Digital Fluency Intensive - Session 4

 Session Four - Dealing with Data

Sharing

“Every person on the planet has the potential to live life as the star of their own movie -  not only sharing the daily minutiae, but also the commentary, the analysis of it and creating collections of feedback and feed-forward.”- DJ Burt

Human beings have an instinct to share; how can we channel that instinct into genuine learning experiences? 

Allowing students to share their learning creates a community of engagement, and gives students a sense of pride seeing how other people engage with the work they have been doing - it also encourages students to create work which is thorough, properly finished, and writing descriptions for their blog also gives them time to reflect and summarise their learning experiences.

Giving students the opportunity to have an authentic audience (i.e edublog) will help them to raise achievement outcomes, and for students to develop a real sense of pride in the work that they have created, and the learning they’ve done. An authentic audience, as defined under Manaiakalani, are the people who CHOOSE to listen to you.

Sharing with;

- One another

- The class

- The school

- The local community

- Global communities (digital age)

Blogging was the  choice for students to share their learning for different reasons;

It resembles the spaces our young people want to be on (youtube, facebook, etc.)

We are able to provide legal, safe, secure provisions for students

Used by teachers and students

Allows for engagement, and interaction between creator and audience (going back to authentic audiences)

Spaces like Facebook, while useful, are open, and not safe for students to share personal information.

Allows for students to create a SMART digital footprint.

We share to show the process, but also to help students understand what “finished” looks like; that it is ready to share. A life-long lesson to learn, we use the acronym FIOP at Pt England for our learning; to finish it off properly. 

Google Forms

Google Forms is something I am very familiar with, we used it frequently in my time as a high school teacher;

Quizzes for students, and allows for easy collection of date - transferable to Sheets so collation of data is helpful

Feedback about what they found difficult, challenging or needed help with.

Use for interaction with families - to gather information, find helpers, get feedback etc.

Useful for gathering information quickly, and is more engaging than just responding to an email when getting into contact with adults who can be busy.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is very similar, and has a lot of the same functionality as Microsoft Excel which is helpful as I can use a lot of my prior learning/knowledge to help.

This is a very powerful tool when organising, filtering data, particularly when creating groups based on reading age for example, or to arrange students into priority groups based on test results, or feedback from a Google Form.

In a digital age it is so important that we allow tools, like Sheets, to assist us to use critically important data to guide our teaching practices; whether that's for organisational purposes, for streaming students, or to identifying outliers who may need further assistance, or pushing depending on where they fall on the spectrum of results.

Here is an example of data that has been turned into a table; comparing two student's blog posts between 2015 and 2021. As you can see the Y Axis does not show accurately the number of posts, however it is useful for making comparisons between two different elements of data.