Field Data Collection: Power Without Pain

all right i have us right on time at 11 15. so let's go ahead and jump in i'm kylie donya i'm with the esri education team and today i get to talk with you guys about field data collection so my background at esri is actually that i started with our data collection app so i used to work on the product side and got to help make some of these apps i'm talking about today then i realized my passion is more with using gis with children and in education and so this happens to be one of my favorite sessions to present because not only does it get to be data collection but it's with kids and education it's like the intersection of some of my passions so i hope you guys enjoy this um i do want you to feel free ask your questions along the way we will be watching the chat and i look forward to having some discussion with you guys so first of all why data collection with kids well have you ever noticed that kids get really excited and animated when they get to start to put some data on the back right they're gonna get to generate data and maybe it's their own observations or maybe this is data from talking to people maybe like interviews or asking other people about their observations but part of that data that we're going to talk about in the field has where right so it can go on a map and that's why we're talking about it today and what we're actually going to talk about is both how students can do this as student projects and you can do it as class projects so what i cover today can work in both of those spaces and let's jump in all right there we go so really there's even more to data collection and more power to it than just putting data on a map because as i'm sure you're aware data is all around us we're always using it we're evaluating it and by doing data collection students are going to start to understand how to structure their data they're going to start to understand how to think critically about the data around them for example once you understand what goes into collecting data you understand you can't always take it for granted you need to look at well who collected it how did they do that what types of information did they collect to make that final conclusion because the students have experienced that process they're getting to build data step into roles as scientists and they come out as better data consumers and evaluators as well as understanding the world around them data collection is often thought to be really complex right that it takes a lot of setup and work and and it can and doing a complex project does take a lot of planning but not every data collection project needs to be so complex i'm going to jump over to the browser now and we're going to look at one of the data collection projects that if you've seen me present or heard from me you might have heard about this before i love this one this started for me when covid started and my own children who are elementary age were asking me what i do at work all day and loving data collection we started there and we just put together a very simple project we asked two questions no there we go what is your favorite color and there's a choice list and then where are you so you can pick the color and then you can go ahead and browse on the map click and put the pin about where you are and put your location and then you can submit that result i'm not going to bother submitting today i've done this one quite a number of times but what happens here is kids see the dot appear right onto the map okay so i think of this as participatory gis everyone can answer this question and get on the map but notice this scroll bar so we've already filled out the data collection and we're already looking at the map of answers and we're still not even halfway down so keep that in mind as we're talking right now data collection is actually just the beginning right it's how we get started and we'll come back here in a little bit so when we are talking about doing this data collection with your class let's first talk a little bit about what you're going to do you do need to have an arcgis for schools bundle which is the free software offering from esri or a gis club kit which is also free but a little bit smaller and a little more temporary with that you'll get all the apps i talk about today once you have that software you're not going to dive into it right away right that's just a requirement to moving this project forward but you're going to start with designing your project that's likely not and shouldn't be in the software at all once you've thought about your project and designed it then you're going to pick what app or tool you're going to use to do this project and you're going to set up that tool and then of course you're going to collect the data and use that collected data all right so project design you need to start by deciding what question you want to answer or what problem you want to solve so there might be a problem in society that your students want to solve there might be a pattern they've seen around them in the world that they would like to investigate or maybe they've noticed it and they wonder how far does it carry what are sort of the limits of this pattern so this design phase is all about figuring out what information you need to answer and solve your problem and what your problem is and it's going to be a little bit iterative okay you're not in the tech here so this is not about the buttons to click the mechanics of putting questions on a page honestly that's going to be one of the easiest parts and we'll get there but you have to be ready to get into there okay right now we want to understand what variables are going to contribute to solving our problem what answers do you want and here is really where kids are going to need the most guidance because what they're learning is how to ask good questions and how to get the needed information now as you're doing this planning and design a great way to start is at a whiteboard make sure you keep it interesting though right what's your problem or question what kind of information do you need what are you going to do with that information you want to be thinking about um if you're getting the right information to answer it for example if the question your students have is about a difference among age groups make sure they remember well did you record their age right there are little things like that is it a difference in genders well make sure you record you've asked and gotten the gender so your tech here the level you need to understand the tech right now is that all of the esri apps that you can use for data collection are going to do some similar things they're all going to capture location they're going to capture pictures for that location and additional info and that additional info is kind of the bucket you get to work with and decide what what you want putting what you want to be putting into it okay so focus right now on what kinds of information you need and what you want to do with it now here's always kind of the tough point for me in the next hour we're going to talk about once you have the data some ways to kind of go beyond just the data collection part and it's a chicken and an egg issue for me because to really do a good data collection project you already need to have in mind what you want to do with that