Wednesday, June 27, 2012

S'More Tech Summer Camp, Day 18 (Data)

Hi campers!

As you can see from the title, we are taking a break from infographics to talk about the basis for those infographics, DATA. What data do we measure? How do we share that data?

My principal recently shared this link with us, as an expectation for next school year. Click here to see data binder videos. At this school, every teacher, including PE, keeps data binders for students. The librarian is not shown, but the reading specialist is. Hmmm....

While I was pondering this data binder concept, I saw this cool post from KindergartenWorks about an electronic data binder. You can take digital photos of student work and organize the photos like you would in a physical binder. That way, you can capture hands-on work students are doing at centers, instead of just written work.


I know that Evernote is the mother of all organizational tools, but threering.com is designed specifically for school and teachers. You can use your smartphone to snap photos. Here is an example from threering's website.



I could use this site to store photos taken during student research projects. I could save the photos and project the best ones to use as examples for other students. This would be really handy!

My big question is this: what data should teacher librarians assess? Circulation statistics? Those are readily available, but are they significant?

Here are examples I found online of ways that some teacher librarians share data.

Matthew Winner displays data about overdue books here.


I've also seen an idea on Pinterest to create a bulletin board that looks like the iPhone graphic below, but with each of the icons being a database that we promote and teach. 

Although this display doesn't include numbers, I think it's a graphic reminder that we are wayyyy more than just books! (As I was typing this, my little brain realized that we could put the database usage statistics under the icon, and we would have numbers, too! Plus the colorful pictures!)

For the rest of this week at camp, I'm gonna be searching for more examples of data we can share. As our schools become more data-driven every year, we've got to find a way to collect and display data in a way that shows our significance. Our smiling faces and beautiful library space are not enough!

If you've found a great way to collect or display library data, please share it with us! We would love to see your examples!


2 comments:

  1. Oh, come one, everyone. Share ideas cause this is the part that is giving me a headache. Tools like Piktochart and Easel.ly are pretty easy to use if you know WHAT to use them for. And are good at the collection part. If I'd kept better track last couple of years I could really "show" a story of how staffing hours affected our program (more missing books, more overdue books, more missed classes) with my assistant gone so much last year. You that haven't ever had them? Wow. You are awesome. I was lost! I was also thinking that I would create some for areas I know the kids study (cause not all of the ones you find online are kid-friendly). But there again ... it's overloading my brain! :/ (This is one cool one that would be relatively easy I saw on Easel.ly https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/5404/__library_survey/image.jpg).

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  2. I like that one, Ms. O! That will be a good topic for tomorrow's camp, I think: what would be a quick and easy way to take a survey to gather data, like the one on that cool graphic you linked to? Thanks for sharing that!

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