Averages: Mean, Median and Mode

We recently gave the students a short diagnostic at the beginning of term so we could determine what areas of Maths we needed to pinpoint before the end of the year. One of indicated areas of weakness was Mean, Median and Mode often covered in the dimension of Measurement Chance and Data. So I set myself a task of designing a lesson that integrated ICT and working with averages.

I have quite a few kinesthetic learners in my grade 4 class and I really wanted to engage these students right from the beginning. Therefore the first part of the lesson the students need to collect some data that related to their physical selves. These included simple measurements like the length of the their arm, height, how far they can jump from a stand still, how long it takes to do one lap of the basketball court, how long it takes to say the alphabet. Not only was this a great way to get the students to move around the classroom and school but it also integrated some measurement as well. With great enthusiasm they had collected their data in next to no time. Download “What Measurements You Need To Find” Work sheet.

Once they had collected the measurements they were then required to jump online and input their data in the Google form. I love google docs! We have just started to explore them as a school when we migrated our entire student email system over to the Google Apps Education package. Google Forms is one of the document types you can choose from. It is a brilliant tool that lets you customise your form in many ways. You add the questions or the desired content with help information for each question if needed. Google Forms allows for a range of question types for example: standard text or paragraph question, multiple choice, check boxes, choose from list, grid and scale. When your content has been added  then you’re able to choose from a range of templates to suit your taste.

Types Of Documents

Once the Form is created there are a number of options to share and promote it. Emailing it out can be very effective. In fact  you receive the form inside the email and the data can be submitted without having to go to the web. Secondly, you can host or post the link out which will take you to the live form. Thirdly, Google Forms allows you to embed the form into a web page or blog. This could be really effective if you have a class blog ,all you would need to do is grab the HTML code and embed it into a post or page and direct your students to it. For this lesson I chose to host the link on our intranet which then took the students to the live form.  

What happens next is one of the most intuitive aspects of google docs. Once the students have submitted their data via the form it then goes to a spreadsheet. Having the live spreadsheet up on the IWB watching the data submitted live was incredibly effective. The students were already starting to analyse the data as it was coming into view. Generally most were comparing their times around the basketball court . The spreadsheet can then be shared with who ever you want. Saved as a PDF , shared as a link on the intranet, emailed as a link to a live web page or kept private. Google spreadsheets doesn’t have  many of the features that Excel offers but its the ability to view and share it on the web that makes it a really powerful tool. I have Shared the Spreadsheet here. Please make a copy of it.

Finally, the students were given calculators and after a discussion/refresher on Mean, Median and Mode were then challenged to analysis the data and present their findings. Each pair was given a print out of the google spreadsheet and using the old fashioned book, pencil and ruler drew up tables to assist in their presentations.