Every second week, “Aunt Math” sends a math word problem in the form of a letter to students recounting math experiences she has had with her neices and nephews. These stories are usually seasonal or center around another theme. The stories are easy to read, in large print and entertaining. At the end of each story, Aunt Math poses a math problem for students to figure out. Within the site are also tips for solving math problems, information on how these problems are related to math curriculum for parents and teachers and Aunt Math also provides solutions to each problem. The site also provides easier math problems for younger students or students who are having difficulty with the math concepts creating a nice scaffold for the various levels of students in your class. As the easier problems share the same storyline, students don’t have to feel that they are doing something different because they are “dumb”.

Unfortunately, the thing that really made the site neat and interactive has been discontinued. When students were done with their solutions, they could write in to Aunt Math and explain to her their solution and how they figured it out. The responses from all the students would be listed on a seperate page like comments on a blog. Aunt Math would write back giving them tips or encouragement. My students really enjoyed that aspect and would take the email home to show their parents. As I checked back prior to writing this, I discovered that that is no longer being done. Citing a “commitment to promoting responsible use of the Internet for children,” the site has stopped responding to individual e-mails. Now, I am not sure how this is promoting a responsible use of the internet as it seems to me that they are just advocating that students should not be using the internet as a communication tool at all instead of teaching how to use it safely. Also, if you were advocating a safe and responsible use of the internet wouldn’t you just set guidelines as to how comments were placed on the site along with a way to filter comments instead of going completely to one end of the spectrum and banning any communication at all? I think the site is just taking the easy way out.

Having said that though, the site is still useful and I enjoy the stories and challenges. It makes word problems that are more interesting and relevant for students.

Today I am going to provide you with another resource that I use time and time again. Whenever I need graph paper, I always you this resource to print out paper for my students to use. The resource is a series of graph paper with the intersecting lines at various sizes. You choose which type of graph paper to use depending on the size of the squares you want to have. I don’t remember where I obtained the resource but it is one I use over and over again. They come as one .pdf file.

linedgrids.pdf

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: 

Data visualization is a whole new area of web application that, along with the whole semantic web (or Web 3.0) movement, has come as a revelation to me. As I was listening to Stan Ruecker talking about the applications he was creating with his team, it really reinforced this whole idea of where the Internet needs to go. Namely, moving towards providing people effective ways to not only find information but sort information that is relevant. This isn’t just sorting information any old way, but in ways that are socially meaningful to them in the context that it is needed. Lately, I have really given strong thought to how the “infoglut” that is out there can only increase and increase to such a level that we will actually regress (and question the relevance of the society’s contributions to the social web). In order for the web to maintain its usefulness, and keep users from becoming internet dropouts, it needs a way to allow users to find relevant information quickly and easily. Google was among the first to provide an attempt to create search experiences close to model. However, we have moved far beyond this to a need for “mash-ups” that search and bring together larger amounts of diverse information that fit our needs at any given moment – data visualization tools that allow us to quickly skim the surface and retrieve only information that keeps us from sifting through everything ourselves. Stan Rueckers discussion and particularly is examples, really served to illustrate how this new Web 3.0 can unfold and be made real.

How is this relevant to me as an educator though? I think this reinforces our need to look at curriculum and what skills we should be teaching students. Thomas Friedman, David Warlick, Jane Healy, amongst others, all point to a need for critical thinking skills  and constructivism to be the focus of instruction. As Karl Fisch and Scott Mcleod point out in in their presentation Did You Know?, we are preparing students to deal with jobs and problems that don’t even exist yet. Critical thinking skills are going to be and have to become increasingly important in our classrooms, schools and society to deal with this information technology. In our classrooms, data visualization will allow us to not only use these to encourage critical thinking but also create visualizations that can allow visualizations to become relevant to our situation, in this case the classroom setting and objectives. Using these tools, students can take information and create meaning in their own contexts.

However, the other issue is making this applicable to all levels of students. Though the tools shown by Stan Ruecker were intriguing and relevant to the context he was working in, it was hard to see how they could be used in the elementary level. One idea where the “pill database” was transformed to a database of rocks and minerals that could be sorted according to a variety of properties, would be very useful and practical. What I would like to see is the ability for these data visualization tools to become more user-friendly to the point where educators could easily create their own data visualizations using tools that were graphically rich and intuitive. I think we are starting to see that a little with the Many Eyes web application. However, it needs to become more educator friendly and student friendly. The company Edmark produced a series of software called “Thinking Things” that really tried to help students deal with visual data, sorting, arranging and solving open ended problems using this information. Now we need to take it and apply real life problems to it so students from the youngest ages can begin to create and critically think about the world evolving around them. Stan Ruecker showed us the beginnings of where the web is going. Educators need to make sure students are prepared for it.