The Desmos Classroom teacher dashboard collects a lot of student ideas. So what's the best way to make use of those ideas during an activity? Peg Smith and Mary Kay Stein’s 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions offers a clear and useful framework for facilitating class discussions around student thinking.

We added a Snapshot tool to make it even easier to select and sequence student work for those discussions. Get started with the following video, then try your hand at selecting and sequencing student work for discussion during your next Desmos Classroom activity.

To select a response for discussion, simply click the Camera icon.

Then, in the Snapshots view, you can organize your snapshots into albums. Each album can hold 1–4 snapshots.

Present your albums to facilitate class discussions. Consider entering a title or question, or simply share your discussion prompt aloud! (Note: Teacher must present the album of snapshots to students. The album will not show on student devices yet.)

To select a response for discussion in the Teacher view, click the response’s checkbox to bring up the snapshots and the Feedback sidebar.

You can select up to four pieces of work and present them to students right from the Teacher view, or save them as an album in Snapshots.

There is a lot of mathematical creativity that is best expressed off computers, on paper, on whiteboards, and with concrete manipulatives. We want to promote that kind of mathematical creativity, as well, and we want to help teachers share those creations with the class. As a teacher, you will be able to take a picture of your students' work to showcase from the teacher dashboard by: