Digital Innovation Project - Part 1
For the first portion of our digital innovation project, I worked with a group of single-subject candidates at CSUSM who were all interested in exploring more about the Desmos online graphing calculator. We had worked with the calculator a little bit in our math methods class and were interested in learning more about how we could use it in our classrooms. I had seen a lot of new tools with Desmos all over the Twitter math sites and wanted to explore the tools. Our group worked on a shared document on Google Docs and included information about the research we did with Desmos. You can see the link to our document here.
Digital Innovation Project - Part 2
For part two of this project, I found the perfect application that I wanted to use in Desmos. Since we have a unit coming up in Quadratics later in May with my algebra class, I knew this would be a fun way to get my students more engaged in quadratic equations. I have a lesson that I created for High Tech High last semester that I'm using to introduce quadratics and then after moving through the unit to a greater degree, I wanted to use the Des-Man application to allow students to explore more. This application allows students to make faces, or a Des-Man by writing equations and moving them around based on the rules that move equations. Students will explore how quadratic function shifts actually shift the graphs and review the rules for linear equations, exponentials and inequalities. I am very excited to try this activity with my students. Here are some Des-Man images that I found online and the lesson plan is shown below.