Dealing with Data

 Day four of the Digital Fluency Intensive kicked off with reflections on what is working well and what people need more help with. It does seem as though people are embracing the learning into their classroom practice and their daily lives.

From that we focused on the third element of the Manaiakalani pedagogy - Share. Share has become an integral part of our lives and sites such as youtube have allowed Share to occur on a wide scale. Social Media apps such as Facebook and Twitter have enabled (and commercialised) the human compulsion to share. Share is not constrained to online however, students will always look for opportunities for the human connection and using the ability to share.

Underpinning the idea of share is the concept of Audience. Students can share with each other, the school, the local community of even globally. Authentic audiences are audiences who make the choice to actively chose to view the content that is being created. Blogging is a great way for students to share their content with the globe. John Hattie notes that the feedback ability of blogging is a powerful enabler of learning for students.

Moving on to our focus for the day of Data, we looked at Google Forms. Forms are a great way of collating data, with a number of different question formats. We were given the opportunity to create our own forms. 

Google My Maps (as opposed to Google Maps) is a really cool new app that I was introduced to. I can see a lot of applications for my class - and I have created my own map (see below). Check out the cities I have been lucky to visit with my wife. 

From here we moved onto google sheets. I feel pretty comfortable with sheets but did learn about options to filter options. This tool enables data to be accessed by the users to be specific to their needs. For example if you had a class set of data and wanted to view boys reading levels, you would be able to do this automatically. There is so much functionality within Google Sheets including the ability to lock data inputting, viewing edit history and the ability to Split Data to columns.

For our afternoon session we took our learnings on google sheets to analyse a students blog. See below the chart that was created based on the analysis of a students blog at Point England School. It is clear that this student likes to blog a lot in the middle of the year, and that 2020 (COVID!) had a massive increase in blogging.