Desmos ALL the Things

My district was not prepared for E-Learning. When the initial order came to close the schools on March 13, we were one week away from Spring Break. They didn't do anything for that first week. 

After Spring Break the governor closed the schools through April and the district send out a their plan. They mailed work home to students and asked teachers to create videos and lessons to support the completion of that work through Schoology. I EDIT EVERYTHING. I THRIVE ON EDITING MY MATERIALS and ADJUSTING PACING. I CAN'T TEACH SOMETHING I CAN'T EDIT. But I had literally just started this job two months before, so I prepared to bite my tongue, but it wasn't as bad as I thought. 

The first two weeks of that home learning period they used I-Ready Home Learning packets from Curriculum Resources. These weren't horrible and I created video tutoring lessons to post in Schoology, got good at Schoology links and pages, and hosted zoom tutoring calls. I figured out the home learning pieces I needed. (like a way to model problems with students and share my ipad via zoom.)

The second two weeks were a little bit different.  Because I follow her on twitter, I recognized right away that the work they assigned for 7th grade was created by Fawn Nguyen https://twitter.com/fawnpnguyen. 

While some students were still finishing the I-Ready packets, some were ready for a challenge. 

I also needed a challenge, I was struggling to feel driven and invested in the process and I wasn't using Desmos as much as I wanted to so I decided to turn Fawn's two weeks of 7th grade problems into a Desmos Activities. This was a great way to build my Desmos skills. 7th Grade Fawn Nguyen Home Learning Problems. Creating Desmos Activities had re-energized my teaching and made me feel like I was contributing something. 

Then I was thrilled when the district decided to assign a unit from my favorite curriculum Open Up Resources for the last month of home learning. Desmos and Open Up Resources pair so well together because they are both designed around NCTM's 5 Practices.  So I thought, why not....let's just Desmos ALL the Things. 

Desmos' amazing activity builder tools like sketch and explain allow me to see where student's are at quickly (note their names are anonomyzed and turned into famous mathematician names--another awesome feature.) 

I tried to build in just enough self checking to help students feel ready for the next step. I like the table check. When students first see the problem it looks like this. 

After entering an answer and clicking check my work they either get: 

Ideally they'll show some work using the sketch tool too. 

I love that I can now embed the Desmos Scientific Calculator in all activities. They just click the Calculator Icon at the top and this appears. (This is the same calculator they'll get to use on state tests in Indiana.) 

I can add my own videos to help explain concepts to students. Click here to experience one of my activities as a student and see how I do this. 

I'm not perfect at using the 5 practices for remote teaching yet. Especially not when lessons are asynchronous. I really hope to build my skills with this over break and return in the fall ready to help implement more of this--but Desmos is as close as I can get right now. I love that students can see the explanations of others AND I can share pictures of their work, tables, and examples in future lessons. 

It was so good for me professionally to do this. I feel a lot more confident with self checking activities now. If/when I teach 7th grade Unit 6 again I'll have EVERY lesson as a Desmos Activity. I hope some other teachers can use these and make them better too. 

Here's the link for the whole collection: Unit 6-Grade 7-OUR.

Also, it feels weird to just talk about math right now, so just so we are clear #BlackLivesMatter and also I would like to see #CopsOutOfSchools and use that money to hire more teachers, have smaller classes, hire more counselors.