Unit 3: Creating data intensive documents

Return to: Go to: ETAP 623 Spring 2020 (Zhang) | Brian's Profile Page | Unit 4: Data Intensive Lesson Plan

Learning Objectives

1. Learners will be able to explain the role of technology in science classes.
2. Learners will explain the benefit of using technology to have students create data intensive documents.
3. Explain how the knowledge to construct data intensive documents can be transferred to other areas of science, and other disciplines.

Do Now

Think about the different ways you have students create data intensive media documents. Use the discussion space to identify how you usually have students create charts/tables, graphs, and diagrams. Then discuss how you utilize technology in the classroom, and predict how technology could support the creation of data intensive media. Talk: Discussion Unit 3

After you have done this, read the brief article and watch the video, below on how the role of technology is expanding in education in general. Think about the creation of data intensive documents and how technology can support collaboration and student engagement around creation of these documents.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/science-of-learning/

https://tech.ed.gov/netp/teaching/ (You will have to scroll down the page until you see the video on the right. Feel free to read the page as well for further clarification

Mini-Lecture

As educators, we all probably use technology in some form or another to disseminate information and support student engagement. Science is an inquiry process where it is important to allow students to explore concepts and ideas for themselves, test these ideas, and form conclusions based on their experiments. Read the following article by Kim Minchi which outlines some of the reasons technology is crucial for science education:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/sce.20219

Now that we have an understanding of the role technology can play in engaging and supporting learning in science classrooms we will look at specific ways we can help our students use technology to make data intensive documents. One platform that educators and students may both be familiar with is Google. Using Google sheets and Excel is a way that we can engage students in platforms that they are familiar with, and utilize relevant technology. As the article and the video on the Do Now section stated, as many as 65% of our students may have jobs that do not even exist yet today. This makes it all the more important to teach students 21st century skills by utilizing technology. Take a look at the following PDFs which walk you through the steps of making data intensive documents utilizing Google Sheets and Excel. While the examples show large amounts of data in each document, these tools can still be used for data collected by students during inquiry investigations.

http://science-infographics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/5-Comparing-Across-Categories.pdf Ways to organize textual data

http://science-infographics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/1-Time-series-charts-in-Venngage.pdf Time series data (charts/graph)

http://science-infographics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/6-Assembling-and-Displaying-Histograms.pdf- Creating Histograms

http://science-infographics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/4-Visualizing-Relationships-in-Venngage.pdf- Scatter Plots

http://science-infographics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/3-Creating-Graphs-of-Distributions-in-Venngage.pdf Graphs of Distribution

If you have less data and the above process does not fit your needs for the classroom, click the link below and watch the videos on how to create charts and graphs in only Excel. The tab on the left lets you watch videos that address the different data intensive documents that we have been discussing.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/video-create-a-chart-4d95c6a5-42d2-4cfc-aede-0ebf01d409a8

Teaching students to represent data in a visual way that is accepted by the scientific community is an important part of scientific literacy and has the ability to engage our students. At the same time we are teaching them 21st century skills that will be needed to be successful in an world that is rapidly evolving technologically. It is also true that our students will still have to be able to make some of these documents on paper for testing purposes. The hope is that by having them create these data intensive documents using technology, transferring this knowledge over to making/interpreting them on paper will easier because they will have already analyzed the data in more complex ways. We can also use the skills we discussed in the previous unit to help students transfer this knowledge. Watch the following video on knowledge transfer to get a better understanding of how creating data intensive documents could help students in other aspects of science, and in other disciplines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8QfkT8L9lo&t=139s

Work Period

After reading and viewing all of the materials from this section, use the discussion page to answer the following questions.

1. How can the use of technology support student learning in science classrooms?
2. How would the use of technology to create data intensive documents be beneficial to the overall learning of students in science?
3. What limitations do you foresee in using technology to create data intensive documents, and how could we counter these limitations using strategies learned in this mini course?
4. If we teach students to analyze data intensive documents, and have them use technology to create them, how can this knowledge be transferred to other concepts in science, and education in general?

Answer the questions in the discussion space below:

Talk: Discussion Unit 3

Summary/Conclusion

In this unit we examined how we can utilize technology to have students create data intensive documents, and why technology is an important to utilize when teaching science. At this point we have defined science literacy, examined strategies to help students interpret data intensive documents, and explored how to utilize technology to create these documents which will further engage our students and promote the transfer of learning and skills. To wrap up this mini course, in the final unit, you will be creating your own lesson plan (or unit plan) that incorporates skills for examining data intensive documents and has students create these documents. This final step will help you to incorporate important 21st century skills that our students need to succeed.