Statistics Week 2

This week was a little bit of fun.  In the past, I've compared looking at student test scores and formative assessments to looking at baseball stats.  This week, in the scenarios in the guided practice, it felt more like I was looking at a player's stat line and evaluating how he would be expected to perform.  I felt like I was guessing a lot of the time, or at least describing a scenario that could be true, as opposed to what necessarily is true.

One stat I'm still hung up on is Standard Deviation.  I understand that it is connected to range, but I'm still a little hazy on exactly what it means for a collection of numbers.  But say there was a set of numbers, most around 100 let's say.  Then there was one at 7.  Would the SD be the same as a series of evenly spaced numbers covering the same range?  If that were the case, I'm not sure how it's necessarily useful given that we already know the range.  If it's not the case, then I need to go back and look into SD a little more.

The survey tools investigation was a bit of an eye-opener.  I didn't realize people were paying so much for survey software.  For an individual teacher, it seemed like the free subscriptions often covered much of what I wanted to do.  One of the tools (I think it might have been Poll Everywhere) offered the ability to identify respondents, and that would definitely be helpful in the classroom were I to use it for a graded assessment.  However, there are plenty of services like Edmodo or Quia for giving quizzes.