data well to do something with the data you have to have the data so there any time you get into that back and forth chicken and egg what comes first it's probably a good indicator that you're going to do some iteration here okay so you're going to start and you're going to start the best you can and you may need to come back and evaluate again but start with things like what kind of data do i need do i need names what is a name okay a name is probably a string because i can't give someone choices i don't want to list all the names okay what if i want to ask a question like how long did it take or how long ago was it well if i give a string some people might say things like since last tuesday well i want a number of days okay that's important for me to recognize so i want to ask questions and i want to constrain the answers that i get the types of information i want i want a number i want it to be days so this is my design right i'm figuring out types like integers and units like days so that i get the right data now something to start thinking about there's not just strings and numbers there's other things right maybe you want to present a set of choices that people can pick between and here we do start edging a little bit into the tech right because what the tech can do is going to influence what we need to understand about the question so that type right that answer is it a number is it a string is it was it a choice out of a list that's going to influence what you can put on the map how you can make that map look right the style of it it's going to influence that to influence these statistics and it's going to influence the analysis that you can do so one thing one of my favorite things doing gis really is to play so start getting some ideas and then you'll get to jump in and start playing with those things now to play we do now start caring about the tech okay what i have on the slide here is three of the most popular data collection apps that esri has so survey123 is the one that's most popular in education and it's kind of like google forms with a map so you're filling out a form for example an interview arcgis field maps you may have heard of arcgis collector field maps consider them the same thing field maps is just the new version and this is putting info on a map so the map is a little bit more front and center if you care about the things around you as you're doing your collection you might find this a better fit and then there's quick capture which is very much about rapid data collection pressing a single button getting information and moving on and in education survey 123 is the most popular and so that's the one we're really going to dig in today now if you find that there's a different one of these apps that you are more interested in we'll have i do have a resource to help you pick which one and in it it also has resources on getting started with all of these so you'll have all of that information and i have the link at the end or i can throw it into the chat let me just grab it really quick and find my chat window there's that url so when you're looking these apps and again they'll be at the end here all right so i did say that survey123 is the most popular but there's a few considerations that you can make while you're choosing and i'm just going to go over them really quick again that link i just stuck in the chat will go into detail do you have a network connection arcgis field maps works great without a network connection survey123 can be set up to it takes a little more work but it gets there and quick capture is you know coming up behind it does everyone have a login the arcgis field maps and quick capture do require the person submitting the data to be signed in can you install apps maybe it's a phone or tablet maybe you're asking the public and so you're not going to ask them to install an app well survey123 you can fill out in a browser but arcgis field maps or quick capture you would need to install an app and then are you updating data so different apps work with that in this case field maps and survey can do that editing and are you working with advanced location and gps positions and want that accuracy well you might want to consider field maps it has some great tools for that and the final one is if you have a geo mentor that you're working with they're a great resource and source of knowledge if they have a preference if they have some expertise in one of these that might help you have a successful project because they'll be able to help you more easily all right now we're ready so let's go ahead and let's dig in and we're going to make a survey so let's come back in here and so when you come into survey123 you'll see i have a number of surveys you may not have quite so many yet but what you will have is a new survey button and you're going to click that to get started survey123 connect is once you want to do some more advanced things i almost always start in the web designer and usually with a blank survey and we can give it a name getting to know each other and let's give it some tags we'll just go with demo today and let's just go to creating now the great thing about survey123 is that behind the scenes what it's doing right now is it's creating the future services that you need to work with in order to use this data in a number of ways that helps keep it safe and secure so what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to add some fields onto here the first thing i may want to know who's filling out my form so i'm going to go ahead and add a text field now if i wanted i could give them some information about how to fill out this field and i'm not going to do this for everyone you're going to get the basic idea here there's a panel on the side and over here is where i pick the values for this for example is it required well that's pretty important i i try to use required sparingly but you need to use it enough that you get the data you want right because we've designed our project and we know the things we have to know i always ask myself if someone's not willing to answer this question do i want them to bother filling out my survey and when the answer is no if they're not going to answer they shouldn't fill it out require the question then they have to answer okay and here in the top you can choose different things you're doing in this case we're adding another question so we'll pick add and let's put a map on in because after all this is a geographic project and we can again give it a question and give it a little bit more information i find with the map that's often useful because some people aren't quite sure how to work with that especially if you're having other people fill this out let's see we can add images and let's see some other good ones in here okay a single choice right this will allow you um i find that kind of the names are misleading right so there's single choice and there's multiple choice don't think of that like a multiple choice quiz because really it's a a single answer and a multiple answer you have multiple choices in both of them so let's go ahead and fill out in this case let's find out what breakfast drinks people like and we're going to give them a set of choices now this is one of my favorite tips in survey123 if you haven't noticed it there is a batch edit button you could click here type in