Ever since the wonderful Dr. Dan Meyer took over Desmos as Chief Academic Officer in 2015 Teacher.Desmos.com has become a freely available, even more valuable and rich place where you can find wonderful resources to enhance math learning. Dan’s main goal for Desmos was to “produce the best digital math curriculum in the world!”. The team at Desmos are extremely forward thinking and innovative in their approach to math learning. Desmos offers three main categories for math learning: 1. Online Graphing Calculator https://www.desmos.com/ which has the advantages of being very easy to use and intuitive. The syntax similar to writing math and it is fairly straightforward to create sliders. There
How do we give our students a present without telling them what it is before they open it? Often when we tell our students what they are going to learn and understand at the beginning of the lesson I feel that we are telling them what the present is before they open it. Another analogy my colleague at HKU uses is give students a trailer to the film not the spoiler! It is important to set the stage the learning but not spoil the learning! I like to encourage curiosity and excitement with my students by allowing them to discover or uncover the key concepts of the lesson for themselves. This approach is fundamental to inquiry based learning models. So how do we draw out conceptual understanding
With the exponential growth in technology, the integration of digital tools in the mathematics classroom has gained in popularity over the last two decades (Alacaci & McDonald, 2012) and currently there are a variety of sophisticated digital tools specifically designed for mathematics learning. Tools that are designed to do and learn mathematics include dynamic software programs such as Geogebra: https://www.geogebra.org/, Autograph: http://www.autograph-maths.com/ and Desmos: https://www.desmos.com/ , computer algebra systems such as Maplesoft: https://www.maplesoft.com/, graphical display calculators, spreadsheets, electronic manipulatives and applets to name a few. Digital tools that fac
