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What happened........
"Where’s
Marcus?" It was Adam from the
other Year 5/6 class, he seemed a little disgruntled.
"Miss Rose how is it possible that
Marcus’s resting pulse is 256 beats per minute?!"
(A good question.)
Adam
continued, "I wanted to see if he
was sprinting around the classroom because that data just
doesn’t seem right!"
Wow,
this impromptu interruption to my lesson proved to me the
immense power of sharing simple data between classes or
groups of children. In this article I outline how I have
used Google Spreadsheets (part of Google Docs) in my
classroom.
My
class was exploring resting pulse rates and we were using an
online spreadsheet to share our results. I decided to use a
Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Google Docs
application for a while - but I could have easily used
EditGrid as an alternative.
I set
the spreadsheet up so that all of the children’s names from
both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other
columns were labelled, Resting Pulse1,
Resting Pulse 2… and so on. It was in
these columns that the children were to add their own
resting pulse measurements (taken by counting their pulse
for 30 seconds and doubling). I
then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login
on all 24 Pcs in 2 computer suites
- so in effect I logged in 24 times to the same document
from different locations. We
talked a little about how to find our pulse and I then asked
the children to record 10 readings of their resting rate
into the spreadsheet.
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