DFI Session 4: Dealing with data

Today Dorothy started our session off by talking about the 'SHARE' component of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy. She highlighted the importance of sharing with a purpose and for an authentic audience (not just the teachers red pen).....an authentic audience is people who CHOOSE to listen to you! Sharing in the digital age now goes far beyond our LOCAL communities and has become GLOBAL!

As part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa, BLOGGER is our main online space for our students to learn to share. Blogger has similarities to other popular social media spaces but is a lot safer as it allows us as educators to control and monitor commenting much easier.  One message that stuck with me from this mornings presentation was creating a culture within my class where my students don't say 'Im finished' but rather 'I'm ready to share'. The act of sharing can be where the learning begins sometimes...for example the feedback given on blogs etc.

LOTS of new learning for me today! I was not familiar with google sheets, google forms or google my maps. My bubble leader was called on a lot for troubleshooting! I can see that google forms could be a really useful tool and I am looking forward to having a look back through at what other people created to get some ideas. This is a link to the google form that I created today.

Google my maps was a lot of fun to experiment with and I can see that my students would also be fascinated. With younger students I would probably use it more as a whole class activity. I liked the idea someone shared of using it as a follow up reading activity where you plot the journey of a character or even plotting our route after an EOTC trip. We are currently studying our waterways and have recently completed a roadside clean up. I am wondering whether we could use my maps to look at the journey a piece of rubbish might take from our school... to our local awa....to our moana. 

This is a google map of our cohort's ideal holiday destinations....

Google sheets was definitely the thing I struggled the most with today, but I now have a basic understanding of the various functions. I think, like anything if I continue to tutu I will become more confident. I spent some time this afternoon continuing to experiment and was able to work out a few other handy functions. I can see lots of different possibilities using the data to create charts and it was valuable to have a principal in my group so that I could see the way in which she was learning to use it to collate school wide data. It is awesome learning how the Gsuite tools all work in conjunction with one another. Below is the data I used to learn how to find the average, sum, max and sparkline. I was very pleased to learn how to make sheets more appealing to look at to!

Today's CREATE activity was to use google sheets to input data about how often a student was posting on their blog. We then used that data to create two different graphs, one displaying total blog posts for each year and the other displaying total blog posts per month. We were able to use our previous learning of google drawings to insert our chart from our google sheets and ensure they were linked so that when we modify our sheet it automatically updates on our drawing.  I will continue to explore ways in which I can use google sheets to work more efficiently.  Below is the 'Blog Post Analysis' I created...

We were given the code below to use when we are commenting on someones blog and we want to link in a website or a file in the comments section....

<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>