Analyzing Student Data in Spreadsheets

During my undergraduate, I successful avoiding doing many computer-based projects in school because of my degree. This includes many of the microsoft products, including Excel. I never took accounting or business, and never really had to deal with spreadsheets in my history and humanities classes. So, when Barry introduced the "Spreadsheets" assignment to us, I was less than thrilled. I feel like because I have avoided excel for so many years, that I am embarrassingly behind other people my age. So, I watched the tutorial videos that Barry posted for us several times, which gave me a boost of comprehension and comfort that allowed me to get through the task without too much stress.

Google's spreadsheet application is super user-friendly. I don't know if it's just because I have nothing to compare it to, or we just got a huge advantage because Barry posted the videos, but it was really easy to compute the data and correlate it with charts. Using charts in a classroom seems like such a foreign concept to me because I have never been comfortable doing anything like that, or even know where to start, but I felt good about this assignment. It was really easy to analyze the data and quickly and efficiently change that data into visual graphs. I want to be a history teacher, and a lot of history is raw data. I think it would be beneficial to organize this raw data into charts and graphs, which would allow students to have a visual to supplement the information.

So embedding the document in this blog has been a little bit harder for me to do than the video explains. In the video, in has the nice "share" button that drops down into all the embedding options; mine just is a share button, and the only options is to either make it public or private, I don't have the same setup as in the video. So here's a link to the spreadsheet document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjZCoZTBHKrEdGVrOS1uRVBIcWx3NjY5U1c5cDFqdWc



From the graphs it's clear to see that though the students started out a little rocky, all of them improved over time. Some made quick progression and sustained that, like Thurgood, while others improved but then had some trouble with other tests, such as Walter and Renee. I used both a line and a bar graph, because though the line graph allows you to easily compare the test scores with one another, it doesn't display the individual student's performance as well as I would like, so the bar graph allows me to analyze that more clearly. As a teacher, this is a great tool to map out student grades, see which tests or concepts students aren't understanding as well as others, and on an individual basis allow you to track how a student is doing over time. Once I get more comfortable with the software I legitimately think I would use this in the classroom.