Teach My Lesson - MTBos Week 4

The fourth and final week of the #MTBoS Blogging Initiative is here.  I am sitting at the South Dakota Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference, wrapping up my thoughts from the event.  My co-teacher Jarrod and I presented at two sessions yesterday.  The second was titled "Why You Need to Bring Desmos Into Your Classroom."  We found that there are a number of teachers who do not yet know about the Desmos Teacher site and the activities that can be found there.

Which leads me my version of "Teach My Lesson."  

If you're new to Desmos, do the following... go to student.desmos.com.  Enter code "5xy6".  Complete the activity.  This lesson actually follows a different lesson that I do that introduces students to transformations of functions.  (For that activity, enter code "xsnx".)

If you're already a teacher.desmos.com user, here are the links that you can use to customize these two activities.

Transformation of Functions

Standard Form of Quadratic Functions

Desmos has so much potential for exploring mathematics, especially ones algebraic in nature.  I have found that students gain a lot of ownership of the math involved in these activities.  It's important to have students reflect and summarize their discoveries as part of these lessons.

If you happen to use either of these, I'd love to hear feedback.  Best of luck!