180°: How I Transitioned to Teaching Geometry Online (Part 3)
A three-part series detailing my thoughts, ideas and reflections on shifting my high school math class from in-person to virtual.
In Part I, I describe my concerns and questions that arose in the days leading up to the school closure announcement. Part II outlines my exploration, criteria, and analysis of three online learning options that led to utilizing Desmos. In Part III, I discuss specific Desmos features that allowed me to convert in-person lesson structures to a virtual setting.
Part 3: School’s Back in Session (Virtually)
Desmos has a vast collection of fun and interactive math activities. For distance learning, I utilized the customizable Activity Builder to create an interactive lesson based on the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. Below, I describe the Desmos features I used and the modifications I made to my online lesson structure.
Scaffolding: My colleague and I created and linked short videos on each slide, so that if students were stuck, they could watch a video with a quick explanation and move along with the activity. I used Screencastify and my Longjoy document camera to record videos and upload them to YouTube.
Monitoring, Pacing and Pausing of Classwork: During the live Desmos lessons, I was able to restrict and pause student screens in order to facilitate whole-class discussions. This chunked the amount of work and helped students focus on the task at hand.
Monitoring Whole Class Data: During class time, I keep the “Summary” dashboard open and monitor my students’ progress. I can see their real-time responses, sketches, and whether they’ve skipped questions or answered incorrectly. If I notice that a student has spent a long time on a question or answered incorrectly, I’ll reach out to them and provide guidance on the video call.
Arranging Student Work to Promote Understanding: This is one of the features I am most excited about. I can screenshot student work and present them in a gallery. During the “Wrap” portion or a Cool-Down review, I call on students to explain their work and analyze misconceptions that may have occurred. Desmos also has an “Anonymize” feature, which replaces student names with famous mathematicians and can help alleviate status issues in a math class. I often use this feature for discussing misconceptions in student work.
Shift from Live Class to Self-Paced: I initially facilitated a live Desmos lesson and built-in opportunities for student dialogue and logical sequencing of student work. While one of our class norms is “Stay Together,” I realized that my students’ wide range of foundational knowledge, diverse learning needs, and sporadic wifi/technology issues required a more personalized approach.
In the next lesson, I offered a self-paced option where students could engage and learn without feeling rushed by the 15-minute chunks of activities. This also allowed me to provide one on one support to my most struggling students. To enable mathematical discourse and discussion of student work, I included a 20-minute review at the beginning of every lesson of key points and analysis of student work from the previous lesson to build common understanding.
Results: I surveyed my students to gather feedback on the first week of virtual school; the majority of students preferred the self-paced Desmos option as they did not feel rushed or could work ahead if they wanted to. Additionally, in the first week, 89% of my students were able to complete the Desmos activities and demonstrate a mid-high level of mastery on the lesson objective. The percentage of students who were able to engage with Desmos was encouraging, so I continued integrating my lessons with Desmos in the following weeks.
Reflection: Despite the preparation I did for executing online math, I was unprepared for the emotional aspect of online teaching. While I was able to monitor my students’ work and check for their understanding, I felt disconnected from them. I missed interacting with my students in class and getting to witness their “aha” moments. It was also challenging for me to support struggling students as my emails and messages received sporadic responses.
Regardless, the majority of my students demonstrated resilience and perseverance as they completed their classwork while adjusting to virtual school and shelter-in-place. Last week, they worked on a Desmos Circle Art project and the creativity and humor in their submissions made me smile. Although virtual class cannot replace the joys of teaching in-person, this came close.
