Category Archives: Handling Data

65. Survey Monkey

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If you need to collect a lot of data or want to encourage pupils to consider how data collection can be carried out then Survey Monkey is the website for you.

A basic membership is free: it allows you to create and carry out a 10 question survey online.

A paid for membership allows you to customise your survey and download the results. The survey can be longer than 10 questions.

I’ve introduced SurveyMonkey to the staff where I teach. We have used it to survey pupils on their opinions of feedback/marking in books, pupil experience of IT, staff implementation of IT, feedback from CPD sessions, data collection for Masters research and even collecting food orders for parents evening!

In class, you could also use it to start a discussion on bias, types of question, how appropriate different charts are and why companies use sites like SurveyMonkey to collect consumer data.

63. How to make GCSE past papers fun

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Well folks, the end is in sight! Soon Y11 will be on study leave. Sure, there will be those conscientious few who come in for help or revision sessions, but the majority of pupils need the next month to considate their learning and be ready for their exams.

Are these teenagers buzzing with energy and keen to work? No.

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They are tired of being told about exam technique and interpreting questions. They are fed up with assessments and coursework. They are irritable with every non-teenager who mentions exams and ‘this is your future’. And most of all they are just tired because they are working late on deadlines that are suddenly tomorrow, rather than 6 months away.

How can you make yet another GCSE paper interesting?

It’s time to cut up the exam paper (see Foundation GCSE analysis for first scissor session).

Now this task will need some prep work. It is an adaptation of a Maths Relay.

Equipment
*Enough copies of a GCSE paper for 1 between 2 or 3.
(Variation: A set of themed questions, for example 15 questions on Algebra of graduated difficulty)
*Roughly three copies of the mark scheme.
*Your best 3 or 4 students to help manage the task. Alternatively,  mathematically minded sixth former or spare teacher would do. You could even put two classes together.

Optional: A spreadsheet with the pairs of students in the first column

Prep Work
You need to slice the papers into individual questions. Lay out the piles in number order across a desk.
The desks in the room need to be arranged to allow pair/group work and also movement around the room.
Your helpers need to be briefed about the activity.

Activity
Each pair is given the first question face down. When you say ‘Start’, they may write down their names on the question and answer the question.
When they have an answer, they must bring it to be checked.

Correct: it is ticked and they are issued with the next question.
Wrong: it is crossed and they try again.
Wrong twice: they are issued with the next question.

By using your most able student as checkers, you are enabling them to practise effectively checking work quickly and give hints. If they can check their own work in exams quickly, then they will have more time to answer harder questions. By giving hints they are consolidating their learning. Of course, the rest of the class can’t complain that the brightest will win as they are not taking part.

Differentiation
If you have a mixed tier/ability class you can colour code two exam papers: yellow for foundation, pink for higher. They can still race each other but at a more appropriate level.

About that optional spreadsheet
Set up a spreadsheet with the first column for names, the next 15 columns labelled 1-15 and the last column for the total.
Once a question is finished with you record correct/wrong with a 1/0 . You can then keep track of who is on which question with what success rate.

The more ICT-friendly teacher could use conditional formatting to highlight the cells and which team is winning.

Management
I have found it easiest to use helpers for checking and leave the spreadsheet recording to the class teacher. This allows the teacher to oversee and troubleshoot as required.

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Review
I’ve done this with low-ability Y11 last lesson on a Friday and was stunned at the engagement. Although that might have had something to do with the prize of first choice from a box of fondant fancies …

47. Light bulb moment

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Here is a ridiculously simple classroom tip that was thought up by one of my pupils today.

 

Situation

The class were using past GCSE questions, compiled in a Word document, photocopied back to back and stapled.

 

Problem

After completing a table of values, the question said ‘Use the graph paper below…’, except the graph paper had ended up three sides of A4 away due to a crazy quirk of Testbase (GCSE exam question software) and Word. Cue much mumbling and enough paper shuffling to make me think a hamster was rearranging his bedding!

 

Solution

One pupil simply asked if she could take a picture of the table of values, so she wouldn’t have to keep flipping pages.

 

So simple … pure genius!

 

Within 5 minutes, the class were quietly doing very accurate cumulative frequency diagrams, without silly mistakes and rustling.

42. Fake texting, Real learning

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I discovered this great website, ifaketext which generates roughly six lines of fake text messages.

Ice-breaker

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I used it as an ice-breaker for revising cumulative frequency. The class read the texts and discussed what they could remember and whether those pointers were helpful. There were four screens of hints.

In fact the class liked it so much I printed out the fake screens and they stuck them in their books.

Motivation
I’m also using the site to encourage more engagement with homework for lower ability students.

I could have set the homework task ‘Write down key facts that help you work out percentages’. Instead I asked them to ‘Imagine a friend had texted for help with a percentages homework. What would you text back?’

When they hand their work in, we can turn the best advice into fake texts to stick in their books or use in a wall display.

Two of those who have homework ‘issues’ have already said they are going to text each other tonight to do their work. This resulted in the following unusual question:
‘Please Miss, can we hand in our work by showing you our phones?!’

34. The Dancing Cipher

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A different way to look at data and probability is to introduce letter frequency analysis.

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I set pupils the task of finding out the letter frequency data for the english language. Not much of a challenge for a bright student with the internet.

However …
I then gave them four A4 sheets of symbols to decode. Literally four pages of code, with no hints except they had to determine two literary works and authors from it. They had two weeks to solve it.

In hindsight, they described it as the best homework ever. I had parents contact me to see if they had solved it correctly – not to help their child, they were in competition to see who would get it first!

How to do it
Pick a text which is freely available on the internet – it saves typing out pages of text. I chose ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll – lots of interesting words!

I found a great website which gives you the Dancing man cipher amongst others. You paste in your text and select your substitution cipher. It then encodes your text for you. I chose the Dancing Man as it was the second literary work: The Adventure of the Dancing men (A Sherlock Holmes story)

I pasted this into Word and this formed the homework.

The interesting thing about this substitution cipher is that it has 52 symbols and no spaces. It is tricky to cheat as you would have to know the name of the cipher and the full cipher was not published in the book. There is more than one variation of the code as different people have tried to fill in the missing symbols.

Classics
This task ticks all the boxes for data processing, coding, independent study and literacy. In fact several pupils came back and said they had read Conan-Doyle’s classic work as a result of a maths task.