Teaching with Desmos

I discovered Desmos last year through @ColleenYoung's fantastic blog Mathematics, Learning and Web 2.0. It quickly became my favourite piece of 'teachnology'. Before Desmos I occasionally used Omnigraph or Autograph, but I now use Desmos regularly because it's just so easy to use. It really couldn't be simpler. As it's web-based, I encourage my pupils (particularly at A level) to use Desmos at home to support their studies, for example to check graph sketches.

Desmos on the Interactive Whiteboard
When teaching exponential functions to Year 12, I used Desmos on my IWB to show the graphs of functions such as y = 2^x and y = 3^x. We discussed our expectations for graphs such as y = 2^-x and used Desmos to check.  When we plotted y = (-2)^x we got an interesting result - which had me stumped for a minute - can you explain it?

Desmos is particularly helpful for demonstrating concepts in Further Maths (such as the directrix and focus of a parabola) - there's some good examples in this blog.

Desmos in the IT Room

My school doesn’t own tablets and IT rooms are rarely available, so my pupils don't often get the chance to use technology during their Maths lessons. But I was so keen to share Desmos with my Year 9 class, I made a big effort to get organised. I produced this worksheet for them to use in an IT room, with the aim of introducing different types of graph (quadratic, cubic, reciprocal) and simple transformations. After a very short demonstration of Desmos, the class spent two whole lessons working independently. I was pleased with their progress and I hope that they'll remember Desmos and continue to use it as a learning tool both at home and at school.

I loaded my worksheet onto TES today - along with a graph transformation activity that I use at Key Stage 4 - and it got me thinking about whether any other resources are available for teaching with Desmos.  I found a few examples on TES, such as Investigating straight lines with Desmos by Tristan Jones and Using Desmos to teach Coordinate Geometry (KS3) by phildate. I expect that the range of teaching resources available will grow as increasing numbers of teachers discover and embrace this fantastic tool.