Collecting and Analysing – P1/2

Kathleen Johnston — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 22:50:26 +0000

Sorry I haven’t made an entry for a while – it has been a busy time! So, a new year and a new term! As usual, I have been working with my colleagues to plan and team teach ICT. P1/2 are covering Collecting and Analysing. We have started off by looking at why we might want to collect information and how we can use it. First lesson we gathered information in two groups relating to going on holiday. Each group used a yes/no tick sheet and collected the information from within their group. They displayed the results on a graph and reported back on their findings to the other group. Where is the ICT in that, I hear you say, but we wanted to go over the necessary skills involved in gathering and analysing information before we added the ICT bit. Last week we sorted some information using a lovely Kidspiration activity on the Promethean board that Janice put together for us – great fun using photos of the children and sorting them into what clothes they had on that day. We then carried out a collecting and analysing activity using 2Simple – 2Graph. The children collected information about the colour of their swimming costumes and entered the information into a simple spreadsheet within the software. They then created different types of graphs and discussed the results. So that day we were covering maths, language, topic work, science, oh, and ICT. The graphs looked great on the board and prompted some fantastic discussion from the kids about their results. Over the next few weeks we will be going on to use skills to collect information for ourEco
School annual environmental review. The children will be presenting and reporting back these results to the rest of the school. We also have a fun day planned for the end of term with P1/2 and P3/4 getting together to work on a mini research project. The children will be working in small groups and they will be reinforcing the ICT skills they have covered this year. At the end of the activity the groups will present their findings to the rest of the class. There will be an emphasis on collaboration and peer support. I am looking forward to seeing how the children use and share their skills.

Collecting and Analysing – P5/6

Kathleen Johnston — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 21:49:11 +0000

Today I was working with P5/6 and they were producing graphs using the Appleworks spreadsheet facility. They had carried out a whole school survey of the children’s favourite fruits to help them with their preparations to run a fruit tuck shop as part of their enterprise topic. A couple of weeks back we did the preparation work. What is a survey? Why do you need surveys? How will a survey help with the fruit tuck shop? How will we carry out our survey? What will we do with the information once we have it? We then looked at examples of surveys and how they are used in real life. One of the most obvious for us was the environmental review we carry out each year in school as part of our eco school duties. One of our senior pupil Eco School Committee members came in and talked to the children about how useful the review has been to improve the facilities and environment of the school over the past few years. This was meaningful to the children as they have experience of the review and improvements first hand.

Next step was to create a table as a framework for the survey – a valid skill in the whole process. We find that Appleworks is not particularly stable on our PC tablets – Word is much better. However, we can’t afford Word in all the machines, so in the name of consistency we all made our tables in Appleworks. Lots of talk came in here about columns and rows, tally marks and appropriate formats for the tables. We created a class table using a PC and digital projector, then the children went off to make their own.

Next was the survey. The class were split up into groups and each group was allocated a class to survey within the school. The children then reported back to the rest of the class in how they carried out the survey and what their results had initially revealed.

Which brings us back to today! The children used the spreadsheet facility to enter in their results and then created a graph. Next step was to copy the graph and paste it into a word processing document to write about what information the graph displayed and how they could use it in the fruit tuckshop.

One wee guy was having real problems with Appleworks on his tablet so I tapped into the expertise of our ANST teacher who happened to let it slip that she knew a wee bit about Excel. She worked with the wee man and produced a graph and report using Excel and Word. So then they showed the rest of the class (including me!) how they did it. Hurray! I’m not scared of Excel any more!

During the plenary we discussed how we could monitor the sale of fruit using tables, tally marks and spreadsheets. I am confident that the children could now do this independently and this is an excellent opportunity for the children to see how these skills can make a valid contribution to the enterprise process.

Great to see lots of learning for everyone. From now on I am going to make more use of Microsoft Office on the tablets. It was good for me to see today that the spreadsheet skills the children have learned are transferrable – from Appleworks to Excel. If a piece of software starts acting up the children quickly lose confidence in it and are not motivated to use it. However this is an important process for the children to experience -don’t moan about something that isn’t working right -lets see how we can fix it and if we can’t, let’s work out a way round it.

kathleen.johnston » Collecting and Analysing

Collecting and Analysing – P1/2

Collecting and Analysing – P5/6