Data sharing

I have been looking for a way to gather and share data about the use of electricity. The purpose is to provide a data set for classes studying electrical energy to use, either for interpreting and graphing activities or for comparing with calculated estimates..

I spent a while going through a few possibilities, including a google site, a blog and a wiki. In the end, the easiest and clearest presentation seems to be just to publish a google doc with the data in. This is simple and clean for me and gives direct and transparent access to the data.

Seems obvious really now that I think about it. Sometimes it seems I try and make things more complicated than they need to be.

Here is the html display for sharing.

I have also been putting some more questions on to Quia. This time I have been adding IBSL Physics questions. I have learned here that thinking through the choice of labels is important. I used some for IGCSE (e.g. mechanics) that overlap with the IB ones so that they can get mixed up in quizzes. I have now started using labels like ‘IBSL_Mechanics”. Overall this seems to be a useful addition to the resources and a good way of leveraging the past paper questions for the students. If I could think of a way of doing paper 2 questions, that would be great.

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Online quiz making

I have been trying to find a way to make use of all the past paper questions that we have. There are hundreds of them in the files and it might be useful to have them available for the students to do quick self tests as part of their review.
I have looked through a few sites for this including survey monkey and polldaddy. The one that seems to me to be most fit for purpose is Quia which is made for this purpose. Questions go into a questionbank with labels and this can then select a random group of questions with a specified label. The students can then try this and get immediate feedback. To save retyping the question, the bank accepts images, so I can do a screenshot and upload that. The workflow for doing this is a bit complicated and it takes a while to upload a set of questions. This is what I have come up with for a workflow:
Open the paper
Grab each question as a separate screenshot for one subject
Put the questions in a folder
Rename the files with paper year, answer, labels (e.g. S07 A Physics waves) – works best in coverflow view in finder
Upload all the files to Quia – can do 5 at a time
Put them in a folder on quia named for the paper and subject to avoid long lists of files
Go to questionbank and make a template question with a “-” for text, ABCD choices and correct, incorrect feedback.
Duplicate the question about 13 times for the question set
Add image to each question and add correct answer and topic label
Complete questions then add subject label to each question

Here is a sample quiz

I guess this takes about 40 minutes for a 2 subjects from a paper.

Choice of labels seems important for usability

This is a subscription service, so I will need to see if I can get a school subscription or find a free alternative – will ask tech support. The workflow isn’t smooth so I would definitely be open to something else