See how your students could soon be using statistics and models to predict the future.
There are examples of statistical careers and what statisticians have done to help solve problems with data.
Some ideas to help students reach their statistics and statistical literacy learning goals:
Primary and Intermediate:
- Futureintech: Bring the real world into your classroom: Learning from people in industry to highlight when, where and why we need to learn this!
- TinkerPlots: Technology for graphing and interpreting data. Have you checked out the lesson plans?
- Using literature to teach statistics A lesson plan.
- Exposing young children to activities that develop emergent inferential practices in statistics. (McPhee & Makar, 2014) Professional Reading for numeracy teachers.
Secondary:
- Fathom & iNZight: Technology for secondary statistics teaching.
- Herald article: on careers in statistics.
- A framework for thinking about informal statistical inference. (Makar, K. & Rubin, A., 2009) Professional reading:
- Figure: Lillian Grace was the plenary speaker at both Canterbury and Auckland Statistics Teachers day. The Figure site allows everyone be an explorer and user of data. If you or your students want data to answer a burning question this is the place to contact.
- 2015/16 Census: Have all your classes been involved? Experiencing the census at all levels of the curriculum is important for students to demonstrate that they are “managing variation” and are involved in every aspect of data collection and creation.
- Statistical displays: What about running a poster competition for Statistics week?! Below are some examples from oversea’s, how can we improve on these?
- Tour Aotearoa live! Robyn Headifen has suggested following the cycling so much much great data!
What other ideas do you have?
How are you linking with your colleagues in other subjects? How do they approach statistical literacy and use statistics in scientific (both social and the physical sciences) investigations?
Do you have an Investing in Educational Success IES project to share or would like to begin? Also let us know of any cool Stats Apps you’re using with your students.
Finally, a big thanks to teachers who are using the share resources function on CAS.
Nga mihi
The CensusAtSchool Team
This first term newsletter is important reading for all secondary mathematics and statistics teachers.
Upcoming workshops for current PLD are advertised and useful links and tips are provided by Derek Smith and the national facilitation team.
Secondary Mathematics and Statistics Newsletter Term 1 2016
Derek has also sent through some other interesting links that didn’t make it into the newsletter:
Some reminders:
NZAMT14 Conference workshop resources
2015 Ernest Duncan Award Winner Ricky Pedersen has offered to make his Critical Thinking Booklet available for download.
http://www.nzamt.org.nz/index.
Interesting bits and pieces
Some research on happiness in schools for your interest. It would be interesting to ask your faculty members, and yourself, “What makes you happy during the school day or during a lesson?”
https://www.ted.com/talks/
Some interesting data sets from a NZ long term study:
TED Talks links to videos
https://www.ted.com/talks/
https://www.ted.com/talks/
An ERO publication
http://ero.govt.nz/content/
Learning geometry via Origami
http://www.scholastic.com/
Why is learning fraction arithmetic so difficult? From STEM Learning
A look at the methods of teaching fraction arithmetic in Shanghai
Learning maths through song and dance
https://www.facebook.com/
Hope that your athletics and Swimming sports day are progessing well while the country enjoys the settled weather we are enjoying.
Our hearts go out to the people in Canterbury as they wrestle with nature.
Näku i roto i ngä mihi, nä
Derek
Derek Smith|Mathematics National Co-ordinator/Central South Facilitator (Secondary)|Education Support Services|
Te Tapuae o Rehua Consortium Mau ki te ako|University of Otago College of Education|021 913 150|
We hope you all had a great summer holiday and are looking forward to teaching lots of innovative, well-designed statistics lessons this year.
To help you out we start the year off with a great new data card resource for interactive and effective statistics lessons created by Anna Martin, and some helpful tips on describing Time series trends prepared by the Mathematics and Statistics Facilitators and the NZSA Education Committee.
Returning students may ask you to review their 2015 external exam scripts. Derek Smith has provided links to the level 1, level 2 and level 3 cut scores. Please use this information to inform students if they should proceed with the reconsideration process. Please use your professional judgement with the question totals and overall total (Grade Score marking used) in the November Externals, which is not the same as that used for the assessment of the e-Mcat/MCAT. The assessment conditions for the 2016 externals are also now available on the NZQA website. Level 1, Level 2, Level 3.
As you and your colleagues review and reflect on the 2015 year, we hope CensusAtSchool delivered useful content and information. CensusAtSchool aims to provide the most up to date, statistics teaching resources and information, in the news, by NZSA or other Statistical forums or on the internet. If you want a “heads up” on what to read, watch or do this year the best place to start is right here on CensusAtSchool.
If you ever think that our heads haven’t been up high enough and we seem to have missed something that’s coming soon, please let us know: censusatschoolnz@gmail.com
Please forward this email to any new colleagues who may not receive our weekly emails, these can help keep your colleagues up-to-date with the resources and information on CensusAtSchool.
