Tuesday, August 30, 2016

A Favorite Activity: Desmos




I need to admit that I got behind in Desmos world.  I noticed all the posts about activity builder on Twitter in the past year or so, but I did not choose to get involved.  Then I saw the announcements of polygraph and marble slides.  That did not get me to jump in either.  Maybe it was because I was reading much of this during the school year and I was too busy with 3 new preps to try to keep up with Desmos.  Fast forward to a little over a month ago when I saw tweets about card sorts on Desmos.  Now that got my attention.  I bought in within seconds.  I even created nearly a dozen lesson seeds for the upcoming year.  Now I LOVE Desmos.  In fact, whenever I plan an activity in the future, I'll probably ask would the assignment benefit from being Desmosfied?  Some things are better on paper and will remain that way, but I'm looking forward to turning some of my assignments into activity builders.

I anticipate that kids will really enjoy marble slides and polygraphs.  And I love the thinking encouraged by card sorts.  The only thing better than an old fashioned card sort is a Desmos card sort where I don't need to create, print, copy, cut, laminate, cut, sort, and store 10 sets of cards. I can just stop after the create step.

Here are some of the Desmos activities that I have started so far.  Most of them are just one screen of a card sort.  I wanted to do this to get something started that I could come back to later without forgetting that I wanted to make into a sort.  During the year, I hope to add additional slides with leading information and follow-up questions for students to answer.  Use any of these that you like and please leave feedback.

Relating Parallel & Perpendicular Lines
Using Polynomial Equations to Solve Problems
Segments of Triangles
Quotients involving Exponents - Matching
Sum and Difference of Cubes Sort
negation, inverse, contrapositive sort
Isometry Sort
Conic Sections Sort
Quadrilateral Sort
Solve by Completing the Square Card Sort

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