Dealing with Data DFI Course - 26th May 2021

Day Four DFI Course - Paparore School

As always, we began our day by discussing and sharing what has worked well, what didn't make sense and what we need help with. This is a great way for us to reflect on our past week and share what tools or learning we have implemented in our schools or classes. 

Next was our Manaiakalani Pedagogy session with Dorothy. Today's focus was share. Dorothy talked about the many ways that sharing has occured through history and how this is a key aspect of building relationships. Dorothy shared about how social media had changed a great deal in 2005 and how each of the platforms had a slogan that connected to or highlighted the need to share in real time. 

She also talked about how schools have fostered sharing since schools were first opened. The newsletters, the posters, the science fairs are all examples of how we share. However these forms of sharing are sometimes limited by the time, the place and the people / audience that are available then and there. Sharing our learning digitally allows us to connect with a wider audience, global community included. 

Next we had a chalk and talk session which explored Google Forms. This is a tool that I have used throughout my teaching career so far. I have previously used them for a range of purposes. For example, to create surveys for staff, to collect student voice from students across whole syndicates, and as prior knowledge checks or follow up literacy tasks in my classroom. Today I learnt how to add sections to my google form which I hadn't done before. Myself and Holly were discussing how it would be great if the sections that people filled in would be determined by the answers they gave. If this is actually a feature of Google Forms, we didn't figure out how to do that. 

Our next session was a deep dive into creating Google MyMaps. Vicky shared many ways that we could use this tool. For example, mapping out a cross country track, to compare measurements or to map out data from Google Forms. I used our create time to make a map of where I am from and some of the places I have visited around the world. See my map below.

 

Next was a deep dive into Google Sheets. Kerry and Vicky showed us lots of tips around how to use Google Sheets. I've used Google Sheets quite a lot before but it was great to have some reminders around how to manipulate cells and the data. One awesome tip was that if we have phone numbers on a Google Sheet and it's dropping off the zeros, we can change the settings in Number from automatic to plain text. This will ensure that the zeros the start of the phone number will stay on the Google Sheet. They also showed us how to save different filter views which would be useful when looking at data across your class or school.

We had a chance to break into smaller groups and explore Google Sheets further. This was great because we could choose a group based on our own skill level and how comfortable we were feeling with this tool. I learnt so much in this session. We explored tonnes of tips and tools within Google Sheets that would be so handy when analysing and manipulating data. 

In the afternoon session, we had another go at using Google Sheets. This time we had to gather data from a blog archive and use this data to create a chart like the one I created below. I noticed that this student added more blog posts in 2020 than they did in 2019. May through to September were the most productive months in terms of adding blog posts. A significantly smaller amount of blog posts were added at the beginning and end of each year. 

Our last session of the day was around writing quality blog comments. We also learnt how to write a comment and leave a link to our own blog. We were then given some blog time as usual and encouraged to add comments to other people's blog posts as well.