Thank You Murphy's Law

We switched to online learning very rapidly in March of 2020. Classes were in person on a Friday and moved online on a Monday. Murphy's Law came into play - it turned out that I was to give one of my exams of the semeter on that Monday. I pushed the exam off by one class day to give me time to get the exam put on Canvas. Unfortuantely, it isn't as easy as it looks. My images did not show within the exam and students still had to do part of their exam on paper and scan and upload it. The exam was in two places and grading became a nightmare. For consistency, I like grading the same question across all student papers at the same time. I can see common errors and score student papers in a similar way for those errors. Canvas does not let me do that, which is a major drawback. Plus, most students uploaded their work in 4 - 6 image files. Grading took about three times as long as it did before and my feedback was limited since I could not type in math formatting.

 

This fall classes are still being held virtually via Zoom. This and my disasterous issues with assessments in Canvas, led to me to decide to use Desmos Activity Builder for quizzes in my Functions and Derivatives class. It has worked really well and the students adjusted to it quite easily. Several even commented that they liked taking the quizzes in Desmos Activity Builder during a mid-semester check-in survey. Doing quizzes in this way has been so much better that I don't see myself going back to paper quizzes even when we return to face-to-face learning. 

Why would you want to do assessments in Desmos Activity Builder? I can think of four main reasons: they are easy to create, support a variety of student responses, it is easy to manage classes and you have the ability to quickly give students feedback. I'll comment on each of these. 

1) Easy to Create: I can easily embed images within my quiz without having to upload them some place else, link it and check a box to make sure students can see it. I can also design a question that allows for student written input. An example of such a question can be seen in the student work below. Plus, it is very easy to copy one quiz and modify it to create a second version of the quiz.

2) Variety of Student Responses: In Canvas, I can ask a multiple choice question, but would need to ask a separate follow up question to have students explain their choice. In Desmos Activity Builder, that can all be done within the same question. Students also have the ability to type in their answers in math format by clicking on the keyboard. Formatting of math answers is not so easy in Canvas. Here's an example of a question involving rational functions with the math keyboard for students to easily enter their solution.

3) Managing Classes: In September of 2020, Desmos added a "Manage Class" option. This makes it easy to assign activities to classes of students. Why would you do this? If you don't use the "Manage Class" option, it is challenging to see who is taking the assessment and who is not. You might see there are 24 students logged in and you should have 25. Who isn't taking the assessment?  With "Manage Class" all your students names are already listed on the dashboard and you can easily see who has logged in and who has not. Plus, there is easy integration with Google Classroom. For more information about this feature, watch this brief video from Desmos. 

4) The Ability to Quickly Give Students Feedback:In March 2020, Desmos released its Feedback feature within Activity Builder. This allows teachers to give feedback to their students, including the ablity to type feedback with math formatting. As an added bonus, I can easily grade a single question for every student and then move to the next question! Students can see that they have feedback when they log into student.desmos.com. As a teacher, you can see if they have read their feedback by looking at the teacher dashboard. The grey triangle means a student has read the feedback and the green triangle means the student has not read the feedback.  Thinking this might be something you want to try? I have two recommendations. First, if you are new to Desmos Activity Builder, I recommend going to learn.desmos.com/activities to get started and learn.desmos.com/create to see how to create your own activities. Second, start small with just one or two slides of student input. Use Desmos Activity Builder as an exit ticket or warm-up. 

Interested in an activity to getting started?  Here is one of the quizzes I gave a few weeks ago.  If you have an account at teacher.desmos.com, you can copy and edit this quiz on Polynomials, Rational Functions and Limits. 

Thank you, Murphy's Law, for giving the impetus I needed to broaden my use of Desmos Activity Builder.  If you would like to learn more about Desmos and Desmos Activity Builder, I invite you to join me for my online seminar with BER called Making Best Use of Desmos to Strengthen Your Math Instruction (Grades 6 - 12).  Click on this link to see information about dates and how to register.