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Desmos Activities have completely transformed my classroom. Luckily, my school is “bring your own device” so my students have their computers every day in class..

I introduced triangle centers and how they are created geometrically (day 1) and explored vocabulary with my students as much as possible. After students learned what the centroid, orthocenter, and circumcenter were, I wanted to teach them how to find them algebraically (we talked about incenter, but not in an algebraic way) 

Below are the activities. We did one activity per day. While students were working, I walked around and answered questions all class. Desmos Activity builder really helped differentiate this unit. It also really helped students who were missing school. It was really easy to keep them up to date with what we were doing in class!

• Centroid
• Orthocenter 
• Circumcenter

The activities below included all three. They became a little less scaffolded each time.

• Finding Points of Concurrency Practice Day 1
• Finding Points of Concurrency Practice Day 2
• Finding Points of Concurrency Practice Day 3

If a student did not finish an activity during class, the activity became homework. For the first three, every student finished in a 55-minute class. The activities with all three took students a little longer to complete.

I gave my assessment for this unit on Desmos AB and had students find the “best location for a water station” between three different fields on our campus. At the end of the assessment, I asked students how they felt they did and if they thought Desmos was helpful to them. Below are a few responses I received.

Students tend to struggle with symbolic logic.  It’s hard for them to see the order of the logical statements and the reasons behind it. They want to use the inverse or converse to prove something because it’s there. I feel like it’s hard for them to visualize why they can’t do it with symbols until they see why it doesn’t work elsewhere.

We had some time after a quiz on a long block day (85-minute class), and I decided to let their creative side show.

I asked the students to create a children’s book using logic statements.

• They needed at least 10 statements
• Create a story with fluidity by using the transitive property, contrapositive, and conditional of the statement at least once ( & identify when they used what)
• I gave the students the story “If you give a Mouse a Cookie” as an example

This really helped especially with creative transitive statements. For some reason, they seem to struggle with identifying transitive statements when creating proofs.

I let students decide how they wanted to create the story. Some students created theirs on paper while others created it on power point, pages, or google docs. I wanted everyone to see the other stories, however, class time didn’t allow that.

I decided to utilize the wiki feature on Haiku, and I set up a wiki assignment where every student uploaded their story. For homework, student’s had to comment on at least 4 other stories from any of the three geometry classes. This has the same effect as a gallery walk with post-it notes, but it’s now archived on their Haiku. This was a fun activity that didn’t take up too much time. Students really enjoyed creating stories!

I love projects. From my observations last year, students seemed to get a lot out of applying their knowledge instead of taking a formal written assessment. After learning basic geometry vocabulary and briefly playing around with Geogebra for constructions, I created an art project for students to show me what they know.

Feedback I received:

• 15 words is a lot (agreed)
• Some students said they would have liked it better if they didn’t have to use GeoGebra. Part of the assignment is learning the software, so that part is staying for next year.
• Most students said that creating their pictures and having to write about what they did using the vocabulary really helped them visualize the vocab and apply it, instead of just memorizing

I also gave a quiz on the vocab after this project. Although this way a graded project, it was used as a way to enhance their learning, not just assess it. Below are some of the amazing projects I received. My students are so creative!!!  I also had my students do a gallery walk (each received 4 sticky notes but they asked for more) when the project was due. This gave them a chance to see other people in their classes work and made everyone feel good about their work 🙂

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Starting my second year of teaching.Thankfully, I had one prep that didn’t change, Geometry! I’m finally out of the “holding my head up right above the water so I don’t drown” year and am finally truly changing and analyzing my classes. This year I decided to have two main goals.

1. I want my students to speak and debate mathematically
2. I want my students to write mathematically

For this post, I’m going to focus on goal #1.  In my first week back, I created more mathematical discussion than I had the entire previous year.

At Twitter Math Camp this summer, I went to a morning session with Mattie Baker and Chris Luzniak  about creating a culture of mathematical discussion and debate. One of the many ways to do this was to set up a classroom environment is which students use the format

My claim is____________. My warrant is _____________  to express and justify their ideas.

I started using this format on the first day of class. I started asking fun questions like “what’s your favorite movie?” “where’s your favorite vacation spot” and some “would you rather” questions. This was a great way to help students become comfortable with the format, get comfortable with each other, and helped me learn their names very quickly. We continued with these same type of questions on day two.

Next, I started asking more mathematical questions, specifically for vocab that they were supposed to look up the night before for homework. I called on two or three students per vocab word to hear their opinions. If there was a controversial word, I asked more students for their thoughts.   This was a great way to go over and discuss vocab in an interactive way. I could also see what misconceptions they had of certain words.

Then I used this to explore a topic that we hadn’t really focused on yet. For homework, I had students look up the definition of congruent and equal and compare them. When they submitted their responses I could tell that there were misconceptions. Students also didn’t know when to use equal versus congruent.  I decided to start the class with some claims and warrants. The entire class became involved in the discussion on where = or congruent belongs and WHY it belongs there.

I have also used this to discuss a topic that we learned the day before. Chris had a great activity debating if the best method of finding distance  is the Pythagorean theorem or the distance formula (depending on the information given). I let students work through the three distance problems but also provide a claim and warrant for why they chose that method. At the end of class, we shared our claim and warrants as a class.

I’ve really enjoyed implementing claim and warrants into my class so far. I can’t wait to try (and blog) once I try other things from this session!