Favorite Techology Part 1: Desmos Teaching Activites

         I'm going to spend a few blog posts talking about some of my favorite technology sites and applications to use in my classroom, and my favorite features of each.

       Usually, I'm a "save the best for last" kind of gal, but for this I've decided to dive in with my favorite....Desmos!  I have written before about how much I love Desmos, but today I want to tell you about a few of my favorite features (and a little bit about how to use them!).

     There are tons of cool activities that have already been created to use on Desmos.  If you've never tried any, poke around and find one to try.  My favorites are MarblesSlides and Inequalities on the Number Line, but there are tons of great ones to pick from!

     Here are a few reasons that I love creating my own Desmos teaching activities:

1.  One of the things that I love about Desmos activities that I create myself is all of the different options that I have for what I can add to them.  Here is what you can add to your Desmos activities:

• graph
• table
• sketch
• media (picture or video)
• note  (you give information to students)
• input  (students input text or math equations)
• choice questions (choose between multiple choice, multiple mark, or explanation)
• card sort or marble slides activity

You can even combine more than one of these things on to a single screen.  For example, you could have a graph on the screen and an input box where students have to respond to a question about the graph.  

2.  Another thing that I love is that I can see all of my students work on one screen.  I can quickly see who has finished which slides.  I can click on a student's slide to get a closer view of their work.  This really allows me to give students real-time feedback!  Having everyone's answers in one place also allows for terrific use of student work to guide discussion, as I can quickly scroll through answers to find ones that I want to highlight in class.

Notice that Brahmagupta has made a mistake on the purple line.  This makes is so easy to find mistakes and talk with students.

3.  My class really likes to have me use the "Anonymize" feature, which assigns each student the name of a famous mathematician.  It's fun to hear, "Cool, I'm Katherine Johnson!" or to see kids looking up mathematicians to find out who they are.  I also like this feature because when I notice a problem, I can call out "Pythagoras, it looks like the second point on your graph is off.   Please double check it" and give kids feedback without embarrassing anyone.

4.  I like to set up my activities so that students get to see the answers of other students after they complete a slide.  I think it's really helpful for students to see what other classmates were thinking, and how they justified their thinking.

5.  Another feature that I really love about Desmos is the fact that you can carry forward a graph from one screen to another and kids could continue to work on a graph from one screen to another. 


If you're ready to create your own Desmos activity, go to https://teacher.desmos.com/ and choose  choose "Custom" on the menu on the left side of the page.  Then click "New Activity" in the upper right hand corner.    Then click "New Activity" in the upper right hand corner of the next screen.

This short video should give you some ideas of how to add things to your Desmos activity.

Good luck, and I hope you love creating these activities as much as I do!

Ideas to Create Your Own Escape Room Puzzles

     In my last post, I talked about the huge multi-day escape room activity I was doing to review for state assessments.  I've done two days so far, and it has really been going great!   If you're considering designing your own escape room style activity, here are a few tips to consider.

1.  Start with the skills.  As with anything in education, you've got to start with a clear idea of what skills you want students to practice.  Otherwise it's easy to get lost in planning fun puzzles and lose track of what's really important.  For my escape room activity, I started with a list of the top eight skills that I most wanted my students to practice again before state assessments.  From there, I knew that I wanted one puzzle to go with each topic.

2.  Try using a worksheet/activity that you already have.   Some of my puzzles were fancier, but some of them were pretty simple.  Some of the simplest puzzles were simply a list of problems from a pre-existing worksheet, and an answer bank.  When you're planning an escape room activity, there are all sorts of codes you can have: letters, numbers, directions, colors, and shapes are the first that come to mind.  So when you put down your answer bank, just attach a letter (or number or color) to each answer and there you have it!  Students solve the problems and use the answer bank to find the correct "code".

3.  Make clues that force students to do all of the problems you want them to do, not just some of them.  As I was creating clues, I started off with clues like "The answer to problem 2 plus twice the answer of problem 5".  If all of your clues are like this, students will only complete the problems that they have to in order to get the code.  If you want them to complete all of the problems, consider having at least one clue that forces them to look at all the answers, such as "the difference of the largest and smallest answer".

4.  Get creative and add some fun and interest to the puzzle with fake generators.  There are all sorts of cool sites that allow you to generate fake text messages, tickets, receipts, etc....    Simple things like these can add some fun to your escape room activity.  Here are a few links to get you started:
                                     Fake Text Messages
                                     Fake Concert Ticket Generator
                                     Fake Headline Generator
                                     Fake Receipt Generator

5.  Get creative with how you let students know the correct order of the answers in the code.  I tried to vary this to keep my students thinking.  Here are some things I tried:

• Used a colored border at the top of the paper.  Each problem had a colored dot next to it.  Students had to match the order of the border to get the answers in order.  
• Put a different letter with each problem, and then give a clue how to rearrange those letters to spell a word.  When I tried this, I had a puzzle about surface area.  The boxes held the letters A-N-I-S-T.  Somewhere else on the page were the words, "A very good person".  Students were supposed to come up with the word saint.
• Put a different word with each problem, that spell out a common phrase.  Students organize the answers according to the phrase.  One of my puzzles had four sets of problems, and each set of problems would leave students with one number.  The boxes were labeled with these words: ALLIGATOR LATER YOU SEE.  Students had to reorder the numbers to make the clue say SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR, and this gave them the 4-digit code.
• Use a visual clue.  One of my clues, I simply had a different number of dots on each section.  Students were supposed to put them in order from one dot to five to find the correct code. 

Good luck helping your students to escape the classroom!