Journal 7

Evaluation of InspireData and Atomic Learning’s Tutorial Modules on InspireData.

It is never easy to learn a new program. I recently received a long-overdue computer upgrade at work, and now have Office 2007 installed on my computer. YIKES! If I had known that was going to happen, I would begged for the old Office version.

Since I am a science teacher, I thought it would be best to try out InspireData. In fact, I have only heard of Venn Plots in teaching venues, and have never experimented with graphic representation in this format. So, this assignment was both a treat for me.

Before I downloaded the program, I watched the Quick Tour on InspireData’s website to gain a better idea of the program’s offerings. The tutorial was decent and I mistakenly thought I could use the program with the 45 seconds of gained knowledge. I was able to set-up the attributes in the table of InspireData easily, then decided to import my fields from Excel. This was simple to accomplish and easy to reformat and delete extraneous data and fields. The trouble arose when I tried grouping data in the Venn Plot. I watched the two minute Atomic Learning (AL) Video on Plotting Venn Plots (one time only) and quickly learned the correct technique to plot three field attributes in a Venn Plot. I was disappointed with one aspect of the tutorial, and it is no fault of AL. It seems (and I could be wrong!) that the 30-day Trial Version of Inspire Data allows for only three equalities for the field attributes: equal to, not equal to(I am still unsure of the /= function?), and contains. The AL tutorial demonstrated the ability to set your numerical fields equal to a “greater than” or “less than” mathematical function, a function that works well for numerical data like the Exams grades I was trying to compare. I worked my way around this deficiency by converting grades to alpha text, and was able to gain the Venn relationships between Gender, Exam 2, CHEM 100 Grades, and Attendance to supplemental CHEM Team Learning Sessions. This program is powerful in graphically and dynamically displaying data, and offers an excellent opportunity to teach students about relationships between data sets. I highly recommend you try this program; there are many established data sets you and your students can play around with supplement learning in science and math classes. I will display this Venn Plot to my students next week to illustrate the trends in their learning.