The iPad as Data Collection Tool
How a
simple tool is helping transform the way I teach
By Steve Dickie
In my quest to be a better educator, I attended a three weeklong workshop last summer in Modeling Physics. It was the single best professional development experience I ever had. At the core of modeling is Socratic dialogue. Basically, we end up in big class wide circle discussions and ask each other questions. I try to direct the discussion along paths that will ultimately lead to deeper understanding. After beginning to teach differently this fall, I realized I couldn’t keep my 120 physics students straight. It was nearly impossible to keep track of who had demonstrated a degree of mastery of each concept and who still needed work. I started collecting piles of note cards with hastily jotted notes so I would have a better idea of how to steer the discussion and engage those students who still needed help. The cards were not very handy, and they were even less helpful when it came time to see how participation in circle impacted outcomes on tests. If only I had a tool that I could use to collect and reference data while walking around my classroom. That’s when I had my light- bulb moment. I realized the iPad would be perfect for this.
I’m a classroom teacher and I’ve wanted to dip my toe into data driven decision making for years. However, I had no idea how to do it or even where to start. Typically, this sort of thing is done at the building or district level, but why not at the classroom level? Where to start? First I needed some sort of data collection mechanism.
My available options for data collection are very limited. In my building the only automated item analysis I can do is to run a sheet through the 30 year old scan-tron machine to see how many students got each question on a test wrong. This does not really tell me much. It can tell me if the class as a whole does not know something, but it does not tell me which alternative answer they picked, so I don’t know why they don’t know it or what they really think. If I was going to do any meaningful data driven decision making I would have to do it all by hand, correlating all my questions to standards and I would grade all tests twice (once for a grade and once for concept attainment and misconceptions held). When I first thought about it, it seemed like too much work so I put the idea aside.
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Spring/Summer 2011
Figure 1. Google Form for data collection as seen on an iPad. Student names are in a dropdown menu and concepts can rapidly be scored.
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MACULJOURNAL
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