with other 7th grade teachers. I also liked that I have the ability to pace the lesson and easily come back to it with all my students’ work saved the following day to finish. 

I have not yet played around with the computation layer/coding needed to write a DESMOS lesson, but I want to find time to do so. It’s been neat to see what my colleagues and math coach have developed. I like how DESMOS is always free. I also like that there are “professional” precreated really neat activities, but that teachers are also able to create their own activities. I saw something on teacher social media space talking about how a social studies teacher was using DESMOS. I want to look into this more. It sounds very neat and something I wouldn’t have predicted practical.