your first choice click the next one and click the next i find it much easier to sometimes plan this ahead of time and i have it in another document because i've done my planning so i can go ahead and use that to paste them all in at once instead of having to add each of those items and just so we can see what it looks like here's a multi-choice as well and we can do the same thing with that one where we have a selection of answers and we'll go ahead and batch edit to add them in and there are times strings are appropriate and the reason i'm going to put another one in is we'll see some just different ways to look at it so why don't you go ahead and tell me what your favorite book is and let's add in a number as well we can put in a number and we can say um how many egg you seeds have you been to all right and let's go ahead and set a range on that when i can say you know what everyone has to have been to at least zero and i don't think anyone's been to more than 40. so we can put those numbers in now of course you want to constrain these so it makes sense for your data right i'm just showing you some examples at this point i would want to look at my survey and make sure things like did i make required the ones i wanted oh i didn't even remember to get the question for this one so let's go ahead get back to that one make sure i've filled that out so scroll through see how it looks and you can save your work you can also preview it and see what the survey looks like so far when you do that it takes you out of this editing look and feel and into the using look and feel as if you're filling it out and you can even choose to see how it would look on different devices if you're curious once you're done with this you're going to go ahead and publish publishing takes your survey and actually packages it up and gets it ready to be used but it's not ready to use yet well it is ready but only by you because one thing we haven't done yet is shared it so as soon as it's published you'll be able to share it and when you share again because survey123 is smart it's going to know all the different pieces to share and how to share them for you so right now it's taking all those and setting them up all right so one thing i did go through this a little quick um i do find it's a fairly intuitive interface it is a lot of drag and drop and filling out options on the side and again play go in and try the different ones see what the different things look like once you've done that you'll be able to come in here to the collaborate tab and on collaborate you can choose who you're going to share the survey with so this is all about who can submit it who can fill it out right and maybe i want to make everyone or maybe just my organization or a certain group that's up to me and i can make that change and i can save it now today i actually made one already and we're going to go ahead and look at it from the filling out point of view all right whoops sorry about that let me get that browser back up all right so let's jump into the next tab and here is what our survey will look like that's the designer sorry let me go ahead into the collaborate tab okay so this is the one i prepared ahead of time and when you're ready for people to fill it out again we want to make sure the sharing is set up correctly and then they need this link so we can take that link and if you'd like to fill out this survey you're welcome to you can also get a qr code i find this really useful because you can just download it right here and stick it into an email very handy for sharing the survey or if you're having your class do a project and you've created your survey together you can share that at the front of the room and if your class is using like ipads they can take pictures of that and open your survey all right so now let's go ahead and open our survey to fill it out if you're not doing this on your own that's fine just join me okay so you can put your name onto the map you can go ahead and put where you live i'm not going to let my browser determine it for me i can go ahead and search right in i can also search i work at our redlands location so we get our our pin right there on the map we can pick an image file if we want it's not required so i'll skip it today actually i am very much a water drinker i love reading exercise in the outdoors uh i'm not sure if i can ever pick a favorite book we'll go with a favorite book not my very favorite book and the number of educ's i've been to well i'm newer on the team and we can submit that answer all right once you've submitted it you'll be able to explore that data as you can see in here we're looking at the results of the survey and there's we're in the same tab but we're over here in analyze now so just to orient ourselves before when we were authoring we were in design we went to collaborate to share and now we've moved over to analyze and you can see that when there are enough answers we start to get a word cloud we'll also see people who did take pictures you can see them submitted in here we can see the charts of the information so we're getting a look at this data that we've put in now we can take that farther okay actually i think i'm supposed to go back to slides let me catch myself for a minute and make sure if i'm missing any important slides all right before i jump to that dashboard because i i get into this stuff i'm just ready to go so we've asked some questions we've found some answers but that's not it right so no one else in the world has this information you've just collected it so what we're going to do instead here sorry i've just lost my train of thought right so no one else has this information and what do we want to do with it we can make sure it's valid right we want to look at our data we want to analyze it we can discuss it we could map it we're going to learn from it we can maybe share it we could do these in different ways we can make a map right we could put a map out and we could share that map see where the points fall on the map well maybe we want to explore some of the connections in the data right some of those things we were looking at in the survey app of seeing those charts was useful i can share something like that through a dashboard or even through the survey app or maybe i even want to put a whole narrative and tell the story around it and i'm going to go to a story map for that but let's jump in really quickly and see some of this so from here we could make a dashboard that shows our data so you can see our beverages along the bottom the books people like we have who it was and this is all older data i believe i need to refresh because i didn't set this one up to have that auto refresh set on correctly that was my mistake yep and you can see quite a number of you have filled that out and so coffee is by far the most popular i don't know about all you coffee drinkers out there all right so what else can we do with this data here's another dashboard you might recognize this one from the plenary earlier today and you can see the similar information i'm just showing it to show that your dashboard can be pretty simple or you can start to make it more complex you can add bar charts you can add all these other controls if you want to learn more about the dashboards we'll be going over that in the next hour so just join us again now i'm going to