Useful sites (weekly)

• Google Web Elements Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website. 

• Twitter Q&A, Neil Gaiman on “… Painstakingly compiled by @RJFerret, non-italicized copy by @neilhimself (Neil Gaiman), questions in italics, in order of answering, May 18th, 2010.

• 5 tips to improve your presentations | Stratepedia Blog 

• Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. – Gapminder.org Students can access real data and represent it in a variety of ways with tools at gap minder. There is no charge for the service or access to the data. This is an amazing repository of statistics shown in very cool ways. Great for social sciences

• For Teachers – Gapminder.org Teacher information and facts on how to use google docs to import data into Gapminder to plot it yourself. Statistics teachers may find this very useful.  tag

• Does Windows 7 Make Up for Vista? Lifehacker cites a report that says that customer satisfaction with Microsoft is “at an all time high” mostly because of Windows 7. Would be interested to hear from someone using it. I have to admit that the snapping windows look very cool. 

• Steam punk – RN Book Show – 30 December 2008 Thomas Pynchon, Jules Verne or HG Wells as punk icons, or punk authors for that matter? It sounds bizarre, but steam punk enthusiasts have embraced their work as part of the genre. Steam punk is a sub-genre of science fiction. It usually takes place in a Victorian setting, involving industrial inventions such as steam powered engines.

• Twitter user convicted after ‘menacing’ message – AfterDawn UK citizen Paul Chambers has been convicted this week of sending a ‘menacing’ tweet via Twitter, with the British Court fining him £1000 and slapping him with a criminal record. 

• Teaching Parents Digital Citizenship at Katy ISD — THE Journal This Texas school district has decided that the best way to help their students learn how to use online resources more responsibly is to educate parents as well. Evening technology showcases provide a launch pad.

• faqs-Smartcopying. Smartcopying. The Official Guide to Copyright Issues for Australian Schools and TAFE.

• Seven Things You Need To Stop Doing On Facebook – Security – IT Channel News by CRN 

• David Maybury | Blog David Maybury is a writer and person who lives in Dublin. This is his blog about about writing, children’s books and other bits.

• What Ever Happened to the Book? | the human network Detailed academic discussion of e-books, e-texts, digital texts and reading with its many approaches to reading in light of these.

• adaptive path » blog » Teresa Brazen » Explaining User Experience Design to High Schoolers (and other new audiences) How do user experience designers tell their story, in a relevant, meaningful way, to audiences who have had no exposure to user experience design 

• Wissahickon School District’s eToolBox – Ning Great collection of Ning tutorials/resources

• 4 Tips for Integrating Social Media Into the Classroom Social networks are here to stay, and with or without rules, kids are going to use them. Here are four tips for educators on how to develop a technology policy that seizes on social networking as a learning tool and teaches children how to use it responsibly.

• The Book Zone Reviews of books that may appeal to boys – by an teacher in a UK school.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twitter study

Uploaded to Flickr by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Why do we use twitter? I had a couple of conversations with students about Twitter over the last week. We (at least I) discussed how it could be a useful tool. “Tool” being the operative word – the old saying “A tool is only as good as the person using it” – seems to be in play here. I agreed with them that it could be a useless self-aggrandising tool but it could also be much more.

I know that there people who have to decide what to do about social media  such as  Twitter, especially when it might be an important commercial decision.  In schools, is it a useful and safe tool for students to use. I talked about some of the uses that I had noticed and now there is some data. TNS and The Conference Board have just completed a study investigating this  newsworthy Web2.0 tool.  

Whilst there are good number of us who use it to keep in touch with friends the breakdown looks like this:

• 41.4% use it to keep in touch with friends
• 29.1% used it to update their status,
• 25.8% to find news and stay updated
• 21.7% for work purposes
• and 9.4% for research. 

School educational uses (and I have posted about some of them in this blog) do not seem to have been incorporated into this marketing study. Of course there is some overlap in the results but it is interesting that non-social uses are in the majority. The self-promotion and headline grabbing uses that have have dominated in the news media and been responsible for the contempt shown for this this tool appear to be wrong. It is still in its very early days but education and information seems to be a very big part of the way it is going.

How has the world changed?

During this week, our year 8 students have been immersed in one single topic that is basically “Why is the world worth saving”. They were shown some excerpts from the video “The day the earth stood still” and then told that aliens were looking at the Earth and expect that, after a week’s notice,  humans will be able to argue on behalf of their world.

They have been looking at all sorts of things, things that they are passionate about. Many are looking at how we have developed in the areas of technology, medicine. There arguements have been that on the wholoe we keep learning and trying to improve things. It is enlightning to see how optimistic they are although they can also see the results of pollution, environmental changes, climate changes etc. Yesterday they were sorting out the big statements and questions and today they were starting to do the research to support there arguments. I was looking around and came across GapMinder.

In the video below, Hans Rosling  demonstrates GapMinder, a tool that can even make statistics look beautiful.  The content for this brief video is the change in the life expectancy & income throughout the world in the last two centuries. You can have a look for yourself by going to the the tool here.

I always love the way we can “use” statistics to support our arguments and GapMinder looks like an interesting tool. The trends described through the tool here are certainly useful to provoke thought.

Hans Rosling has also presented TED talks. Have a look at the TED talk where Hans Rosling, with insightful data backed by his spectacular charts, shows how some pre-conceived notions and grand generalizations (about the Third World countries, in this case) can be sharply in contrast with the facts.

Real-time statistics – Worldometers

Today I have been preparing for the start of our school year next week. I have been going through files and clearing out old data files, reading and commenting on blogs that I have neglected reading over the last 6-7 weeks.

I made quite a mess and filled up the bins. I still have a lot more files to go through but still it was a start. It was interesting looking at some of the information that was once used often but is now out of date or has been superseded. In fact, as we all know,  the information available to us is growing amazingly fast.

This leads me mention to an interesting little tool called Worldometers, world statistics updated in real time. Have a look and see the birth and death rates click over regularly.

The site divides the statistics up into different areas: world population, government and economics, society and media, environment, food, water, energy and health.

The watching the information change, sometimes so fast it is only a blur, makes you  very aware of the global picture. You can easily find the sources for the information, and the links are available for anyone to follow up the information. 

Worldometers is part of the Real Time Statistics Project, which is managed by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world.
Sources are carefully selected to include only data published by the most reputable organizations and statistical offices in the world.
The counters that display the real-time numbers are based on Worldometers’ algorithm that processes the latest and most accurate statistical data available together with its estimated progression to compute the current millisecond number to be displayed on each counter based on the specific time set on each visitor’s computer clock.

I like the idea of providing out students with world statistics, available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format, and having them realise that Australia is part of a very large and diverse world.

Explaining information with maps

I like maps, always have. They are fascinating and allow for a lot of information to be viewed in a graphical way. They can also offer a means for comparison.

Worldmapper is a wonderful collection of world maps that allows viewers to see various types of information in a graphic way, ie. as a map. I found a reference to this site on the blog, Using ICT in education, and had to have a play.

The site has 366 complete world maps and about 600 in total. They keep adding more. The maps and data files”cover mainly United Nations member states, plus a few others. The maps are cartograms and each maps ” territories that have are re-sized according to the variable being mapped.”