CODAP-Common Online Data Analysis Platform

By Allison Johnson

Statistics in middle school and high school is often not considered a priority standard and can sometimes be overlooked by the teacher or skipped if the class is behind. Most teachers also do not feel comfortable and confident enough to teach statistics. There are many resources online for teachers to sharpen their statistics skills and better prepare them to teach the lessons.

The traditional way to learn statistics is to use Excel. Excel does have a lot of nice functions and options. It is easy to calculate the mean and median and other numerical values in Excel. The graphing functions in Excel are not so good. The graph function in Excel is not easy to manipulate and it is hard to easily change what is on the x-axis and y-axis. This week in class we learned about a program called CODAP. CODAP stands for Common Online Data Analysis Platform.

I found a lot of things in CODAP that I liked. You can easily rearrange the way the data is sorted by clicking on the title of the column and choosing how you want it to be sorted. It is also very easy to make graphs and customize them. In CODAP when you make a graph you drag and drop exactly what column of data you want on the x-axis and y-axis. You can also delete the data from the graph and drag a new column onto it to make a different graph. You can choose what type of graph such as line graph, bar graph, pie chart, histogram, box plot, etc.  You can adjust the settings on the graph. You can also easily hover over points in the graph and get their exact value.

There are a lot of functions and features to the graphs that Excel does not have that CODAP does have. In Excel, you cannot easily customize and change the graph by dragging and dropping columns. In CODAP you can also make a line of best fit and it will tell you your r^2 value and the equation of the line. Just like Excel, CODAP can also find the mean, median, standard deviation, etc.

Technology is a very useful tool when learning statistics. Personally, I never used Excel until college. In my college statistics class, I had to completely learn how to use Excel. I wish I would have been introduced to it in high school or middle school so I would have a better understanding of what I can use Excel for and how to use it. When teachers are teaching statistics concepts in middle school and high school, I think it would be very beneficial to use either Excel or CODAP. Using these software programs can be a great learning tool to better understand statistics. 

Floop: An innovative way to give feedback!

By Melissa Christlieb

On Friday, February 4th I attended the SD STEM Education conference in Huron, SD. During one of the presentations, we learned about the website named Floop. This website is a tool for teachers to use when grading and giving feedback to students online.

With this website, teachers are able to make assignments for students and the students use Floop to turn in the assignments electronically. On the teachers' side of this website, you are able to insert comments, write on the assignments, give audio comments and see who has read and replied to your comments. If a student replies to comment it will flag the assignment as if they just submit something. I think this would be very helpful for teachers so that a student's comment does not go unseen. As a teacher, you can select to see who has turned in the assignment and who hasn’t. Floop also keeps a bank of your previous comments made which can be reused for different students.

This website is able to be accessed on a mobile device, iPad, tablet, or computer. This makes it super easy for students to take a picture of their assignment and upload it to Floop. In Floop students are able to peer review their classmate's assignments anonymously, and it also gives them prompts for giving feedback to others.

Another thing that was talked about during this presentation is what descriptive feedback is. Descriptive feedback is more than just saying ‘Good job!’. It is giving thoughtful responses to questions and engages with students about the work they have completed. This includes positive feedback on their work as well as where they might have made a mistake or could improve their work.

In math education, this website can be very beneficial because students can get feedback from the teacher or their peers immediately. Students are also able to have conversations with their teacher in the comment section. Floop allows grading to be done in a timely matter and allows teachers to give descriptive feedback to more than one student easier.