Maps, formaluae & data (it's more fun than it sounds!)

This week we focussed the start of the session on 'Share' and Stef spoke about the essential role that sharing and communicating has played since the beginning of humanity. 

To effectively communicate and share our stories and learnings we need to have an audience for it to be authentic.  The value of blogs in providing an authentic audience for learners and educators was discussed.

We spent time learning more about the following:

Google Maps
Dave Winter introduced us to practical applications for Google Maps through the use of MyMaps.  As a groups we discussed how others had already used this which included topographical maps to identify rivers and build understanding to water quality.

Here's an example of how I applied this to identify which schools are members of the Tairawhiti Manaiakalani Outreach.  I'm looking forward to applying this to a range of other areas too.

Google Forms
This is an efficient tool to capture information and collate data in an easily digestible format.  We spent time applying this to our own roles and here a sample form I designed today.

Google Sheets

Similar in many ways to Excel, I found this session helpful as we learned practical tips like how to freeze columns and rows (View, Freeze, 1 row or column), the ability to highlight the data set and the way that Google then automatically calculate commonly used equations like sum, average, minimum and maximum will be a real time saver.  Take out for me from this session was a real time saver - highlight the columns you want to resize the width of then adjust one and then all will be converted to the identical width set.  The ability to use formulae to colour code data sets is another excellent tip.

It was an emotional day as we paid our respect to those affected by the awful tragedy in Christchurch.

Thanks to everyone for your collegiality, warmth and presence.  

'Til next week, Jo