DFI Course - Week 4

Since Last Week

My reflections of my development with all things Google over the past week using the three key questions are:

1. What has worked for me since the last time we met?

I used Google Drawing in the classroom this week, including the exercise “Working with Shapes, Texts and Images” with 90 kids and teaching students to incorporate remove.bg to create innovative digital art. I have also started to use voice typing with a headpiece.

2. What hasn’t worked (or made sense)?

Trying to get an attractive layout in blogger is often difficult and takes a lot of time to get a more appealing “magazine” type layout. Dorothy Burt's comment to me was that this can be sorted through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which is beyond my current ability level or by paying someone with those skills to do this for me which is at the point where I lost interest!
Also, I often work at night at the dining table in my lounge and the TV sometimes contributes to my voice typing. I know this is a first world problem but it is worth working at to make sure that I get the most benefit from voice typing. Practice, practice, practice!

3. What do you need help with?

Nothing at this stage.

This Week - Dealing With Data

A copy of this week's agenda, along with links to presentations etc are here.

The main focus for this week's programme was "Dealing with Data" and this included sessions on:

• Manaiakalani's "Share"
• Google Forms (surveys/quizzes)
• Google Sheets (spreadsheets)
• My Maps
• Analysing data from student blogs

Share

This week we delved into the "Share" part of the "Learn, Create, Share" pedagogy, including looking at the concept of sharing throughout history. In the past I have thought of "Share" being the same as "publishing" ... where students display their very best work in a "finished" state.

This all changed for me a couple of years ago when I started to consider the prospect of a fully-digital, paperless learning environment where students are encouraged to create examples/evidence of re-windable learning and posting it in a location that is easily recovered. In essence: digital exercise books. 

This means that (contrary to my previous misconceptions) students should share their work/learning even if:

(a) it isn't finished

(b) it isn't all correct

(c) it isn't perfect.

This was supported in the session on "share" this week, including this slide where we discussed the notion that the only difference in sharing in the digital age is that we can/do share our work with the global community, but we don't share with the sole intention of making it available beyond the learner. 

Rowena Clemence (one of Hornby High's e-Learning Advisors and a fellow participant on the DFI Course) reinforced this at a staff briefing during the week.

Google Forms

This week we looked at Google Forms in some detail, and while I am reasonably familiar with this app there were a few tips and tricks I had not picked up yet, such as using the "Go to section based on answer" function. 

This is great for personalising questionnaires for students (e.g. when you have a composite class and you want to ask both year levels different questions).

Google Sheets

In a former life (pre-teaching) I was a Chartered Accountant employed in the health sector, and one of my most regularly-used tools was Excel spreadsheets. Since then I have transferred my skills in Excel to Google Sheets, where I regularly use advanced tools such as sort, filter, conditional formatting and pivot tables. 

Again, there were some tip and tricks that I wasn't aware of, including:

• easily freezing rows and column using the bars on the top right-hand cell header
• saving filters to use at later dates (i.e. rather than having to select a range of filters manually)
• moving graphs to "own sheet" for ease of editing
• embedding charts/graphs in blogs so that the data is live (i.e. the graph is updated as the data updates).

My Maps

My Maps is useful little app that enables users to create their own map using personalised locations on a map very similar to regular Google Maps. In the example below I have added my favourite South Island camping destinations, and My Maps enables me to calculate the time and distance between two locations (e.g. Home and Westport) and download directions to travel between these points (by car, walking or by public transport).

I wish this app was available to me in 2013 when I took a class of Year 7/8 students to Wellington for a week. Being able to identify walking routes around various Wellington destinations each day would have been brilliant, and would be a great way for students to share their camp/holiday in an interactive way.

Analysing Data from Student Blogs

As I showed under the heading for Google Sheets, we also spent time looking at how to analyse individual students' blogging over time. In the example below I created a table to show the number of discrete blog posts a particular Year 9 student posted since she started blogging in 2016.

Some interesting observations here are:

• the pattern of increase in November
• the peaks in December 2018 and January 2020 from the Summer Learning Journey
• the beginnings of a drop-off in March - May 2020 (caused by lockdown?)

Conclusion:

While there was a lot I already knew I was really pleased with the new skills I have developed this week. The timing of the Google Sheet session is brilliant, as I will be working with my Hurumanu class on Statistical Inquiries over the next few months, and this is a timely reminder on how to create charts/graphs easily in Google Sheets, including a few tips I wouldn't have been able to teach the class if I hadn't been at this session!

I'm also keen to introduce My Maps to my Wānanga class to see how easy this is for the different year levels to pick up.