Randy Long wanted his Conservation Ecology students at UC Santa Barbara to develop sampling methods and data-analysis skills, so he had them each chose a location in which to collect Pokémon! They recorded data in a Google Form which fed into a Google spreadsheet. The class used the data to develop and investigate research questions and write short research papers.

Randy was impressed by the obvious improvement in students' understanding of sampling methods, data collection, analysis, and hypothesis testing as compared to previous years' research papers.

Randy’s students successfully used data, collected using mobile technology, to learn course content - a great example of using analytics for learning.

Robert Blake had both bilingual students from a variety of Spanish-speaking countries and second language learners in his Spanish and Applied Linguistics classes at UC Davis. He wanted students to contribute data - specifically, language usage data - so he invited them to respond to specific scenarios in Spanish using Socrative.

“[Students] type it in and ... I have all of that data right there [and] it's anonymous. ... we analyze it and it provides me the raw data for the types of points I'm trying to make.”

Bob’s students saw their data actually being used to teach course concepts. Students were then invested in the meaningful conversations that followed, which were centered around information that they provided.

Victoria Cross wanted her undergraduate research methods students at the UC Davis to learn to trust data, regardless of their hypothesis. She explained, “this is what science is - you’ve got to be willing to change your mind.”

Students voted using iClicker for which strategy they thought would result in more wins in a game-show type game, or if they thought strategy was irrelevant. Their aggregate responses became the class hypothesis.

Students then played the game multiple times with different strategies, recording their win-loss records in a Google Form. The class then reviewed their own aggregate data - did it support their class hypothesis about which strategy would result in more wins?

Shane Jimerson used Kahoot, an online quizzing tool, in his School of Education class at UC Santa Barbara to identify gaps in his students' knowledge.

“[I] use it as a way of seeing what folks are knowledgeable of ... there [are often] a few [questions] where there is more variation in the responses. So then I can provide further discussion and exploration to try to make that clear. I guess that’s a form of assessment for my class - to figure out what they know and don’t know after presentation and some discussion.”

Shane collected data about his students' learning to provide them the support they need for their learning.