IQL Graphs

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Two Types of Assignments to give students practice understanding, critiquing and communicating about graphic data.

Possible critique assignment tasks

You can give students a good graph or a poor graph and ask them to tell its good points and bad points
You can give students a graph and ask them to tell one thing you can tell from the graph and/or one thing they can't tell. (This would be good for a VoiceThread because many students can comment on one graph.)
You can give students a graph and ask them to measure it against a checklist/rubric that you and they have created.

Jing

Best choice for:

Individual work.
One student does a critique and posts it.

Materials required:

free copy of Jing downloaded to each student's computer http://www.jingproject.com/
microphone attached to their computer

Your Role as Instructor

Find graphs that you want critiqued and paste them into Powerpoint slides
Make the powerpoint slide available to the student. You can upload it to Blackboard or email it.
Give students handout on how to do this assignment
Play them a sample, either one from this session or one you create.

Resources

Here is a screencast showing how it might work:
http://screencast.com/t/MDk1Y2VhMz
Here is an assignment sheet for students which describes how to do the screencast step by step. http://bit.ly/bHWBAm You can download it as a word document and edit it further if you like.
Some other sample uses of Jing:

Show how to do something on screen (for example how to send an email in BlackBoard – http://screencast.com/t/M2E5Y2Q5ZWY
Tour a great website – I did a sample and published it at http://screencast.com/t/OaPnTE68s
Explain project directions – You don’t have to get fancy on the graphics, just display the written instructions that you already have and talk your way through them. It’s a fact that some students just get it better by hearing. Example at http://screencast.com/t/GPiHjq70Aet
Create a talking powerpoint – Display the show and do a voice over. Example at http://screencast.com/t/MAxmb1NPUy

Voicethreads

Best choice for:

Group process
Everyone sees and hears everyone elses critique of the same graph

Materials required:

access to the internet
microphone attached to their computer

Your Role as Instructor

Create an account for yourself on Voicethreads http://voicethread.com/#home
See step by step for doing that HERE
Find graphs that you want critiqued and upload them to Voicethreads
Make the Voicethreads available to the student. You can paste the link into Blackboard, embed the whole thing in Blackboard or just email the link.
Give students handout on how to do this assignment
Play them a sample, either one from this session or one you create.

Resources

Sample voicethread with one graph example at: http://voicethread.com/#u613457.b800017.i4649929 You can make a comment on that Voicethread if you like.
Student handout on how to make a comment: http://bit.ly/aQ8txX You can download it as a word document and edit it further if you like.
Sample voicethread showing general uses at http://voicethread.com/#q.b3352.i28616
Voicethread in a blog by Larry Welkowitz http://welkowitz.typepad.com/aspergers_conversations/2010/01/high-placebo-rates-in-medicine-with-webcam.html

                 Graph Checklist
        Is the information worth graphing?

Labeling: title, legend, source, axes?

Congruence: Does your graph show what you are saying it shows?

Tool choice: Is your graph the most effective way to show the information?

Comparability: Are you comparing like entities – apples to apples?

Context: Does your caption and oral description explain why what you are seeing is important?

    All the files for the presentation and for class handouts are on the Resources page of this site.

Large Public Data Sets available on the web

Listing of 1,249 large datasets http://bit.ly/cTSsJu
UK Data (made available Jan 2010) http://data.gov.uk/data

US Data http://www.data.gov/

International data http://data.worldbank.org/

List of various sources http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory


      7 Basic Rules for Making Charts and Graphs
             by Nathan Yau of Flowing Data