Say I stumble onto an interesting activity written by a specific teacher.
For example, I stumbled on this interesting post by @Curtis_James:
Which links to his activity:
Is there a way for me to see other activities written by this teacher?
→ There is a good chance I would find his other activities interesting as well… but I don’t seem to be able to click on his name in order see what else he might have written.
Thanks
Can anyone find activities I myself have written?
I’ve tried the Desmos search tool - but my activity only seems to show up if I’ve recently launched it (otherwise, it no longer seems to show up when I enter relevant keywords).
Note: I have published at least one - and I can access it from a bookmarked address, even when not logged in.
I think your best bet is to do an advanced search like this. As for others finding your lessons, they could use the same type of search as long as your activities are marked public.
I think it’s well documented that Desmos has never implemented a proper search function (who would have thought it was so hard?)
However, I think there should be another level of “public” before they open up this functionality - like how YouTube allows you to have unlisted videos which can be publicly linked to but not found in searches.
I think this is “a feature, not a bug.” It’s kind of a matter of branding I think. There’s a pretty significant philosophy attached to the name, so you can only find vetted activities through their search. I still agree that I’d like a more tiered level of publicity for my activities. It would make sharing with PLCs and such much more convenient, particularly where copyrighted material is concerned.
I am willing to grant some of Desmos’ idiosyncrasies as features not bugs, but I think being unable to find your own activities is a feature I could live without.
Indeed. A site-targeted Google search tends to be my goto whenever built-in search fails me as well.
I find that built-in (application-specific) search tools have the potential to present information in a more digestible manner, though (ex: showing image & title in a more prominent fashion).
Been a few days since I made my activity public… and the Google web crawler still hasn’t indexed my activity.
Agreed. I was sort of surprised you couldn’t “publish” your activity to some form of “my publicly shared activities” that was searchable by others
…even if just through a “other activities made by author X” link.
“share my activity” through a simple link is a great way to share things with colleagues as you work things out, but requires extra work if you want to share your curated list of activities.
Actually, I found a reasonable solution:
You can create a special collection for yourself where you add any/all activities you wish to make “public” to others. Here is mine:
https://teacher.desmos.com/collection/61d8e4beb0ca9d73f13b5050
In theory, you could just copy/paste this link in the description of each one of the activities you publish
https://teacher.desmos.com/collection/61d8e4beb0ca9d73f13b5050"So that anyone that likes one of your activities can find others you have written.
It requires manual intervention (so will probably lack some consistency), but probably better than relying on Google!?
edit:
The problem is that others have to apply this solution for me to benefit from it. Not all that practical, I must admit.
Interestingly, that’s not even necessary. When someone has shared an activity with me and it was already in a collection, I can look at the menu bar and see the entire collection it’s in, the other activities in that collection, and click back, and add the collection.
On the other hand, I’ve published quite a few activities (some are more than a year old) and even shared several publicly (on different forums), and I still can’t find my activities via google search! I found one, and it happened to be in a collection someone else made. I’m guessing that collection has either been around a long time, or that collection has been published in numerous public web locations.
I find more activities on Desmos facebook group than Google search, nowadays. And I no longer worry that my students will cheat by discovering my activity. 
You’re right and you’re right.
Searching is not at all easy. Seems simple, but simple is rarely easy. And yet it’s one of the most important user-friendly UX improvements. But then again that’s why there are libraries specifically for this sort of thing.
I applaud Desmos for improving their Documentation(with search) but it’s far from finished and that’s not touching on Activity search itself.
Lots of room for improvement here and let’s hope that with Desmos still in its infancy their roadmap includes this as a priority item.
Very interesting. I am trying that myself. When you say “menu bar”, do you mean here?:
→ This is what I see looking at my own activity that I am browsing while not logged into Desmos (To “mimic” what happens looking at activities created by others – without having to create a second/test Desmos account):
@Elayna Please let me know if I am doing something wrong here/looking in the wrong location so I can adjust what I do.
If not, I will probably want to stick with adding a link to my main collection in the description of each of my published activities.
This is what I see when I click on an activity already in a collection. I clicked on yours.
I agree with @Daniel_Grubbs and applaud Desmos for keeping it’s search within teacher.desmos.com to only vetted activities. If it were open to all activities, the Desmos created & vetted activities would get lost in the sea of vastness. I think back to Smart Notebook Lessons when Smartboards became a thing and it wasn’t too long before their inhouse search engine of lessons was flooded and it was impossible to sift through everything.
I too use Google as the best way to search everyone’s activities and find that the most “clicked” activities that appear near the top are pretty good. @cwinske advanced search is an even better way to filter.
I wonder if Desmos would consider keeping their in house search as is, but also including a button for people to search outside of teacher.desmos.com.
In any rate, kudos to the thoughtfulness that Desmos puts into all of it’s decisions rather than just jumping in without considering things from all angles (yes Math pun intended).
