It is my ultimate dream to create a paperless classroom. I could take the stance that this goal is purely from an eco-conscious standpoint, but selfishly I am tired of dealing with broken-down printers and copy machines.  Wouldn’t it be great to avoid them altogether?  Why not have your students do all of the work on your Xperia tablets and then email them to you, export them to other apps, or the Web.

My third graders recently participated in “real-world” application of measurement that was not only fun but incorporated many CCSS Math standards.  After the stress of the State testing, I wondered, “Why not have a paper airplane derby?”  My students LOVE paper airplanes and I could get them to unwittingly do math. A win-win situation.

Specifically, third graders need to, “generate measurement data by measuring lengths using rulers marked with halves and fourths of an inch. Show the data by making a line plot, where the horizontal scale is marked off in appropriate units— whole numbers, halves, or quarters.”  So after marking off 2 feet intervals, my students were responsible for measuring with a ruler the distance in between the intervals for a flight distance total.  If I had a class set of tablets, I imagine my students would create a spreadsheet using the Google Drive app to keep track of their data.

Each student could then share the spreadsheet with each other and with me.  If they wanted to make a bar graph using Google Drive they would be able to do that on any desktop computer (it was too difficult to try to do this on the tablet- even when you looked at the document in a browser and in desktop view).

Another option is to use an app called Graph trial which is free and has a simplistic format for making bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts.  It was easy for me to figure out and I know that my third graders can handle using it with minimal frustration. The first thing you need to do is to give your graph a title and then select the type of chart you are going to make. The titles of the vertical and horizontal axes are then given a name as well as the range.  The students then add the data in the fields x axis plot name and value.

This is an example of what the Paper Airplane Distance data looks like in the bar graph.

This is what the data looks like as a line graph.

You can easily switch among the 3 types of data representation by clicking on the tabs on the top left side.  When you touch the Menu tab you have more options.

If you choose to “Share graph image” there are a variety of apps that will pop up to export the graph. Your options depend on what other apps you have downloaded and some will not be appropriate for this activity. (To see what to do with some of these other apps, just click here for my Sony Education Ambassador page).

No need to print! You can embed their graphs in your Google Site or any other Web site. You can even open the File transfer app to save it on the SD card.  It is that simple!  Your students have successfully measured to the nearest quarter inch AND they have represented their data in a graph.