Dealing with Data - DFI

My Maps

Today we worked with maps. I could instantly see a place for it in a maths curriculum, especially in the upper school. You could explore area and perimeter with some of the older children. For the younger children you could look at length, distance and time. There are lots of opportunities for project based assignments. Students could plan a road trip, look at distances, gas prices, how far you could go on a tank of gas etc. Junior students could compare how far they live from school compared to friends, who has to walk the furthest. The difference in cycling time VS walking time. The opportunities are endless here. I see integration opportunities to integrate into literacy, inquiry, physical education and even art.

This term our inquiry topic is Safety and I can see a place for maps in this. Looking for the local emergency services and how far they are from your house (walking, biking etc). We could look and see how far everyone lives from school and who has to walk the furthest distance. We could look at hazards (roundabouts etc) on the way home in real satellite image.

On a personal note, I wish I knew about this during some of my bigger trips overseas it would have saved me lots of time and made my trips more efficient and no doubt I would have saved some money.

Spreadsheets

Above is a spreadsheet looking at the data of a PBS student over the period of four years. This data has been broken into months and helps you look at activity levels over the space of a year. This information could be paired with testing data to see if there is a link between regular updating and student achievement. 

Spreadsheets is capable of so much. You would never know what it can and can't do until someone informs you of all the small tricks. I can certainly see the benefit of using spreadsheets especially when it comes to tracking your data, identifying target students, monitoring micro shifts and looking to where you'd like your students to be moving forward. Being reminded of some of these functions has given me something to think about in terms of how I collate my classrooms data. The question for me now is, how can I organise my data in a way that best informs my teaching? An example might be an 'alphabet' spreadsheet which might identify 95% of students don't recognise the letter 'm'. I can see a lot of opportunity to use sheets to support my phonics program as well as keeping track of maths challenges (knowledge based information).