Thursday, February 7, 2013

Special Blog Post #1

Many Students Misinterpreted the Data in the Did You Know Video

Using WolframAlpha I was able to compare the population of India, China, and the United States. India-1.21 Billion People
China-1.35 Billion People
United States-309 Million People
In the movie, Did you know?, it states that 25% of the population of India with the highest IQ's outnumbers the entire population of the United States. India has 901 million more people than the United States. Without knowing this information, one would assume that India is further ahead of the United States when it comes to education.
It is estimated that 18 million Chinese speak English now and 300 million are learners. If we add these two numbers what do we get? So a total of 21 million people will be English speaking as compared to 309 million people total in the United States. I guess the lesson learned here is that when certain data is presented I should investigate further to do a comparison of numbers before I make an incorrect observation.
I just did a comparison search of Alabama and Mississippi. I got information on population, demographics, education, income, voting, school finances, along with graphs and charts. I know I was supposed to do a second search, but I decided to click on examples on the main page. This website does so much. You can ask pretty much anything and get some type of information. You can get information on weather, statistics, people and history, places and geography,music, colors, and transportation. This is just a partial list. It does not include the other choices available within each of these categories. There is a wealth of information available on this site. This is a wonderful site for students, or really any curious individual. I like that it does all the math for you when you are doing a comparison search. It's good for me, because I am not very good at math. I wish I would have known about this site before now. It is something I will definitely put to use in my classroom.

Gary Hayes Social Media Count Change


Gary is an award winning multi-platform producer, author, educator and Director. He is currently Senior Producer and Manager of Product Development at ABC TV Multi Platform responsible for delivering new editorial formats against ABC TV shows including dual screen, social TV and mobile. His Social Media Count gives numbers down to seconds. It includes numbers related to Social, Games, Mobile, and Heritage. The numbers are constantly changing. This includes Facebook,ipad purchases, music downloads, and money spent to make movies. There are too many categories to name. You can get numbers per week and monthly. There are several ways that he has broken down the information.

As a future educator it is more than a little intimidating. It allows one to see just how quickly things are moving and it will only get faster. There is some real truth to life long learning. To keep up with the world I will have to constantly be learning and updating what I have learned. This will be a benefit to me and my students.

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