Homework the previous night was to record the genre of the next 25 songs they listened to. I showed ’em how to sort their songs by “Last Played” in iTunes.
They came back the next day and I had them tally up their genres, again, building stacked bars of their music preferences. Everyone used the same color/genre legends and we posted a long strip of music preferences on the back wall.
For reasons I can’t quite recall, I had them come up to my laptop at the front and punch their preferences into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet also. Makes me sound like some School 2.0 badass but I didn’t do anything with it that I can remember.
I did beat it into them over and over again how cool it was we could draw conclusions about our class’ preferences at a quick glance.
4 Comments
Rich
November 23, 2007 - 12:20 pm -Thanks for giving me some great *real world* ideas to use when I do my own pre-algebra data analysis unit in the spring (also our 6th grade has a unit on data analysis too).
Sad to not see any classic rock anywhere in that there color legend! Kids these days…………. ;-)
(p.s. your PDF links aren’t working at the moment)
Ben Chun
November 23, 2007 - 1:47 pm -Are they going by the genre encoded in the song’s ID3 tag, and displayed by iTunes? Or do you have class-wide criteria for differentiating between “rap” and “hip hop”?
dan
November 23, 2007 - 2:03 pm -Got that fixed now, Rich.
Ben, mostly they just guessed at it. Some used the tags on their iPod or iTunes but most didn’t.
Hanefi Ãœnver
April 30, 2008 - 10:32 am -when I do my own pre-algebra data analysis unit in the spring (also our 6th grade has a unit them over and over again how cool it was we could draw conclusions about our class’