Data Literacy for Students: Teaching a Critical 21st Century Skill

[Warren Apel]

If you attended my talk in Shanghai last year, you know that I’m a proponent of data-driven decision making and using data to inform instruction. Basically, I’m a big data geek. At my school, we’re doing some exciting things with teaching data literacy to students as well, and I’d like to share some of the tools and techniques we’re using. These links will help participants in my workshop on Saturday access some of the websites, tools, and software that I’ll be demonstrating.
The two big concepts for teaching data literacy are
• Students should be able to interpret and analyze charts and graphs
• Students should be able to create rich, meaningful visualizations of data.
Teaching one often helps students achieve the other, so they really do go hand in hand.

Some software tools I’ll be showing
Graph Club – decent, easy to use graphing software for very young students
TinkerPlots – my very favorite graphing application, excellent for students in grades 4 to 8, but also something I use often in my own work.
Excel still has a lot of usefulness, although it can be difficult for students to use and is best at producing print graphs. It doesn’t (yet) create rich interactive Flash-based online data displays
Data Analysis Toolpak: a nice histogram-creating add-on for Excel. It’s not installed by default, so make sure your tech department puts this on all computers that students will be using Excel on.
Box and Whisker Chart Plugin: a free box-and-whisker graph generator. It helps make box plots easy to create on Excel, without resorting to the kind of complex workarounds that people (me included) used to have to do in order to make box-and-whisker graphs in Office 2003 or 2007.
Swivel: a social network for data sharing. You can upload a data set, graph it, comment on other users graph, embed your graph in a blog, mash your data with someone else’s dataset. It’s a perfect Web 2.0 application for middle school math and science.
ManyEyes: a more powerful social network for data, with more visualizations and less graphic sizzle. Allows students to create rich, meaningful interactive data visualizations without getting bogged down in fill effects or background colors. It’s the easiest way for a student to create a chloropleth map.
Daytum is fun and interesting, but maybe not the most meaningful for students. You can send data to your personal graphs via SMS, twitter, email, or the web. People use it to track their personal statistics, whether it’s miles jogged in the morning or amount of caffeine consumed. It’s kind of fascinating to watch.

Collections of data available online:
InfoChimps: a useful and searchable collection of public datasets
WolframAlpha: a search engine that often displays results in tables of data that can be graphed
The US Census and CIA World Factbook: two of the many excellent data collections published by the US government
YouTube: each video has a “statistics” link that gives students an excellent example of easy-to-understand data visualizations that help explain how a video became popular and what demographic it’s popular with
Google Analytics: your school website can (and should) use this free tool so that you can gain insight into the top content and user demographics. Students can delve into these datasets to help answer meaningful questions about their school.

Good examples of data available online
The Atlantic Monthly: a two-page spread each month with a chart, graph, map, or other visualization of data, along with an explanatory note. Very engaging, especially if it’s relevant to your curriculum. The online version can be printed out or shared electronically, plus also sometimes includes interactive flash-based clickability.
Wired: lots of great data, infographics, charts, and statistics, plus a searchable back issue database online. Sometimes good for science even in younger grades.
Good Magazine: great visualizations, and the online versions are often zoomable and richer than the print versions.
GapMinder: Hans Rosling is an amazing speaker and his Ted talks are worth watching. His website GapMinder World allows students to graph 5 simultaneous variables on a complex but understandable visualization. Great for social studies in middle to high school.

How do you find out about new interesting data visualizations?
Some of my favorite data blogs are
FlowingData: Nathan posts new and old charts and infographics about 5 times a week. You can even subscribe by email, if you’re not into RSS or blogfeeds.
Juice Analytics: another great data blog, mostly aimed at business users, but still interesting.
Pointy-Haired Dilbert:
Daily Dose of Excel: If you are into Excel, you’ll get a lot out of these tips and tricks
Jorge Camoe’s Charts

[Dan Robinson]

Hey Warren - seriously found your workshop to be the most insightful and useful. Thanks for your preparation and your presentation. I would love to show my students how to use gapminder to display and present data in the intimate way that Hans Rosling does.

[Warren Apel]

Thanks for all the great feedback! I had a great time presenting - glad you found it useful! Jay, thanks for the suggestion about Jing. I've used both Camtasia and SmartRecorder, and didn't really like either of them. I just watched the Jing demo video and I'm sold.

[Paul Welsh]

This collection of resources makes your presentation even sweeter. Wither it's a 20 minute conversation over beers or one of your workshop sessions, we never fail to learn a lot from you. People were fired up about what you were teaching as well as how you were doing it. Thanks for all your efforts in spreading what you find useful and necessary in such an engaging way.

[beth gourley]

My husband is also a fan of Hans Rosling--you might be interested in his comment here

[beth gourley]

I heard nothing but rave reviews about your session! Disappointed I was unable to attend. Thank you for your list of resources.

[Jay Reimer]

Warren; in your presentation I saw the "handheld" screenshot of making the Manyeyes graph. One very cool tool for making simple "screencasts" is called Jing which you can see at Add it to your tools stats packages to enable kids/teachers to "see how you did it" on their own time. It is awesome - I know you'll love it.

[Jay Reimer]

Warren; you are presenting the content well and showing engaging examples. Thanks for pointing us to some tools that really work and are INTERACTIVE!

[seantm]

Nice collection of resources Warren -looking forward to the presentation--