I could have spent the last 3+ hours taking a much needed nap on this Thanksgiving Break. Instead, I got caught up looking up awesome Desmos and Math Lesson / Activity Ideas. It's times like these I wish I had a classroom to implement these into right away. Well, in a way, I do - I don't have my own classroom, but I do have 5 math fellows to try new things out in! My brain is flooding with ideas of ways to use it in both little bits (lesson intros, aids, etc) and big bits (whole-class period exploration and inquiry activities). So, even though I don't teach this course anymore, I am going through my Math Analysis (PreCal) concept list and writing down ways Desmos can be used as a tool to help students discover and explore math concepts and/or aid in providing a visual or model for the math concept.
As I'm going through my Math Analysis Unit Map and almost every single concept could have been explored (think discovery / inquiry) and/or reinforced with the visuals and modeling provided through using Desmos.
(To see all the resources I have aligned with these concepts already, as well as video lessons for every concept, please see my student site at kirchmathanalysis.blogspot.com
Oh, and don't forget about the awesome activities at teacher.desmos.com or dailydesmos.com. What a world of opportunity! Life. Is. Changed.
Here are my thoughts - there are some concepts I don't have notes by but I left them in there so you can see the whole unit picture. If you have ideas (or activities already designed and are willing to share!!!) for any of these, please comment and share. The document linked below is "commentable", so please feel free to comment there or on this post.
This is just a list for one of the courses I taught for the last 5 years. I know there are a lot more things Desmos can do that is outside the scope of this course, so I added an "other" section at the very end for other "cool stuff I don't want to forget" but that doesn't align with what my brain has been wrapped around for so long. There are also a lot of concepts in this list that are "review" for Math Analysis and thus are originally taught in Algebra 1, Geometry, or Algebra 2.
One of the things that sticks out to me so much is that these visuals and models of the math would have helped SO many of my students do more than just memorize procedures and formulas. They would have been able to "see" it and thus (hopefully) make more sense of it. While I can't go back and change the past, I can help to change the future!!
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