What to do today...?

Dealing with substitutes has always been problematic in our district. We are a small school (minuscule really) and if we are lucky, we might have three or four subs on the list. On days when a bunch of us are out for some sort of district activity, almost every available sub is used between the elementary, middle and high schools. Since beggars can't be choosers, sometimes I get the sub who tells the students war stories all period of the one who records his own music and talks about that (he's actually pretty good). Sometimes I get the sub who gives out the assignment and then reads a book the whole period, ignoring the kids completely. The point is that I never know what if anything will actually happen in my classroom on a day when I'm gone.  In the end, I tend to leave review worksheets or book assignments because I know they might actually get done.
I've been working on some different strategies to try to improve this.  Google Classroom is a tool I'm hoping will help, but this time I've decided to try something a little more adventurous.  My Algebra 2 class is studying for a quiz on graphing quadratic equations, so I created an activity using Desmos' Activity Builder.  This is my new favorite tool for teaching math.  My kids are crazy about marble slides and we have been using the parabola version in this class.  I decided to create an activity where they would have to figure out the equation for the graph of a specific quadratic equation.
A couple of nice things about Activity Builder: I can track my students' progress so that I can tell them they get a "grade for the day."  That way, they know they will get a zero if I don't see them on there.  It helps keep them somewhat honest anyway.  It's very simple to use--it took less than an hour to put the activity together. I can choose to allow students to see each other's responses or not.  That way, I can allow them to see each other's thinking, but not each other's answers--again, just keeping them honest.
I have to be gone this Monday at a district level meeting, so I am going to inflict this Desmos Activity on my Algebra 2 class and see what happens.  I know this isn't exactly writing about teaching a lesson, but I'm really hoping that this will be a strategy I can use to keep my students moving forward whenever I can't be there.  I have some ideas about explorations that I could write up in the Activity Builder that I could assign on days where I have to be out.  That way, the students could complete the exploration on Desmos and I could see who did what and read their responses to the questions.  We can have a whole class discussion on the day I get back, and move their learning forward.  

I'll edit this post on Tuesday to let you know how it went, but in the meantime, if you would like to try out the activity as it stands now, go to student.desmos.com and type in the code 3vrk.  You can use the name visitor if you want so I can tell you aren't one of my students.