DFI Session 4 - Dealing With Data

Malo e lelei bloggers,

Another week, another DFI session!

We began today's session by looking at the 'Share' element of Manaiakalani's pedagogy, an idea that Dorothy and the Manaiakalani team associate directly with connectedness. Something that was made clear during this presentation was that the 'old school' ways of sharing learning, such as showing work to the principal and presenting at assemblies, are still very important for students to experience. However, the digital age has enhanced the sharing process by opening it up to a global audience. Dorothy noted that the global audience is an authentic audience because the choice to be viewing and (hopefully) commenting on content is entirely their own.

Blogger is the platform that schools under the Manaiakalani umbrella use to share student learning. Being in a junior class, my students do not have their own blogs but share a class one which I am responsible for updating. Unfortunately, regular is not an adjective I would attach to these updates 😬but after listening to how providing students with this digital audience can increase their motivation for finishing work I think I seriously need to reassess the frequency at which I post on our class blog. I have a number of students that never seem to finish their work, no matter the incentive I use to try and encourage it. Perhaps, sharing work on our class blog is the motivation they need? Watch this space! 🤞

Over the course of the rest of the day we looked at Google Forms, Google Sheets and My Maps. I am quite familiar with Forms, both filling them out and creating them (another skill I can thank lockdown level 4 for) but creating pathways from one question to another was new learning for me. Being able to bypass any irrelevant questions/information is such a great feature! I think this is particularly useful in a heavily ESOL junior classroom where I need to limit the information I am throwing at my students.

Google Sheets is another programme I use a lot of but only at a very basic level. I was excited to learn about formulas, creating filters and conditions, and displaying data using charts. I will definitely be using these features to display and analyse my own students' progress and data from now on.

Here is a chart I created in Sheets to show how often I have posted on our class blog over the last year and a half - I told you it was a sad state of affairs 😅. At the moment, I am taking full responsibility for adding posts to our blog but I think if I involve my students more by getting them to create the posts themselves the number of posts will definitely grow, as will my students ownership of our blog.

My Maps is a Google app that I actually hadn't heard of before today. I found it to be super easy to use and I can already see how it could be used in the classroom. Some possibilities could be:

    - as a part of our current inquiry topic, Cultures in our Classroom, where students could pin and share where they are from.

    - to map out where students have travelled to during the school holidays.

    - to plot our cross country route.

    - to calculate distances.

Here is a map I created in My Maps that pins the top holiday destinations of my DFI cohort. Something I really like about this app is being able to customise the pins so that, at a glance, it is easy to see why one might want to travel to these places.

Have you used any of these programmes in your classroom? I'd love to hear how you've utilised them.