For those of you who are math teachers, do you use Desmos? Do you know its capabilities?
In an effort for this old dog to learn some new tricks, I attended a conference today to learn how to use more of Desmos than just the graphing calculator. A Zoom conference.
Teachers from across the country were at this conference, and thus it started at 9am. Eastern Time. 6am here on the left coast. I'd brought my work laptop home, and by 5:50 I was trying to get into the Zoom conference.
And I couldn't.
Never did figure out what the problem was, and neither could the conference tech people I called. Instead, I used my personal Chromebook to access the conference. A Chromebook, that doesn't have the Zoom software installed, worked fine, but my school laptop, new this school year, couldn't get it to run. Later I emailed our district techies to see what the issue might be.
It's been a long time since I was the "slow person" in a training, the one asking a lot of questions, but there I was. I didn't realize how much I didn't know! I sure learned a lot, though, including that it would take several more detailed trainings even to get a handle on some of the higher power capabilities of that web site.
It was nice being done at noon Pacific Time :-)
used Desmos for my transformations, conic sections, nets in solids, angles in circles, slopes, and probably some more stuff. I tried to give the students one "self-discovery" activity at the beginning of class before we did notes to get their minds thinking of connections between what we were learning and what they were doing in Desmos.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I barely scratched the surface. I had no clue there were pre-made activities for basically all subjects until I had been using it for like a year.
Good for you on learning something new.
I love it for trig when discussing the standard equation and the 4 varables in it. You can show the standard equation for a sine function, then manipulate each variable and show how the wave changes. Students can tweak them, then describe how the wave changed.
ReplyDeleteI also like it to check answers. In algebra, give 2 points, then create the equation. Demos can then show the graph. Same in calc: calculate the tangent line, and see if you are right.
I stumbled upon one of the Desmos lessons ("pre-made activities") while preparing to tutor a student in precalculus. Since I do not teach it at my school, I do not have ready made lessons, so it was a blessing to find a good one on graphing trig functions.
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