DFI Reflection - Day 4 - Dealing with Data

This week the benefits of online learning came to the fore. Lockdown. A Level 4 shutdown of the whole country.  I think we all knew it was coming, but no one knew when. Doing DFI online has meant a seamless continuation of our course which is awesome. Pity my home internet didn't value my learning as much as I do!  It just didn't like running Meet with video enabled and anything else online. If I turned my video off it at times made a difference, but it is what it is and I wouldn't move just to get better internet!

We covered the SHARE part of Manaiakalani's pedagogy today. 

Since time immemorial we have shared our lives with others. At school it was through assemblies, school newsletters, school visits by parents and taking work home. Although this doesn't stop in the age of Manaiakalani, it is totally expanded with the advent of the internet and Blogging.

Part of the Hook of Manaiakalani is the SHARE:

"Work with learners to establish an authentic audience for their learning outcomes".

Sharing their work with a purpose, an authentic audience, getting feedback and having discussions on their work provides a great boost to the tamariki's self esteem and mana. In ordinary circumstances at school, no one really has a choice about hearing or seeing your work. It's either your teacher or the school/class in a compulsory situation. Online it it different. As Dorothy Burt said it is "people who choose to listen to you" online. They can easily click into another website and ignore you so any reads you get, any comments you receive are genuinely interested in your work - how motivating is that?!

We covered off three main areas today with regards to data:

1. Forms
2. MyMaps
3. Sheets

I have used all three extensively before so it was nice to know a wee bit before we went through them as a group.  I use forms a lot in Guiding, and have used them in tests online for my tamariki, had them answer comprehension questions and find out information from our whānau.  Here is one I made on DFI - which was great as I was going to have to create it anyway. I kept it simple for our whānau, my audience. I had difficulty embedding it which I will try again later, but here is the link:  Lockdown questionnaire

Our school started using MyMaps when we had a huge school camp to organise. We were going to Cape Reinga, Waitangi, Auckland and Waitomo. The tamariki had to create their own route, find out about places on the way and record what they were doing at each place. It was a fantastic learning tool. I personally use it when on PLD we go and visit various marae and learn about iwi rohe, whakataukī that go with each hapū involved etc. It is a way of recording my photos, locations and information. I have also uploaded recordings of the visits (voice only). 

I had actually forgotten about MyMaps so this was a great opportunity to revisit them. We are currently undertaking an inquiry on our awa. I could get them to map the awa to its headwaters and put places of interest and photos along its course. They would love it!

Our last session for the morning covered Google Sheets. I have completed a lot of work in Excel in a previous life. Pivot tables, formulas and other goodies, so my main difficulty is finding where I can do some of these things in Sheets. The keyboard shortcuts were great and there's some nice functionality in sheets. I have yet to introduce sheets to my students. I am trying to think how I could use it and in what context in my classroom. If anyone has any ideas for this age group - I'm open to them! We used sheets to gather data and analyse it. We created a chart and then inserted it into a drawing and wrote comments about our analysis.  

The data behind this drawing is here along with a sample of the exercises I did in spreadsheets for practice. 

 

The final session was on quality blog comments. This I think is my greatest fear - that someone will write something inappropriate and I won't pick up on it quickly enough so the poor blogger sees it first! This part of the cybersmart journey with my tamariki will have to be very well considered and rolled out.  We don't have individual student blogs yet and I have just gotten my class blog - the day before lockdown so not a consideration straight away. It will be wonderful to see the class interact with each other and support each other in their learning journeys though.

All in all, a great day of lockdown, it certainly took my mind off the world for a few hours.