Thursday’s Web 2.0 Tool
Today’s tool is not really that interactive and probably not really usable for my Grade 3 class. However, it is kind of a neat sight that gives a different perspective on world statistics. It basically takes the map of the world and distorts it to reflect a variety of statistics. The site is called Worldmapper and it provides users with a number of different topics on which to compare data on. Here is one in the education category:
Territory size shows the proportion of all spending on primary education worldwide that is spent there, when measured in purchasing power parity US$.
Now, though they have information on how they create the maps, I don’t know where they get their information. But it is a neat site and the goods category would be useful when discussing where our goods come from which is something I discuss with the children as part of our look at trade between communities. One of the activities I used to do was to get students to find 10 goods at home and write down where they were made. We then surveyed the class and created a graph on the countries and the numbers of goods found for each. Using worldmapper, it would be interesting to see if the data matched. This might also work well with the site, Gapminder which, “enables you to explore the changing world from your own computer. Moving graphics show how the development of all countries by the indicators you choose.” Here is a video demonstrating it’s use from TedTalks:
