Our topic today was dealing with data.
We were introduced to Google forms and how many benefits Google forms have. Google forms can be used for staff meetings, making quizzes, finding out dietary needs and many more. I enjoyed creating my own Google form. The topic that I chose was called “What is your favorite fruit?” People could choose from a variety of fruit that was listed below. They were allowed to choose more than one fruit. After selecting the fruit, the following task was to write in a paragraph how they could use their favorite fruit in a dessert. I love that we could design and personalize our Google forms to our own preferences. I enjoyed being able to give it my personal touch and changing the theme to match with my topic. I like the idea of being able to use Google forms to make quizzes or spelling tests. I like the safety feature of being able to lock the form so that no other tabs could be opened. I liked that tests could be shuffled so that Children could not copy their friends’ answers next to them and that all answers were the children’s own choice. I like the variety of options available when creating your google form and being able to set my Google form to either have a short answer, a paragraph multiple choice, checkboxes or a drop down.
Google mind maps. Google mind map lets you customize your map allowing you to track or plan your journey, measure the distances and add Place markers. I enjoyed creating my own map which was about ‘exploring the west coast’ and all the beautiful places to visit. Most of them I have done myself and would highly recommend these places of interest to any other person wanting to come and visit our beautiful West Coast .
Google sheets. Oh my goodness I truly had my hands in my hair. I was really stressed out and feeling very overwhelmed when we did the deep dive part but I was very grateful that we were split up into smaller groups according to our strength and abilities. I was grateful for our coach (Amie) who worked slowly through most of the topics. She explained the variety of tools in a great way and showed us practically how to use them. I loved the practical example of having all the students’ data entered so that you could then break it into smaller chunks according to information that you would like. For example the conditional formatting. Being able to identify and mark children who were doing very well with a certain color then being able to identify through conditional formatting children who were not doing well and needed support and selecting a different color and being able to identify children who were in between, all on the same spreadsheet. It gives a great visual. Making life so much easier. I benefited from learning how to wrap cells so that text would not overflow into other cells as this was a problem I was experiencing. I also enjoyed learning how we could freeze certain cells so that we could move data along the page and not lose our heading.
For our create task, we had to choose a blog of our choice, enter the data onto a spreadsheet then use this data to create a chart. We then moved this chart onto a google slide doc. I enjoyed playing around with word art, adding text to a shape and just customizing my document to my own taste.
I’ve once again learned a lot from today’s session and look forward to using these tools effectively both in and outside of the classroom.