DFI Week Four: Dealing with Data

It is human nature to want to create for an audience - our children love to share, especially writing, with both whanau and other teachers/students within the school. They also love to share with their big buddies from Gisborne Intermediate next door! I would say their tuakana teina relationships provide the biggest motivation for sharing in our current space. Although we don't have devices in our space, we share between teachers and then share with the children from there - technology definitely widens and speeds up our ability to share with tuakana/whanau on the spot. Before spending a bit more time learning about the Manaiakalani Pedagogy through staff meetings with our facilitators, I definitely got the feeling that it was the one or the other type of sharing, whereas now I can see that Manaiakalani still place value on the face to face sharing as well as opening children up to a global audience through the use of technology. 

It has been a big learning curve learning how to create and format sheets - but it has been really helpful to understand how they work as I have been inputting data into these sheets for years but haven't ever created one. It blows my mind to see how much young learners know about google, it was super easy to learn from Mele's blog post on how to analyse blog data using google sheets. 

I analysed Tara's Blog data and created a chart. For some reason she blogged in the second half of each year the most - it would be interesting as to why that was.

I can see how we could use sheets within our team at school, especially when tracking our school entry data as with three New Entrant teachers we all take a share of the testing and then I enter the data. There is usually follow up communications from this testing, either with other team members or our Specialiast Teacher of Additional Needs, so I liked the idea of adding the tick boxes that Makaore showed us so we know whether the follow ups have been completed or not. 

It was also fun to have a play using google forms. In my personal life I'm a bit of a baker with a few wedding cakes lined up for the summer so for fun I created a cake order form. The process of moving the data from the responses over to my map was a good example of how Vanessa said it could be used for Whakapapa - and in our setting we could ask whanau to fill out the form and then we share the completed map with the children - lots of opportunities there! I can't wait for the next few weeks where we get to put all these tools together a bit more.