Make Units More Inspiring with Vision Boards

Want to make learning more visible for your students?  Sure you do.  According to Amanda Cardenas, "A unit vision board is a lesson planning tool that allows teachers to imagine their units as an experience and think through what it would feel like to be part of that experience."  For example this is an example for The Great Gatsby.

She has a folder that has many examples.  To see her article and podcast click here, hopefully after checking out my amazon.ca ads below.   If you are  making any amazon.ca purchase  please click on my links below first as I will get a small commission on anything you buy even if it is something else as long as it is within 24 hours.   Thanks.  This post may contain affiliate links that earns me  a commission at no extra cost to you.  Buy your Christmas gifts soon and check out the pre Black Friday ads below.   The JBL ear buds below are a great price again.  I might even buy a pair at $89 for myself.

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Why Understanding Data Visualization is Key

 

Todays post reminded me of back in teachers college (yes I know the 1800s) we had a prof I call Dr Flooby Stats as he always would produce a graph and state something about it that I would always lose my mind over his interpretation.  The worst was when he had a bar graph with no vertical data and no sample size.  One bar would be twice the size of the others  and he would say that this bar was much larger than that bar and blah blah blah.  I would raise my hand and say your data has no values so I cannot judge myself.  When pressed on his data it usually turned out that one bar was only a couple percent larger as when he put real numbers on the chart it was not to scaled from zero.  He would then say, "well it is statistically significant".  I would then usually say something like, I should be the judge of that.  You should place numbers on your graphs and tell me what the sample size is.  If you would like to read the article that reminded me of this click here, hopefully after checking out my amazon.ca ads below.   If you are Canadian and making any amazon.ca purchase please click on my links below first as I will get a small commission on anything you buy even if it is something else.   Thanks.  This post may contain affiliate links that earns me  a commission at no extra cost to you.  Buy your Christmas gifts soon and check out the pre Black Friday ads below.

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Google Public Data Explorer

 

Google Public Data Explorer is a free way to analyze public data.  I first posted about this in 2015.  It is worth taking a look at it again. You can look at fertility rate, life expectancy, HIV prevalence,  education, etc for many countries all at once.  You pick what you want to plot on what axis.  You can animate the graph through the century by moving a slider to see how things change over time.  To see this website click here.   This might work well in your Data Analysis class or Statistics unit.  This might work in your Geography class if you want to look at GDP versus Population Density, etc.  Play around with it to see what you can find out.

Google Public Data Visualizer

Google Public Data Visualizer is a free way to analyze public data.  You can look at fertility rate, life expectancy, HIV prevalence,  education, etc for many countries all at once.  You pick what you want to plot on what axis.  You can animate the graph through the century by moving a slider to see how things change over time.  To see this website click here.   This might work well in your Data Analysis class or Statistics unit.  This might work in your Geography class if you want to look at GDP versus Population Density, etc.  Play around with it to see what you can find out.

History Cartoon Analysis

This online active from "Active History"  is so that students can work on understanding political cartoons in a historical context.  You can choose from:  The Peace Treaties after WWI, League in the 1920s, Nazi Germany and others.  To see the website click here.