S'More Tech Summer Camp, Day 19 (Data)

Hi campers!

Are you making your way through that stack of books that you were saving for summer, when you have more time? I am, and I love being able to stay up late to finish a book, without the alarm to awake me so rudely in the morning!

I also love having the time to think about my plans for next year, what I want to change and what I want to keep. And I'm focusing right now on data, how to gather it and display it and use it to keep ourselves at the CENTER of our school and twenty-first century learning!

The Boston Plan for Excellence created this rubric for Making Data Public. When every teacher in the school has some type of data board, we've got to jump in, or be left out!

This bulletin board is an example from the Boston Project for Excellence report, focused on Making Data Public.

Yesterday, Ms. O shared this library infographic as an example for us to consider:

I definitely think that survey results would be good data for us to communicate to our stakeholders. And this one (although it is for high school, not elementary) looks great, doesn't it?

My favorite way to survey is with Google Forms, like we talked about here on Day 12. We could take a beginning of the year survey of students and teachers. The beginning of the year survey could be incorporated into our library orientation lessons. Then we could ask the same questions in the middle and at the end of the year. 

Survey questions I like from this pictograph:

• Most of the reading I do for fun is:  (a) print or (b) online (I would also add audiobooks as an option.)
• How often do you read for fun? (a) almost every day, (b) once or twice a month, (c) a few times a year, or (d) never or hardly ever
• When I do research, I mostly use: (a) books, (b) Google and Wikipedia, (c) school databases (I would refer to our Library Resources web page here. I'm still not sure our students would know to call them "databases.") (d) all of the above (I don't think our students are aware of the public library databases. I haven't talked about them.)

Survey questions I would add:

• Do you have a public library card? (This is a statistic I know I can impact. Last year we had a field trip to the public library for all of second and third grade. We were able to get library cards for every student who didn't already have one. This helps them to keep reading over the summer.)
• When you read for fun, what do you like to read? (books versus magazines? fiction versus non-fiction? fiction genres?) We could use these responses to inform our collection development, and show the statistics to prove that we are responding to the survey results.

What else would you add to YOUR student survey? If you already collect and display library data, please tell us about it. What works for you?