DFI Day Four- Dealing with Data, it'll make you smarter

Analysis and stategise

What a great day of learning it was today. We plummeted deep into the Sharing section of the Learn, Create, Share model. Ooohhh man - tapping into the human experience in the past, present and the future has really progressed and evolved other the years, adding new and exciting ways to share things. Long gone are the stone age where everything was shared by drawing on a cold, hard wall!

Now, I'm not saying we no longer write on a wall to share, I'm saying that those walls have reinvented themselves into new types of walls to make it more simple and accessible to share our knowledge, journeys and stories. For example, we humans no longer draw on the walls inside caves to pass on information as this suited the accessibility we humans had then, we have simply reinvented our walls to suit the accessibility we have today, which is of a digital aspect - our walls on Facebook, Blogs, Instagram, Snapchat and the list goes on.

I came to the conclusion that there are two types of behaviours when it comes to sharing, those who are eager and willing to share (as sharing comes naturally to them), and those who are reserved and need more processing time to share (as they find it challenging to share things). I find that we all start at the reserved behaviour and the more we share, the more we transition into the natural sharing behaviour. I am currently in that transition from reserved to natural!!!

I am aware on how to fill out Google Forms and that they are great way to get information on pretty much anything, but I have never ever gotten around to or even bothered about making any myself, until today.  I didn't realize how fun and easy Google Forms were to set up and use. I didn't even know that there was a quiz section to the form. I plan on using Google forms in my class to create fun independent activities in my classroom. Long gone are the days were filling out forms were a hassle and a bore! Bring on the fun and magic of Google Forms!

Something interesting that I learnt today was the Google My Maps. I didn't even know this thing existed! I knew about Google Maps, but not Google My Maps. I can see how much fun it is to learn measurement in this app. I found it very intriguing that you could import data from a Google Sheet into My Maps and it would automatically map it for you.

*Pro tip - make sure you are specific on the area you are adding into the Google Sheet, (as I found out during making my own my map below). I had Hay Park as my school for here in New Zealand, and when I converted the data into My Maps, it had pinned my location at Hay Park in Vancouver, Canada. Oh how I wish I was in Canada, sitting by a nice warm fire, slurping on their such sweet nectar - Maple syrup!

I use Google Sheets on a daily. This is my go to if I want to collect and organise information on student data and for collecting information for school trips. Then I usually create my own graphs on another sheet and this is super time consuming!

I was completely blown away with how easy it is to create graphs with all the data collected in Google Sheets. I really enjoyed learning about how we can use the conditioning formatting to make it more visible to see which students are capable and which students are needing more support in particular learning areas. This will make informing my teaching practices are whole lot more simpler than what it used to be. These tips and tricks will definitely be assisting me to work smarter not harder!

Here is a quick look at my graphs and data analysis I made with the data that was provided to us for this session:

I am pretty impressed with myself if I do say so myself.

Well that's all from me today.

And, if you have reached this point, you are a legend! Thanks reading!

Stay tuned for the next post!