With the lockdown continuing deep into the spring term, the Solent AMSP team were eager to support colleagues in local schools and colleges with a Teacher Network meeting dedicated to remote teaching and learning. It was clear that there was an appetite to develop strategies to engage students so that we could avoid teaching into the void! Overall, we had a large audience of interested teachers with 23 practitioners present, eager to know how to engage their learners.
Pat Cobb, an AMSP Area Coordinator, very generously gave some of his time to present effective ways of setting up Desmos Classroom. Features included multiple-choice and check box activities, through to card sorts and importing activities. Other key features such as teacher controls included pacing, pausing and anonymising, together with assessing work swiftly by using the overlay function.
There were plenty of questions for Pat to answer at the end of the event with teachers eager to know how they could swiftly and effectively build presentations for their students, not just to use during lockdown, but in the real classroom, too, when time permits as the lockdown ends and normality gradually re-emerges.
If you’d like to learn more about Desmos and how you can use it to enhance your lessons, the AMSP are running a free self-paced online professional development course, Demos in the Maths Classroom, which is well-worth signing up for. You can view more information and apply on the AMSP website.