Building Mini Reports

An effective teaching strategy is to allow students to report their results back to their class.  The ensuing exchanges between students can be quite active and lively.  This type of activity contributes to the overall engagement of all students with their course material and improve acquisition and retention.  In this post, we will discuss how Myrtle spreadsheet makes it easy for students to generate mini reports that can be presented to their class in a quick and convenient slide show presentation format. 

Let's suppose a group of students have chosen as a course project to expand on the linearizing transformations material they encountered in their textbook Introduction to Statistics with Myrtle.  They decide they really want to explore how linear regression is used in allometric studies of whales, dolphin, and other cetaceans.  In particular, they want to research how allometry can be used to predict the mass of a ceteacean based only on a measurement of the animal's long bone diameter.

In order to begin constructing their presentation, they first want to include some images describing to the audience what cetaceans are.  They have already found the Wikipedia page for ceteceans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacea.  Next, in Myrtle they would click on the sharing icon
  and select "Post Links..."

They would enter (copy and paste) the URL to the Wikipedia page they found into the dialog that appears

and then click "Ok".  Of course, no images will appear yet since the URL is not to a specific image (.jpg, .gif, .png etc), but rather to an entire web page that actually contains multiple images.  To browse and select the specific images that they want, the students would simply choose "Select from page..." from the registered link's popup menu.

 
The interactive dialog which appears browses the images available on the page.  The students could then use the arrows to browse through the images and select the ones that they want.  This process can be repeated for as many images as the students would like to have in their presentation.

Finally, once completed, they can view the images as well (as any graphical results generated from Myrtle statistical analyses) together as a slide show.

To do this, they would again click on the sharing icon

and then select "Slide show..."

The students can use the play control buttons to pause and  advance the slides of the slide show. For example, in their presentation they might explain how they were able to use linear regression of some published data to predict the mass of any ceteacean based only on a measurement of its long bone diameter!