DFI Day Four: Dealing with Data

Dorothy Burt: Share

Another interesting session with Dorothy. She spoke of the massive digital revolution in 2005 (creation of Youtube, mā): all these giants saw the power in humans wanting to SHARE and connect. Traditional ways of sharing are constrained by time, place, people. We share to make connections with other people. For sharing to be satisfying, it requires a satisfying audience.

Manaiakalani project “Maintains a relentless focus on the positive” (… affordances of living in the digital age).

Share to (finish) Learn(ing) – I like these additions! That makes sense. We can do both – we can share to learn, AND then share to finish learning. Dorothy spoke about how important it is to give students the opportunity to practice FINISHING a task – how important this is as a life skill.

So, Learn Create Share can be seen as linear, AND (or) as a cycle.

(Hmmm… I muse to myself… the feeling of never finishing anything sounds a lot like being a teacher!)

Dorothy notes: It doesn’t matter what platform you’re on – whānau will eventually stop commenting on platforms! SO… please don’t hang all the power of Learn Create Share on whether or not whānau get engaged. It’s a holy grail, but not the be all and end all. Sharing with peers is very powerful.

REMEMBER how powerful the sharing is – Manaiakalani students who SHARE via blogs are the ones who see those big leaps in learning.

Deep Dive: Forms with Kerry Boyde-Preece

• I love that people can use a Mote response. That’s new to me.
• I had a go with creating a Form my ākonga can use to let me know how well they’ve understood the take (content) of the lesson. I aim to use it within the week:

Chalk n Talk: Google MyMaps with Hinewa

• SO AWESOME!
• Remind tamariki to NOT publish their home address if we are wanting to create and share MyMaps!! (private vs public info)
• I had a play with the data from our cohort. I am so excited to see what our ākonga make of this amazing platform… I bet they will think of uses that I have never considered.
• Starting points in class: explore some examples in My Maps, work out what would be useful data, then go for it. Maybe start by collating a set of data all together, use MyMaps to do some things, THEN go create and use individual data sets later on.
• Can view MyMaps in Google Earth (under the 3 dots). (Hinewa notes that the more layers there are, the less good it is in google earth – so have a play before sharing with tamariki).
• Here is my MyMap!

Sheets with Vicki

Everything I learned in this session has gone straight to my Hot Tips Section – in my Google Keep.

Analysing blog data using sheets (and graphs) with Amie:

Okay this play time was really useful. I can see why we just get time to play – you sort of need to do trial and error with all of those customisable things, rather than be talked through it. Good to keep that in mind when it’s time for the tamariki to play. Our ākonga are not blogging individually much at the moment but I think we can do some analysis of our class blog first of all. I think I might share a spreadsheet with them with the data simple and protected, so they can’t accidentally delete that as they play.. Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s great for them to experience what happens when they do change data, see the real-time changes in the graphs… we’ll play.

I had a go with different types of chart, some more and less useful but learned something from all of them!

Cybersmart snippets: 

Financial literacy! Yeah great idea to teach this – I will pass the site on to my colleague too. I wonder if any of these Cybersmart challenges have been created i te reo Māori? Talked to Hinewa – no, and for the learners I work with that’s fine – because the quests are quick (so I don’t take up too much of our precious reo time using reo pākeha) and the learning is so important that I am okay with teaching it in te reo pākeha so that we can all make sure we understand clearly.

Take-aways & Next Steps:

• Sign up for Toolkits – if I have headspace – if not next week, then next term.
• Plan a statistics unit using Forms, Sheets, MyMaps. Oooh, the ākonga are going to love it!! (Plan it first Tiff, don’t jump in till I have worked backwards from end to start point to ensure they have the skills they need).
• Have a go at using the Google Form I made in class, tweak according to feedback – I aim to trial it before next DFI.