Sherrard Middle School, Mrs. Klemm's Digital Citizenship class incorporated the Nearby Data project into a unit on social media. The students watched ‘The Social Dilemma’ and created follow up questions and discussions on how social media uses peoples’ personal information. Students were tasked with polling students and teachers around Sherrard Middle School about their social media usage. Various data points were collected such as age, gender, and access to technology. Students then had to choose how they wanted to display the data visually and what pieces of data they found the most relevant to tie together and share. WLU’s Center for Arts and Education provided examples on what visuals might look like. The students then used ‘Canva’ software to create their visual representations. This work will continue and be expanded upon in this class during the 2022-2023 school year.

Union Local High School, Principal was previously involved in the Fluency Project, which led to his interest in Nearby Data.  The Nearby Data team presented to small groups of teachers and the entire high school faculty.  During that session, the principal and superintendent expressed interest in visualizing their district’s COVID data sets about the impact of masking and school attendance.  We were able to develop and provide visualizations of the district’s data that were then used as part of their communications with parents and other stakeholders. This data included the number of students quarantined by grade level and number of students quarantined over time.  We will continue to work with the principal at Union Local in year 2.