US Government Open Data Set

 

You can visit the U.S. Government’s open data sets to find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, design websites, apps, simulations and more. Utilize the data to create real world research lessons and activities for your students.  To see the website click here.

 If you used an idea from this website then buy Mr H a gatorade :)  Thank you

Data GIF Maker: Tell Stories with Your Data

 

Designed to help you tell stories with data, Data Gif Maker is a quick and easy way to make animated data visualizations. It doesn’t have many features; however, its simplicity makes it perfect for many situations where you’re only comparing data between a few items. 

To see this click here hopefully after checking out my amazon.ca ads below.    If you are making any   amazon.ca purchases  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.  Remember you can follow me by clicking on the blue follow button above. This post may contain affiliate links that earns me  a commission at no extra cost to you. 

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NY Times - What's Going On in This Graph

Here is a bonus post for today.  Yesterday the New York Times announced that they would publish monthly, "What's Going On in This Graph".    According to their website, "Teachers tell us these data visualizations are rich texts for classrooms across the curriculum, not just in the math or statistics class. Whether in a literature class analyzing Jane Austen’s language, a science class considering climate data, or a civics class studying gerrymandering, teaching students how to read, interpret and question graphs, maps and charts is a key 21st-century skill."  To see the website click here.

Data Maven

Data Maven by Crunchzilla is an interactive website that runs a tutorial on Data and Statistics.  To see this website click here.

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.

Search for Data with Google Docs

On November 11 2013, Google announced the addition of data tables in the Research drop down menu. Click here to see this announcement. Let say I am creating a lesson or if I am a student writing an essay on WWII and I decide I need to get some data on death rates during the war.  I could look to the internet or my librarian or better  yet use a data base that our board subscribes to (see the librarian) or even use the many databases available through the Windsor Public Library (see me) or I could follow this post.

To use this, first go to google docs by going here.

Click on "Create".  You will then get a drop down list.  You can now select "Document".

From here you can now select "Tools"

Select "Research".

Now select "Tables" (you could select the other choices to get other types of information).  By doing this you will now be able to obtain data.

Now I can enter the data item I am looking for.  In my example it is World War 2 deaths.

You can now scroll through the data.  Again some of this data might be bogus as it is from various websites.  However you can scroll through most of them and see if there is any patterns.  If you would like to copy and paste one into your document, just mouse over it and select "Preview"

If you like this table you can now just highlight it and then copy and paste it into your google doc.  You can now edit the tables by making the columns wider etc.  When you are done you can publish your document to the web easily by selecting "File" and "Publish to the web".

According to David Doherty, "there are several benefits to publishing a Doc over merely sharing it: Publishing a Google Doc it is viewable (but not edit-able) by an unlimited number of people; it is accessible by URL;  it can be embedded into a website or blog; it can be automatically updated as the Doc is edited, or can be a “one time snapshot” of the Doc.  To publish a Google Doc, go to the file menu and find the “Publish to the web” button at the bottom and follow instructions."

A couple of articles for your reading pleasure II

Here is another article from HBR,  "The Hidden Biases in Big Data."  Does this apply to EQAO and OSSLT?  You be the judge.  You can read the article by clicking here.

Keeping with the spirit of the first article, here is another article about data, from the MIT Technology Review, "The Dictatorship of Data."  Click here to read the article.