Learn more about: Setting up classes | Activity permissions | Co-teachers | Class Roster And Student History pages

Create classes to assign activities to the same group of students throughout a school term. Students will use an invitation code to join the class at the beginning of the term.

To set up your classes for the new term, first go to teacher.desmos.com/manage-classes. Click the Add New Class button and either type the name of the class or import the class from Google Classroom.

You’ll need to create a new class for each group of students that you teach during the term (e.g., Period 5, Period 6, etc.).

To share the invitation code, click on it. You will see a link that you can share with students or you can project the invitation code for the whole class to see. Students will enter this code on student.desmos.com to join.

Desmos Classroom activity permissions let you control who can access your classes and sessions, and serve as a security protocol to deter unwanted visitors. Approved students will have access to all social communication features and will be able to see responses from their classmates. Students without approval will still be able to join and participate in class sessions, but their responses will not be displayed to other students, and they will not be able to see other students’ responses.

When a student tries to enter one of your classes, a notification will appear at the bottom of your screen. While waiting for approval, students can still join and participate in class sessions but won’t see their classmates’ responses until approved. Teachers and co-teachers can view the students waiting for access, and approve or deny accordingly. Students will need to be approved for each class they join. If you don’t recognize any names, you can quickly expire the code and deny all students so no one else can join.

You can also review student permissions directly from a Teacher dashboard. Students currently waiting to access social features are displayed at the top of the page, while students who have been denied access are at the bottom. Student permissions can be edited at any time. If you accidentally approve a student, click Menu (three vertical dots) button next to their name to select the option to:

1) Hide the student: they will remain in the session, but their work won’t be shown to other students or appear in the dashboard.

2) Deny the student: they will be removed from the session entirely.

When creating a new single session, you can choose whether to require student sign-in and teacher approval for social features. Session security settings cannot be changed once an invitation code is created, so we recommend taking some time to assess the needs of each session beforehand.

Highly effective teachers are collaborative teachers and they also focus on student thinking. Co-teaching is easy in Desmos Classroom when you and your co-teacher are both near the same computer. But when you're far from each other, you can still collaborate. Add a co-teacher to your class from the Classes page. Co-teachers will need to have an existing Desmos Classroom account. Once a co-teacher is added, they will be able to see the class on their Manage Classes page. They’ll also be able to view the activity history for the class to access any dashboards and assign new activities to the class.

You can share individual activity dashboards with other colleagues. Simply add a colleague to a dashboard, and they’ll get an email with a link for dashboard access. Once you’ve added someone to the dashboard, you can also share the dashboard URL with them directly.

Click on the activity title to find the Share dashboard link.

Colleagues will need to have an existing Desmos Classroom account to be added to the dashboard.

They will receive an email with the dashboard link. You can also share the dashboard URL with them directly for dashboard access.

If you create a class that’s linked to Google Classroom, we’ll import the co-teacher from Google Classroom. Be sure to add the co-teacher as a teacher in your Google Classroom, then press Sync from the Classes page and they’ll have access.

We recommend dividing up the responsibility, while one teacher facilitates the conversation toolkit, the other can snapshot interesting student thinking or leave feedback that helps students develop their ideas.

Discuss together the kinds of support different students need, with each of you having your own copy of the dashboard right in front of you.

From the Manage Your Classes page, you can click on an individual class roster to:

From the Class Roster page, you can view an individual student’s activity history for the class. Each row will show the activity information, date assigned, and a link to view the student’s work if the student has started the activity.

Please note that responses from other classmates are not included when viewing an individual student’s work in an activity, so you won’t be able to view responses.