Digital Fluency Intensive- Week 4 (online)

In today's sessions we looked at various ways of creating and using data from Sheets, Forms, MyMaps, and Blogger. 

I really enjoyed having a look at MyMaps, as it has a more extensive range of tools which is a nice intermediate between Google Maps, Google Earth, and the software for Geographical Information Systems, like ArcGIS, which I used to use in my previous industry. I am excited to play around with this and make use of it for organising and planning trips (for whenever we may be able to travel again). Being able to connect places, maps/route plans, information, photos etc all together in the one place is such a great idea.

Learning about the settings of forms, and being able to embed them on to a site, were helpful skills I learnt today- I had not used the Quiz settings before, so I look forward to setting up forms that can be auto-marked, to give me data snapshots quickly. Here is my tester form from today:

Going over Google Sheets was really helpful, as a lot of more basic formatting stuff that I used to used excel for I had not crossed over to sheets, or I had completely forgotten how to do. This meant that what I was actually using sheets for is far more limited than what I know/want to be able to do with it. I really enjoyed having time to play around with some data, going over some of the little bits that will be useful like Conditional Formatting, adjusting the size of multiple columns at once, saving filters instead of creating a new sheet, splitting text, and my new favourite- SPARKLINE!

Sparkline is what you can see in column N. Where it gives you a trend line summary for the specific students achievement- such a great little visual :)

I would have loved to start recapping how to write formula and manipulating data, it is something I would really like to be taught again. But I definitely had forgotten too much to be joining that group today.

The last thing we did was use Blogger data to look at writing trends. I chose to look at a students, as my blogs do not have many posts to analyse. It was interesting to see the posting trends over their years at HHS, and primary, and I would also be intrigued as to trends depending on subject, which is not something I looked into today. It was quite a challenge to set a graph with multiple layers of data (definitely out of practice!) And inserting the chart into a drawing was a good skill to practice- especially now that I know if I insert it instead of copying and pasting how it can still be linked to the data on the Google sheet, so if it is updated or changed in sheets, that will also be able to update it where ever a copy of the chart is inserted into (that's a terrible explanation of something I think was super handy to learn!).

I found this week online a lot more difficult than last, as there was far more variation between our skill levels and the specific support each of us needed from facilitators. But even so, I am enjoying learning all of these skills which I will be able to use both at school and other areas of my life. I already wish we had more sessions to level up further in things like google sheets and mymaps, but I know there is still so many other apps to explore and learn about too!