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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

DFI Day 4: Dealing with Data

Another busy week and another worthwhile DFI. This week's theme was 'dealing with data'. 

Today discussion on the Manaiakalani pedagogy was focused on share/tohatoha. As Dorothy pointed out sharing isn't something new and has been happening since the beginning of time. As technology has advanced so too has the platforms for sharing potential. the beauty of the advancement of technology is that our learners are now able to share with an audience beyond the school gate. I found it really interesting with Dorothy's definition of an authentic audience being 'people who choose to listen to you'.


An aspect of 'share' that I hadn't really considered before is that once learning is shared on a blog this gives a true endpoint to the product. This made me reflect on a conversation I had yesterday with one of my students. Pre lockdown this student was a very reluctant learner and needed a lot of prompting to stay on task. During the lockdown, with the support of his mother, this student was able to complete several pieces of quality learning which he shared on his blog. Since his return, I have sadly noticed a decline in his motivation and behaviour. This in itself is the topic of a blog post all on its own! In an attempt to chance tact yesterday I asked him to think about how good it felt to complete tasks to high standard like the ones he had done at home. He simply shrugged his shoulders at me. He genuinely seemed to not understand the sense of achievement of completing a task. After listening to Dorothy this made me wonder how many experiences this student has had of actually finishing a task? If he doesn't understand the feeling of finishing does this therefore mean he has no drive to finish a task? If success builds success how many experiences of finishing a task does one need to have to develop a drive to want to do this? A realisation I made a while ago, that Dorothy confirmed, was the importance of allowing specific time for sharing. Not only is this sharing of a final product but can also be an opportunity to gain feedback to improve their learning from an authentic audience.


The next part of the day was a brief discussion around hot tips for Hāpara. This included dragging and reordering students. This will be really helpful to have my children I need to watch all in one part of my screen as opposed to having them spread.

Our next focus was on using Google Forms. New learning for me today was...

  • You can lock a page so students are unable to access Google - this would be great when doing quizes
  • How to create multiple pages
  • Information can be added to an existing spreadsheet

The following is an example of a form I created that I will look at using with my students. Thanks Makaore for the great idea!

Google My Maps was an extension I was unfamiliar with and I can see that I am going to need to continue exploring. Interestingly you can use data gathered from Google Forms and input this into My Maps. I would like to explore this further with my students by asking them to locate where they were born. I can also see that it will be helpful when making connections to places such as during my upcoming technology topic.

I enjoyed playing around with Google Spreadsheets and learned a lot from this session. I have some confidence with Spreadsheets as I use them regularly but I can certainly see I am not using it to its full potential. My key takeaways from this session was...
  • Another way to Freeze columns and rows within the sheet
  • Changing the direction of the font
  • Creating alternating colours automatically
  • Gained confidence at using formulas
  • Different ways to sort data
  • Auto filling information such as days of the week, months of the year
  • Inserting checkboxes
  • Imagine insertion
  • Multiple links can be now added to the same cell
  • You can automatically format cells colours according to your prerequisites
Below are some examples of my explorations of Google Spreadsheets



Once again this was a full-on day which confirmed lots of things I was already familiar with as well as some new gems that I am looking forward to making 'dealing with data' easier.

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