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What happened..........
It was great! With
the live update feature we were able to see individual
results popping up all over the place - even from the suite
next door where Lindy’s class were doing the same task at
the same time. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option
which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity
to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out
fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent - even
with 24 simultaneous users on a single login. The children
really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a
great overview, not only of the year group working together,
but also of the sorts of data people were adding. With the
projector on I could see at a glance who was adding data and
what was going on in different groups. Children from the
other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning
the validity of results from children in my class.
Within the space
of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected
approximately 600 individual results all in one file. With
so much data compiled so quickly we were then able to
examine and manipulate the results in the same lesson,
working out averages of the whole year group, for example. I
would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable
kit in your classroom – my colleague and I have already
agreed that it will be an excellent data entry method for
future maths lessons on data handling.
The sharing
functionality was proven in this activity and the next step
for our year group is to share a similar data pooling task
with other schools. Sharing and working collaboratively has
never been so easy. Google spreadsheets has a discuss/chat
window allowing for a simple dialogue, as you see above.
This will be excellent for children to use to communicate as
they work. I am in no doubt that the children will be better
able to understand how multiple sets of data can improve
accuracy when we share our work and I am hopeful that they
will continue to question what they discover.
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