The spreadsheet within Google Docs is very similar to Microsoft Excel and it took me only a few minutes to get accustomed to using this spreadsheet within Google Docs. I did come into a few road blocks every once in a while. My first way to try and find my way through a few of the road blocks was to search around and use trial and error, but if I could not solve my problems with trial and error then Google Help made it easy to find the answers to my questions. Many of my answers are rounded because I did not want so many decimal places. For good looks, I usually rounded to the nearest one but in some cases I had the the spreadsheet round to the nearest 2 decimals. If I was not interested in looks I would have the spreadsheet round to the nearest 2 decimals in almost all cases. Being able to have that choice is just another positive about using Google Docs.
So what do we see in these test scores? Well the students will be able to see how much they learned from the pre-test to the post-test. The average test scores show us that the students are performing well on the tests as a class. One student performed much better, maybe he was not trying during the pre-test? Another student performed worse in the post-test, maybe he had some lucky guess in the pre-test? We can also see that some more work needs to be put in for the Formatives.
I found that being able to use a spreadsheet on Google Docs will be very helpful for a few reasons. The most important reason is that I could easily access the spreadsheet at home if I wanted to grade some classwork from home and enter the scores from any computer with an internet connection. A parent, coworker, or administrator could also have access to view the improvements the class has made. All they would have to do is simply click on this link http://tinyurl.com/week4data
Or, I could simply embed the information on the web using a classroom blog. Of course if I made this information public I would take the students names off of the data and charts. I would instead try to enter student ID numbers.
It's also possible to only enter in the individual charts if that is all I wanted people to see.
SInce you are an Excel expert, I'm always interested on what people think of the transition to Google Sheets. Looks like you got up to speed quickly, with only a few little barriers. As one digs deeper into the features of this tool, the advantages begin to add up, especially with the sharing and embedding features. Job well done on this presentation.
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