return to the favorite color that we looked at at the beginning you may or may not have known when we looked at it before that this is a story map and so in here what we've done is we have our survey and we've embedded our map right with it and this is where we stopped last time my internet is taking quite a hit today sorry about that so here's where we stopped last time looking at the map but there was more right there's what could we analyze what can we look deeper into all right so there's more that you can keep doing you can do different kinds of analysis of where different colors are i'm not going to go into this too much we'll be playing with all these things you can do after you've collected data in the next hour but in case you can't make it i did want to give you just a taste of the maps the dashboards the story maps and all these things you can do with your data once you've collected it because collecting it is really just the beginning all right so we've looked at those and next i wanted to talk about one other thing we're starting to get back to more normal right there's a little bit less remote instruction but some things we're learning have been good so i did want to mention that this is a great kind of project to do when people aren't near each other because you can use these apps from anywhere you could be doing data collection around your house you could be doing it in your neighborhood you could even send links to friends and family so it is a great project to keep in mind when you are looking for something and you are a bit dispersed hopefully we won't have to do too many more of those projects but maybe it even means collecting data around different parts of your city after people have gone home for the night all right so we took kind of a whirlwind look here's a bunch of links that are going to help you learn more so as i mentioned you do need to have a bundler a club kit both of those are for k-12 free offerings to get your accounts there's some places you can go to get some project ideas there's a geoproject hub i also shared the link in the chat earlier to get the apps and schools and get some information there and some information about going offline with survey123 finding a geomentor for the data collection we've got another presentation and you should join us over in that one and i'm going to go ahead and see if there are any questions kelly we had some really interesting questions and uh one of them was about um whether there is a way for the users who have entered some data to be able to go in and edit that data great so that's a good question i'm going to jump back into survey because the answer to that question is going to be right down here so if you're using survey123 you can choose if people are able to add only or add an update or even add update and delete so it is possible to go back and edit the record you do have to set it up and help them get back to their record and you you can only you allow them to only do these things with their own records so it's not like they can go edit someone else's right but you can configure it that way okay there was another question about whether any of these tools do a sort of breadcrumb uh tracing and i thought it was that a couple of them do okay so by breadcrum from tracy you mean like tracking where the person has been as they go cracking exactly okay so there are a couple different options with that right now older versions of collector have their own way of doing it built in workforce because you could link that to your data collection it's another esri app that it didn't do the data collection but could track the people where they were and now the best way to do it is with tracker which you enable separately and you have a special type of layer so it's a lot more performant and then you'll be able to track and see the tracks with that one wow there's a great that's a great list of uh links to the get an arcgis for schools bundle all the way down to find a geo mentor that's a great list yeah there's some good ones in there and of course ema you can always email us at schools esri.com if you have other questions right now there is an indication that uh sometimes uh okay lots of lots of good questions coming in here uh there are um questions about if people have trouble submitting uh photos in a survey one two three is there are there some tricks to a successful use of the use yeah so sometimes that's going to come down to your data connection right because one of the one of the things with field data collection is you are out in the field and while you are there your device may or may not have a strong connection now all of the apps are designed to be able to handle that in different ways so for example with survey123 if you're in the field and collecting data and you can't submit it and you're working in a browser that's not going to work so well because that that data you've collected only lives in the browser right if you're using the survey123 app i didn't really talk about this but i kind of mentioned it you can download an app and use that now if you've downloaded the app it's going to be much better about storing the data you've collected in the field and then you can send it all back in once you're at a better what connection cool there was a uh there was a question early on that made me think about the privileges that somebody needs to have in order to create one of these can you talk about that sure so first of all a little bit for filling them out survey one two three anyone can do it right can even be shared publicly you don't even have to be signed in now for creating it you do need to be able to publish services because you are publishing some services behind the scenes so that's the big one there you do need to be a publisher so the whoever is creating the survey controls who gets to fill it out yep yep so right in here you get to pick who you want submitting it now i didn't get into this but you also will get to pick who can see the results so those can be different groups of people so that's something to think about but if you want to have somebody edit this data how does it keep track of that the right person is editing their data right so if you're doing some of the updating you it actually what happens is behind the scenes the feature service stores the na the username of the person who created that record and so there are limitations because it's shared in special ways arcgis online is actually really smart and can set up your data to only let you even though you're able to see the layer you'll only see your things in that layer so if i took the layer and added it to a map i would see the points i'd added charlie if he added it to the map would see a different set of points because he'd only be seeing his data so that's one thing to be aware of and we'll talk a little bit about those different layers and what you're going to use each one for in the next session when we talk about using this data that we've just collected all right we are out of time i appreciate everyone who's joined us and hopefully we'll see some of you uh at the at top of the hour right thanks everyone you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 110

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, Education Summit

Id: yGpl-JeC_WE

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021