Last week of Stats

This week was incredibly busy for me.  In addition to the work we had, I am also the festival manager for our solo & ensemble festival in Mukwonago.  This year alone we have 24 schools, about 7 or 8 non-member participants and over 2,000 students performing at over 840 events.  I am currently scheduling all of those events and it gets a little crazy.

Anyway, I had fun trying to find the information for the bibliography.  I didn't realize how much information about music careers were out there and that there have actually been statistical data about them.  I found interesting things about various music careers, all the way from music teachers to recording artist to film sound engineer.  It was truly amazing and very neat to read about and learn.  I really enjoyed this assignment and hope to use this in future concert programs and publications.

Survey's and Search

This week was a blast getting our survey results gathered.  I have a lot of fun, I know it may be a little strange, gathering up that data and making various charts.  The Google Doc options make creating these charts a snap and I always have a lot of fun manipulating data like this.

We also had to watch a video on Bill Tanzer that discussed how research is formed based on what is being searched on various search engines.  It is amazing how much information can be gathered based on the simple search criteria.  Amazing things these search engines are.  :)

Survey Bliss

I was really excited about the assignment this week.  We had to create a survey.  I love surveys, not sure why, but I really enjoy learning how to manipulate the data into graphs and charts.  I'm not sure why I enjoy this, but for some reason I find the ability take information from surveys or questionnaires and such, and create an easy way to interpret the information.

Recently, I started tracking our music department enrollment numbers and have been able to enter this information into a short questionnaire for other teachers.  I've now been able to take that information and using bar graphs, pie charts, trend line, etc., I can present this information to administration as a point of keeping music programs in our district.  Given the current political climate, I thought it would be prudent to be able to show how much our numbers have grown.