So we had our workshop today... not bad, six teachers, so that's half the department. Two others were working at school and couldn't make it. A good four hour session with a pro-user who's also a teacher. While he didn't cover a lot of the fundamental stuff or get into all the changes in the user interface that Maple 12 has, he did keep up with most of our teachers (we're an agressive bunch when it comes to learner... doctors making the worst patients and all). There was a nice bit of work done with programming and question construction. Hopefully things will come of it... we discussed a lot of classroom issues while we were learning Maple. Now I have to have some serious stuff ready for next week!
So using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it. They're collected at https://teacher.desmos.com/ But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough. It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss. Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue. Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page. From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working. I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...
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