There is no doubt about it, most people (particularly children) find looking at data dull. It’s not hard to get away from raw data though. You only have to watch the first ten minutes of the BBC news to see data being visualised in a variety of ways – infographics, live tweets, and immersive maps, for example. Yet in many schools, we still insist on limiting data analysis to hand drawn charts or bar graphs in Excel. It is our job as educators to use data in more creative and engaging ways. We need to make it tell stories and, at the same time, help the children in our classes understand complicated patterns and trends. Technology can help us do this and, in this lesson plan, we are going to investigate some tools that will allow you and your pupils to explore data in a whole new way.
