Desmos Classroom Activities: An ideal tool for remote/blended learning

The past few months have been a very chaotic time for teachers and students. Many schools and colleges are now back to teaching full time but this year is likely to be very challenging and teachers want to know that they can provide opportunities for students to learn, even if the normal day-to-day routines are disrupted. For me, one tool stands out as particularly effective in ensuring that students have interesting and engaging activities that will develop their mathematical understanding: Desmos Classroom.

Desmos Classroom Activities 

Desmos Classroom activities are collections of screens that provide students with the opportunity to interact and respond to mathematical questions. They can feature text answers, mathematical answers, graphical features, multi-choice, card sorts and many other types of elements. 

There is a large selection of pre-made activities and it's really easy to adapt these or create your own. These activities are great for supporting students in thinking deeply about the maths they are learning but it's worth mentioning that they look great too - the design is really appealing and this makes using them a joy for teachers and students. 

Teacher Dashboard

Where the activities really come into their own is with the teacher dashboard. This allows you to see a live report of your students' progress, including their responses to any questions and how they have moved dynamic elements such as graphs or card sorts.

The dashboard also allows you to control the screens that the students can see using 'Pacing'. For example, if you just want them to work on the first three screens of a larger activity this is easy to set and change during the lesson. You can also 'Pause' the activity at any time so students can't interact with it. I've heard audible groans in a room when I've paused an activity - which shows how much people enjoy working on them but also highlights that it's good practice to warn before pausing - e.g. "I'm going to pause this activity in 5...4...3...2...1...". With great power comes great responsibility! 

There are lots of other features on the dashboard too: you can anonymise it before showing it to a class; you can take snapshots of students' responses and display them; you can give individual feedback; ... and many more than these which are best experienced by exploring it. 

Pedagogy behind their development

It becomes clear very quickly when using classroom activities that a huge amount of thought has gone into the design of the environment. At its heart is a desire for students to be actively engaged in thinking mathematically. This is encouraged by there being a range of ways in which students can interact and an emphasis on making connections. 

One of my favourite features is "Explain your answer". It is built-in as a default option for many question types that when students give a response they are asked to explain it. This encourages the sort of mathematical dialogue that is so helpful in developing students' mathematical understanding. I think most teachers have had the experience of finding that they've understood something more deeply when they've had to explain it and this provides mini opportunities for students to have this experience. 

The amazing Dan Meyer leads the team developing these activities and the platform. He's published a blog post about building great digital mathematical activities. In this he discusses how the design of the classroom activities is based on a number of principles. Some of the most important ones listed for me are:  

• Ask for informal analysis before formal analysis
• Connect representations
• Create objects that promote mathematical conversations between teachers and students
• Give students opportunities to be right and wrong in different, interesting ways

However, there are many more in the blog. It's well worth a read: https://blog.desmos.com/articles/the-desmos-guide-to-building-great-digital-math/

Supporting remote/blended learning: live online or asynchronous lessons

Desmos classroom was originally designed to be used in face-to-face teaching environments. However, it has proved to be a fantastic tool for supporting learning in a variety of contexts. The recent upheavals have meant that many teachers have found themselves needing to provide either live online lessons, asynchronous online support, or a combination of these for students. Desmos classroom is particularly effective in supporting this.

The activities partner very well with a live classroom environment such as Zoom or Teams live. You can see what the students are doing live, give feedback and pause when you want them to focus on what you're doing. At AMSP we've been using it in parallel with live online classrooms and it's been really effective. 

It also works really well to support asynchronous teaching too. They are constantly updating the platform and one feature they added over the summer was the ability to give individual feedback on a students' responses. This makes it viable to set an activity as a homework task for a student to complete over a week - you can monitor how they are progressing, give them feedback if they are stuck on a question and then pause the activity at the end of the week. 

Finding out more

A lot of the activities have been written for a US audience but the majority do transfer really well to teaching in UK schools. Natalie Vernon and I have curated a couple of collections of activities that are aligned to the GCSE and A level curriculums: 

• GCSE collection: https://teacher.desmos.com/collection/5e827a6e58f1e36e4d220ef8
• A level collection: https://teacher.desmos.com/collection/5e83d8c2e4f77b7bb43dc438

... and if you're wanting somewhere to start I can't recommend Marbleslides enough: https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/566b31734e38e1e21a10aac8