More data delight

The data delight continued for me this week as I explored more ITM readers’ suggestions for tools that can help students learn data-analysis, probability, and other important mathematics concepts.

Okay, the word ‘delight’ might not work if you’re not a ‘data enthusiast', but maybe you would be if more people followed the advice of Edward Tufte and mastered the skills to visually represent data. Watching Al Gore’s global warming presentation skills or Hans Rosling’s exciting Ted Talk makes it easy to understand why Visual Literacy has been identified as one of the key 21st century skills according to North Central Regional Educational Lab (NCREL) (Photo Credit)

"Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, use, appreciate, and create images and video using both conventional and 21st century media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning" ... NCREL

While I would never want to see the colorful crayons and markers that Ms. Patterson's students use to produce the graphs that line their classroom wall disappear, the next steps for preparing tomorrow’s leaders could be collaborating using online spreadsheets, publishing or embedding their graphs in a blog, wiki, or web page, and chatting from remote locations about their findings. The addition of graphing capabilities to Google spreadsheet provides an accessible tool for even our younger students to develop these 21st century skills.

Students can create an online graph in 3 simple steps.

(1) highlight data and click on the toolbar’s graph icon
(2) fill out a clean, user-friendly screen that even our younger students can understand (type of chart, labels, and whether you are charting columns or rows (both options --yeah!!)
(3) save and voila your graph appears on your spreadsheet.

Most teachers will easily see that the graph can be moved, edited, and saved as a separate image. If you want to share your charts with a global audience, click on PUBLISH tab, then scroll down to More Publishing Options. Selecting HTML as File Format will Generate a URL that you can paste as a hyperlink in emails or on a webpage. However, selecting the HTML to embed in a web page File Format and clicking Generate URL will actually give you some code that you can paste in a webpage, blog, or wiki. Don’t worry if you don't understand this code, just ask any student who has a MYSPACE account and they can show you exactly what to do with this code. Thank you JR for the tips on how to remove gridlines and the folks at Google for discovering that merged cells should be avoided on spreadsheets with published graphs (until this little 'bug' is fixed) as I added a Google chart to the jumping jacks data collected by by the students at St. Albans City School.

Go ahead, give it a try. Add a new twist to some of the classic Candy and Cereal graphing lessons using Web 2.0 tools to help today’s students meet important math standards. Imagine if the 2002 Skittles Project data had been collected and charted with Google Spreadsheet. (Photo Credit)

Thank you to all the ITM readers who shared their favorite tech tools for creating visual representation of data. Besides those I explored in my last post, readers have also suggested advanced tools (like www.data360.org and www.many-eyes.com) ; online productivity suites (like Zoho and ThinkFree); and online spreadsheets (like EditGrid and NumSum and more),

I can’t wait to hear how some of you are redesigning assignments with these tools.

Rumor has it - My wish might come true!

I remember when I first discovered online spreadsheets. Within minutes I was creating charts or graphs in my browser in three easy clicks. First a bar graph; 3 more clicks; and a pie graph of the same data was floating around next to it. Introducing a tool that created visual representation of data so easily made me the tech integration hero in my school for the next few weeks. This tool, truly could be ubiquitously streamlined into any lesson where a visual representation of data lead to greater understanding of the content being taught. From history classrooms to math classrooms, the simplicity of creating graphs in a Web browser took away one of the biggest complaints of my most reticent teacher -- “its not efficient for me to use technology to teach this concept. The upfront’learning the technology’ or ‘setup’ time takes away from my precious classroom time and it does not add enough value to my teaching.” IROWS, a new online spreadsheet tool had teachers and students illustrating ideas without even having to stop to log-in. Logging in was useful for saving and more advanced features, but when you have a classroom of 3rd graders ready to illustrate their data, the three click chart increased usability and made CIPA compliance much easier. Then one sad day, during a professional development workshop, I noticed an announcement on the IROWS website. The site would soon be shutting down. The founders of IROWS had been hired by Google.

Turning my attention to Google Spreadsheets, I discovered new reasons for using online spreadsheets in the classroom. The collaborative features that allows multiple users to share a spreadsheet is great for group projects or engaging your whole class at once in an exercise. The chat feature can be used for reflection and makes a great assessment tool. We used both of these innovative features of Google Spreadsheets in designing the lesson plans and template that you see in the virtual field trip of the ITM 5 video. A few tricks (like using the same font color and cell color to hide the results of a row, and then writing an IF statement to compare a student input to the hidden cell, and providing a positive message when correct) can be used to create drill or practice sheets with immediate reinforcement. To login to online spreadsheets with students under age 13 in a district that does not allow student email, I used email aliases that all point back to my teacher account and created a classroom sets of logins.


But, I still desperately miss the charts and graphs feature I had so enjoyed when using IROWS. Taking the time to compare the features of other online spreadsheets (some of which include chart features) is on my TODO list. Meanwhile, it was my wish that the founders of IROWS are quickly coding their wonderful AJAX graphing capabilities into Google spreadsheet. Rumor has it that my wish might come true very soon. My fingers are crossed, but while I wait, I would love to hear your reviews of online spreadsheets and tricks and tips of features that make online spreadsheets work well as a classroom tools.