Nga mihi
Rachel, Chris and Anne
Theme: Making connections
Date: Friday 27th November
Venue: Tamaki Campus, University of Auckland,
Plenary speaker: Lillian Grace, CEO and founder Figure.NZ
Registrations opened: Tuesday 27 October
Online registrations will close Monday 9 November 5pm.
Workshops will cover levels 4 to 8 of the NZ curriculum incorporating material suitable for years 7 to 13 (and including Scholarship at year 13)
Detailed information on workshops and registration can be found via links at
https://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/en/for/schools/statistics-teachers-day.html
Making Connections
Where: University of Canterbury (Dovedale Campus)
When: Monday 23rd November 8:30 to 5pm
Plenary by Anna Martin (University of Auckland Department of Statistics)
Cost: $25 members, $50 non-members (will include 2015 membership)
4 workshops are running throughout the day, with an Ignite! session at the end.
Registration and invoice links can be found here.
Kristian Giles
Secretary for the CMA
Today is World Statistics Day!
Watch students at Kapiti College show how they use the inquiry cycle to make conclusions from data.
Today organisations, teachers and students from all over the world will be celebrating the role that data plays in our lives now and in the future.
Statistics New Zealand have launched a Level 3 time series resource to showcase how they analyze data, this presentation was well received at NZAMT 2015.
Other World Statistics Day classroom activities include a movie showing students how they can contribute to a data-driven future, and a poster explaining how statistics around the world are use to make decisions. These could be a great way to generate discussion about how we use statistics in the world outside school.
Also Anna Martin has produced a very addictive game to celebrate World Statistics day, what does your data look like?
Dear Colleagues
Here at the Friday Institute at NC State, I am offering a Massive Open Online Course for Educators (MOOC-ED) that is focused on “Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations”. The course is designed to target pedagogy and content for teachers (preservice, practicing, college-level teaching assistants, and teacher educators) in middle school, high school, and AP/ intro college levels. There will be many choices and options in the course for teachers to focus their learning around content that they teach. You can see a more detailed description of the course here:
The second run of the course will launch September 28th and has 6 weeks of material. Registration is open and FREE! There is an opportunity for to earn Certificate of Completion for either 20 hrs (for completing activities and engaging in discussions) or 25 hrs (also includes a project). It may be a great opportunity for teachers to work in teams to complete the course together.
Preservice teachers could complete activities in the course as part of assignments in an on-campus course or take it in addition to their on-campus courses to enhance their preparation to teach statistics.
If you teach a course or include units in your methods courses focused on teaching statistics, you may also want to engage with us in the MOOC-Ed to gain additional resources and ideas for your own courses.
In the course, participants will see many video-based examples of students and teachers engaging in statistics tasks, hear from a panel of experts on teaching statistics (Chris Franklin, Susan Friel, Webster West), learn about statistical habits of mind, be introduced to a framework for developing students’ statistical sophistication (adapted from GAISE), examine tasks, and engage with real data sets using dynamic tools such as TuvaLabs and Codap with the option of using StatCrunch or JMP (both have donated free licenses), or inexpensive tools like TinkerPlots, Fathom, or any other tool they are familiar with. Now doesn’t that all sound fun? Especially if you also have the option of engaging in discussions with teachers and teacher educators from all around the world?
I would appreciate it if you could spread the word about this course to your pre-service and local teacher contacts. I have attached a flyer that can be distributed. SmallFlyerforTSDIMOOC-EdFall2015
I am excited to offer this professional development for teachers and teacher educators on a wide scale and hope that it can be used to enhance the teacher education efforts in universities and local school districts!
If you have any questions let me know!
Many Smiles
Hollylynne
Are your students ready for an on-line statistical modeling challenge for maths week!? Expose your students to future careers that will be found at the intersection of data, visual arts and modelling.
Anna Martin has created a word difficulty ranking generator, students can gather data to try and model and predict a ‘readability score’. Statistics teachers if you would like to find out more background about the challenge visit Anna’s website.
How will the challenge run?
Monday to Tuesday
Students test their own words through the on-line text analyser, record data from these tests, and try to develop a way to predict the readability score. They should make some notes/diagrams for their model and use these to predict readability scores for the first set of reserved words.
Wednesday to Thursday
Students have access to check the first set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. This should help them refine their prediction model.
Friday
Students have access to check the second set of reserved words. They enter the readability score they would predict for each reserved word, and see how this compares to the actual readability score. They should only do this once (i.e. this should be their final evaluation of the model).
Keen to give it a go?
Here’s the place to send students: http://mathstatic.co.nz/predictive-text-challenge
Maths (and Stats!) week is on again from Monday August 10th until Friday August 14th 2015.
NZAMT have lots of great resources to help you make the most of a special week. If you have any Statistics resources you use for Maths Week and would like to share with others, CAS can help you do that: please email censusatschoolnz@gmail.com
