I have often been frustrated when wanting to find a meaningful data sets for class use.  I hate making up sets of data just so students can find the mean, or graph it.  That to me is the essence of busy work.  

So on this Monday morning, imagine my joy, when I stumbled upon DASL (pronounced dazzle).  DASL stands for Data And Story Library.  This site contains many different data sets AND the accompanying story of how the data was collected.  

Within 30 minutes I had located a great data set on student opinion on popularity and put together a quick introduction to finding 'averages' for my sixth grade math class.  I love that I was able to find data from real sixth graders for my students to puzzle over (see file below).  

I will present them with the data set and ask them a few questions to puzzle over the data before introducing the idea of mean, median, and mode to help us identify patterns in the data.

Thank you DASL!

Doctopus is a Google Apps for Education saviour!  Created by Andrew Stillman, it is a script that installs into a Google Drive Spreadsheet that contains your students and their emails (the email needs to be one that allows them to access Google Drive).  Once installed the, the script will run inside the spreadsheet to create multiple copies of a file and share them all with students, name them how you want, and make sure they all are organized in a folder of your choosing.  

It takes about 3 minutes of work to set it all up (maybe 10 minutes the first time since you have to create your roster of students), but it saves at least 30 minutes of time locating student files that have been shared with you, and tracking down students who forgot to share or who more likely misspelled your email.
Below is a quick video that simply shows what Doctopus does.  If you like what you see, then please have a read through the instructions document that I shared with my staff at a recent PD session.  Also the video below called Doctopus Demonstration is a great walk through by Katie Grassel, which is how I learned to use it for the first time.

This may be one of the coolest pieces of educational tech I've seen ever, and it's currently free to use!  Desmos is basically a piece of graphing software that allows you to interactively change the variables with a slider and in real time see the changes.  I particularly love the "play" feature which will automate the slider movement between the preset minimum and maximum values.  They also have tons of examples to get you started.

Below is a sample graph about waves I made in about 5 minutes for a Grade 8 Science inquiry into wave properties.  I was able to add some text questions on the side with the sliders.  The equation was from an example and I simply changed a few of the variables so that amplitude was (a) and period was (p).  Now students can explore the way the ways change before I ever tell them anything about how amplitude and period are defined.  My guess is that 5 minutes of prep, and 5 minutes of playing around with students will result in far greater conceptual understanding than I could achieve with them in 2-3 periods of manual graphing, reading, and discussion.  Personally I'd have the metal slinkies out next for them to replicate and explain the phenomenon next!

The customization of the equations is pretty staggering.  Note the equation editing options in the image above, which work great on the iPad by the way.

Desmos is pretty amazing even if you never tweak a thing, but just use their provided templates.  You have to make sure to click the drop down menu in the very top right (3 lines right above the + symbol).  In the example below I would have students play around with the sliders before I ever defined y, m, and b and instead let the students inquire into them, and then use a follow up discussion to clarify any misconceptions.  

Another great inquiry I think would be into lines of best fit.  Inspired by a lesson from my fantastic maths colleague Melissa, I quickly found some information on speed of sound vs air temp and entered the points into a table.  Then I had to decide which type of line I should insert (linear, quadratic, exponential, etc).  I added a line of y=mx +b and then tweak the min/max values of the sliders to match the data and then started sliding to see if I could find a formula for the line of best fit.  I came up with y=0.599x + 334.  When I checked the real value I found that it was y=0.6x + 331.4.  That is pretty awesome considering I took 7 data points and in 5 minutes was pretty awesomely close.  I was able to predict that at 1000 C the speed would be 992.9 m/s.  When checked against published data it was found to be 941.4 m/s.  That means I was off by about 5%.  Not good enough for NASA, but good enough for a 5 minute inquiry (thanks again Melissa for that great analogy).  

To check out more awesomeness with Desmos, check out:
The Common Ratio: http://thecommonratio.blogspot.com/2013/10/des-man-vodcasts.html where Ange lays out an awesome inquiry with her Grade 11s using DesMan inspire by....
Finding Ways to Nguyen Students Over: http://fawnnguyen.com/2013/03/20/des-man.aspx, and on to the tool...

DesMan Teacher Edition: https://class.desmos.com/desman 

ScreenLeap.com is nice web app that allows you to share your screen with anyone.  The sharing takes place all within your browser so there's no need to download any programs (other than making sure you have java script installed in your browser).

The refresh rate isn't amazing, so you won't be sharing any video with this method, but you could use it for presentations, or just sharing what you're looking at.  In class I used it to share a presentation from my laptop to the desktop computer that was hooked up to the projector.  There was about a 5 second lag in refreshing, so again, animations would be affected, but not simply content sharing. 

I would suggest having students use it to quickly share what they have on their laptops with the class without having to have them come and plug their computers into the projector.  You could simply have them all share and then switch between view, especially if you open them up in multiple tabs.  

Might also be a way to keep track of what their working on!  I could imagine asking a student who is not on task to share their screen with me so that I could periodically check in on them and they wouldn't be able to alt-tab out of a program to hide it from me!

I’m always a little bit wary of info graphics, largely because as a scientist/mathematician I want to see the raw data too, just to make sure sure I agree with the presentation of the data.  However, that doesn’t mean that all info graphics are incorrect and they are increasingly more popular, so teaching students to evaluate them is an important 21st century skill.

The Aside Blog has a fantastic page full of links to various info graphics for you to use in class.  I also love the video they highlight by Column Five which talks about specific visualization strategies for presenting data.  So if you’re interested in data visualization and info graphics, head on over to the blog and start indulging your inner data geek.

Originally posted on March 5, 2012

I have just stumbled across the best source for high quality maps of all sorts of wacky types.  Over at Reddit there is a group that aggregates great map images.  Unfortunately it has an unfortunate name that makes it educational unfriendly, and might get stuck in your schools filter, so be warned.  The group is called Map P*rn, which is the unfortunate part, however, the site is moderated and the content is only full of sexy maps.

Tons of old maps, new maps, fantasy maps, enough to satisfy even the most fanatical map loving humanities teacher.  Below are a few public domain examples that I found in a minute of browsing (and another minute to verify the public domain status!)