DFI - Dealing with Data

In this fourth DFI, I appreciated Dorothy tracing the Manaiakalani journey in choosing a digital platform and developing practices for sharing and connecting online. Dorothy posed the question “Why share?” and pointed out that Tohatoha (Share) is right at the core of all civilisations.  However, back in 2005, sharing exploded digitally through YouTube and then Bebo and Twitter. It reminded me that the digital action of sharing amplifies affordances from the speed, to being able to broadcast to the whole world. In the development of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, tahatoha was an important part of “hooking” learners into an authentic audience for their learning (especially when young people were first engaged with the emerging phenomenon of social media). Sharing with purpose is now unconstrained by time, people and place:

Dorothy also made some important distinctions about the ‘linear process’ of Learn | Create | Share. The act of sharing can be regarded as a ‘finishing point’ which is an important life skill for students to be ‘work ready’. But it can also be a starting point for learning: a student’s thinking on a blog post can kick off discussion and provocations for the next lesson. 

Google Forms, My Maps and Sheets

As today’s DFI was also themed around data we kicked off our sessions using Google Forms. I was inspired at the Wananga last week by Rebecca Jesson’s exhortation to “Know Your Learner as Reader”, so I created a form to gather student voice about attitudes to reading and gauging interests. I also added a video at the end to inspire reluctant readers and for students to listen to other young people’s views on reading that they may not have thought of before:

We also created Google My Maps which is an app I have not used before but has huge learning design opportunities particularly in maths, social studies and geography. I really liked that My Maps can import data from Google Forms and I can think of all sorts of ways students can connect to one another’s backgrounds, places of interest and where they have been/want to go in the world! If you are interested, here is a My Map of places you may not be familiar with in the Waiuku, Franklin area:

I found Vicki’s Deep Dive into Google Sheets extremely useful. Despite being a long-time sheets user, I still found a number of tips I will surely be incorporating into my everyday data work. For example:

• the shortcut to freezing rows and columns;

• paint roller formatting; 

• conditional formatting rules (e.g. to colour all students who are below a certain raw score or level);

• restricted editing rules (for cells you don’t want touched by anyone else!);

• explore suggestions - these Google suggested graphs and analyses of your data are a real time saver;

• data validation - for keeping entry clean and limiting responses to drop down choices.

But the Top Tip of the Day for me was Sparklines as a fabulous way for seeing trendlines in student data:

We concluded our day with a create session using a fabulous blog analysis task by the amazing Robyn Anderson at Panmure Bridge School. If you are not using this task, I would highly recommend, getting students to analyse their own blog statistics - great connections to information literacy skills in maths!