Inspire Data is a simplified spreadsheet and graphing program. I imagine this is the type of program that would be best used by elementary school children to middle school aged children. The exercises they provide are interesting and engage the children in a search for information and clues from the data. It actually seems quite similar to geocaching or that it could be used for that purpose.
-good for organizing data such as changes over time of a location, population, # of injuries, immigration, etc.
It has its quirks but I’m still working on figuring these things out:
-you can’t graph a lot of data at once (about 11 classes of data
at once, what if there’s a class of 25 students?)
- hard to tell where the independent and dependent variables need
to be on the axis because you have a choice about where you can
put them
- need pages of instructions to figure out how it works, not ideal
for younger aged children
Also, need to find out if it is compatible with our GIS programs so that we can use it. This might be helpful for the RAMS Camp kids I’ve discussed in the past, when they come back home to find things they learned about at camp. It is easy to transfer data to excel if needed and then convert it to something we can use with mappler or our GIS programs .
This is what I have seen so far. I will tell you more once I learn other functions like: how to convert data into graphs and charts and.
