I ♥️ Desmos

Years ago, I did a this thing called My Favorite Friday.  I haven't done it for years, but my favorite thing right now is Desmos.

Since March, Desmos has been my #1 go-to for Distance Learning lessons and still connecting with my students.

We've been in Distance Learning this year for 2 weeks (we are pivoting back to in-person next week, but that's a whole 'nother story), and I could not have made it through these two weeks without Desmos at my side. 

This year is a year like no other and I had already committed to blogging more regularly about my learnings, but then today, even more amazing Desmos things started happening!

My Current Favorite Desmos Hack:

So I had this brilliant Desmos Hack that has really saved me a ton of time overall... 

The first screen of the Desmos AB asks students to select their class hour, then I can use the summary screen to mark attendance sorted by hour.  Last year, I had them enter their name as "4 Name" so I could sort by name on the Dashboard, but I really like this MC question better overall.

One reason why I love it is that I can give feedback to all 3 classes during the same activity without switching between dashboards.  I was so excited to share this hack with you, but then I got home tonight, ready to blog and went to my Desmos to take some screen shots when I noticed it didn't look right...


New Desmos Feature:

Do you spy what I spy??? 

OMG - Desmos now has classes!!!  Of course, now I have my kids trained after 2 weeks, so I'm going to have to figure out how to best use this, but I am excited to explore it!

One feature that I'm hopeful this has when I explore it is a better co-teacher management system as I do team-teach and depending on which one of us created the activity, the dashboard access is clunky.  I'm hopeful that this will allow us both access to the files for our shared class without a ton of emails back and forth sharing links to activities

More New Features?!?!?

What?!?!?  Now when you add a "note", you can use italics, bold, or add a link??  I can't tell you how many times this week alone, I had wished for a way to easily add emphasis to a Desmos Activity - I swear Eli and his team are reading our minds!  You can read more about this new feature on the Desmos website.

One thing about new features in Desmos is that they are often not advertised, so when you find them, it's like this fun hidden treasure!

Earlier this week, I was giving feedback to a Desmos activity (which I absolutely LOVE the Desmos Feedback feature), and I just happened to notice that little arrow... hmm, what does this do??

OMG - I can edit / delete now?!?!? 

Game changer!!!  I can't tell you how often I would make a typo or hit enter too soon - this is a HUGE thing for me! :)


My Favorite Question this week:

One of the things I had planned to share today before finding all of the fun new features was this question that I had added to a Desmos Activity earlier this week.

My students were supposed to try this AP Free Response problem, then I asked them to check themselves against the sample student responses on AP Central and to reflect on their answers.  The number of students who mentioned things about being specific, using good vocabulary, etc was just an absolute highlight of my week.


So major thanks to Eli, the Desmos team, all Desmos fellows, and the absolute love and care that each of you put into making Desmos better every day.