In this video, I show demonstrate how to embed Desmos Activities in a Blackboard class.
Desmos Activities
Desmos Activities build on graphs to allow the instructor complete control over how the students interact with the graphs, and allow student submission of responses either for discussion or for feedback/grading. An Activity is a sequence of screens, with each screen consisting of a small collection of components (such as graphs, notes for message to the students, input boxes, multiple-choice inputs, etc). Components can talk to each other through a simple and straightforward scripting layer which fortunately is well-documented. This allows, for example, a student to enter a function in one component, have a second component graph that function, and a third component display interesting results from the graph. The scripting is natural enough, and the documentation is good enough, that (I believe) one does not really need programming experience to use it. However, you can build simple activities without scripting, just by relying on the power of the underlying graph.
Desmos Activities are quite intuitive and natural to build, but it is worth exploring a few different activities to get a sense for the design philosophy before making your own — in short, you probably don’t want too much going on in a single screen, and think about building your activity as a sequence of screens.
Do I Need an Account? Do My Students?
As an instructor, you will want to have a Desmos account to manage collections of helpful activities, create links for your students to access them, and create your own activities if you like; but students do not need to have their own accounts to access the demonstrations. They would only need an account if they want to be able access their own previous work after leaving and returning. They can even submit work to your class without an account. You can also include basic Desmos graphs without creating an activity, and you can even do this without an account if you are sharing a graph you found online instead of your own. You can even share graphs without being logged in. But you’ll need your own account to save graphs on the site.
Iframes
While I demonstrate embedding the activity in a Blackboard page, this can be done in any page that supports iframes. Iframes are just HTML’s way of embedding one page within another. Blackboard’s “Embed Media” button in the (extended) formatting menu allows you to add iframes without knowing anything about HTML, but I show in the video how (if you’re willing to look at the raw HTML) you can make changes to the iframe attributes, such as making the width of the frame a percentage of total page width instead of fixed, that the Blackboard interface itself does not support. (If you are looking for the “Embed Media” button and do not see it, be sure you are viewing the full formatting menu by clicking the “Show More” button at the right end.)