DFI - Reflection Four - Dealing with Data

Things that we went over today:

• Why do we use blogger?
• Google Forms
• My Maps
• Google Sheets

Why do we use Blogger?

Blogger is the chosen for children in schools because it generally has the same functions as the others sites used for sharing such as uploading, commenting etc. It is secure and teachers can easily monitor comments as there are three different ways to track it. 

Google Forms

This is great way to gather data. Its good to start with a blank template and adjust this after to add colours, images etc. You need to adjust the sharing settings so that your form is not restricted to your organisation. You can also limit the form so that people can only answer once. There are three different ways that you can share this form; email, link or embed. Embed means that people can fill it out via the site/blog. 

You can export the data from the form onto a spreadsheet to analise the data. 

When making the form select the type of question that will fit the response you want. You can make the question required which means the form cannot be submitted until that question is answered. You can add images to questions. Go to settings to adjust the colours/look of the sheet. Make sure to preview what it looks likes before sharing. Here is a Google Form I completed today. Answer honestly! 😁😂

One example of this was to use the quiz function for children to answer questions about a reading book. This was cool as the images inserted made this more user friendly for younger children. I'll just need to push for some more technology at my school to make this accessible for the children in my class. 

My Maps

This was entertaining to browse however it did test my frustration as I kept zooming in and out rather than moving around. It was great to measure distances between places, draw your own routes and personalising the pins. 

Google Sheets

This is a great tool for collating and analising data. Autofill is a great time saver. As long as the first three parts of the pattern is typed in, by dragging the little blue box, it will automatically fill out the other boxes. It was cool to see how to add formulas such as the sum, average etc. You can use the explore tool to look at different graphs that are generated from the data that you are using. You can protect the cells so that only invited/specific people can enter data. Today we used this to analise blog usage. Is there a way to use these graphs to analise reading data? Such as the childrens current level and movement across the year. I will have to have a play and look into this. 

Overall

Another great session. I can see that Google Sheets will be a hard part to remember as there are so many different ways that this could be used. I did get a bit confused with some parts, particularly as I only wanted to make a simple pie graph but could not make this work for me. I will have to keep having a play so that this becomes more familiar for me to use.