Get out your calendars and mark them now! Twitter Math Camp 2017 is being held from July 27th-30th at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School in Atlanta, Georgia. Please feel free to use this structure if it works for you, but make sure to adapt for your own personality/time constraints, and most importantly, find out what your learners want/need to know! One hour or afternoon is simply not enough to learn all of Desmos, but it’s definitely a start! Unfortunately, this is usually the phase that gets cut out due to time constraints. When there’s time, I walk participants through the basics of building an activity, and hopefully provide time for them to try making one with a partner. I show teachers how to bookmark activities they find using the search engine, and then how to copy/edit them so they have a starting point. Every single teacher has always found something they could potentially use that week. It’s also during this phase that I finally show them the search engine on the teacher site and ask them to look up a topic they are teaching within the next day or two and see what they can find. ![]() I bring up past activities from my Desmos history and show participants some student work. We talk about teacher moves that I made, implementation strategies, possible implementation challenges, and really analyze the teacher dashboard. After playing one activity, we stop and analyze the activity with our teacher hats on. This phase goes hand in hand with “Let’s Play,” and often, they overlap during my PD sessions. It’s always a struggle to make them stop playing so we can learn something else. These activities are obviously super fun, but also a middle ground for a range of middle and high school teachers in the same room. Some of my favorite activities to choose are Polygraph: Parabolas and Marbleslides: Lines. I stop at selective checkpoints to showcase various graphs or student answers from the teacher dashboard, talk about key vocab that I see being used, or to address any misconceptions I see, etc. I briefly explain the activity directions, give out the class code, and let them go to town. I choose a couple activities appropriate for the grade level of the participants, and we play! I tell participants to put on their student hats and imagine I am their teacher. Depending on time, you can also share the Desmos Scavenger Hunts and let participants work through them. But mostly, during this phase, I direct participants to Learn Desmos by finding a tutorial they are interested in and trying it out. I demonstrate basic calculator moves such as sliders, tables and regressions. In the intro, I share some Desmos logistics and explain/show the difference between the calculator and activities (briefly touch upon polygraph vs activity builder vs card sorts (future PD, yay!), etc). Several people have asked me for my PD plan, so here it is: This past year, I was given a few opportunities to run Desmos professional development for the teachers in my district, and in a few surrounding Massachusetts towns. I bet this sub could do something like that.It’s no surprise that I’m completely obsessed with Desmos and want to share it with teachers everywhere. Desmos is great for making things like this, which is educational in its own right, but I wish that high-quality teaching tools like this could be aggregated somewhere and sorted by grade level so that teachers could implement them straight away instead of fishing the depths and not always finding what they need. That would make it less daunting when you initially see the graph as a person unfamiliar with the unit circle. That feature would also further help to keep the visual load down initially and allow the presenter/user to flesh out the unit circle as their lecture/usage progresses. That would show how increasing values of theta go round the circle in an animated way where the pacing is entirely controlled by the presenter/user. I might also add another slider that essentially reveals the lines and numbers for each special angle one-by-one as theta increases. ![]() Idk if font size can be tied to a variable but that would be great to better indicate the state of the sliders. ![]() I especially like how it shows the spatial distribution of the special angles which otherwise just seem like meaningless numbers to memorise. Great job on this, btw! Excellent illustrative piece.
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