Discussion #2: Data Collection

According to Roblyer and Hughes (2019), we are living in the adaptive learning era where technological ubiquity allows schools to gather, track, and synthesize more data than ever before.  In a HBR article from 2012, Big Data is called the “Management Revolution” (Mcafee, 2012).  And that revolution includes schools.   Some of the physical data points we collect from students are attendance from Powerschool, feedback uploaded from other teachers on Google Drive, and, of course, grades from class assessments, among other data points.  The more data we collect, the more accurate our decisions will be about how to reach our students collectively and individually.

When it comes to teaching my students how to gather data, I have been able to pass along my 15 years of expertise as a data analyst.  In one example, we compared the average monthly temperatures taken from two different cities: Nashville, TN and Sydney, Australia (Climate-Data, 2020). Once students placed these 24 data points in Excel, we learned how to create a comparison line graph.  The lesson objective for that day was to explain that the southern hemisphere has an opposite climate than the northern hemisphere, which the line graph clearly shows.  This was the first time many of my students understood that it is summer time and warm during our Christmas time in Australia.

From your experience, once your students have collected data, how have you seen them synthesize this data to tell a story?

References

Roblyer, M. D., & Hughes, J. E. (2019). Integrating educational technology into teaching: Transforming learning across disciplines (8th ed.). Pearson.

Mcafee, A., Brynjolfsson, E. (2012). Big Data: The Management Revolution. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution

Climate-Data. (2020). Nashville, Tennessee Weather. https://en.climate-data.org/north-america/united-states-of-america/tennessee/nashville-886/#temperature-graph

Climate-Data. (2020). Sydney, Australia Weather.https://en.climate-data.org/oceania/australia/new-south-wales/sydney-24/