Using Visual.ly in your maths lessons

If haven't already seen it visual.ly is the webs best collection of info graphics and basically a statisticians dream.  Visually takes any concept and breaks it down into the simplest key statistics and facts relating to thousands of topics.

As a maths teacher this offers a wealth of data to inform students and a great starting point to lead to larger mathematical questions.

For Instance the info graphic below is related to the explosion of Halloween Stores across the United States.  Take a look at this with your own students and do some of your own research in these areas to see how your students compare to the national average.  This will lead you to seek out further statistical information regarding your findings.

There are a multitude of options for using maths and writing in Visual.ly and it will really engage your students because it is current, topical and looks amazing.  Access it here.

by Column Five Media via

Lesson Plan: Surveying Data and Creating a Graph

This is a single lesson aimed at upper primary aged students (aged 9 -12 ) about collecting data, creating graphs and analysing the data you have collected.  All of the resoruces are contained within the planner.

Download the entire PowerPoint Presentation here. (recommnded)

Download a PDF of the lesson plan here.

Lesson plan survey and data generation

View more presentations from Kevin Cummins.

•This lesson will assist students in further developing their knowledge of fractions, decimals and percentage.

•The data collected can also be used in developing an understanding of graphical representation in the form of graphs; for example: Pie, linear, bar graphs etc. 

Google Public Data Explorer - An excellent maths resource

Just found this today and I would definitely recommend taking a look at it with your students especially if you are looking at chance and data.

Google Public Data Explorer, a part of Google Labs experiments, is a tool that helps you explore through and visualize public datasets that are made available by government and other agencies that track stats, from around the world.

There are a number of datasets available. You can check out the government debt in Europe or visualize the unemployment rate in the United States, see how the US population is growing or the variations in prices of natural gases around the world.

It offers four kinds of visualizations for most of the datasets: line chart, bar chart, map or bubble chart. You can easily switch from one chart format to the other.

You could also compare the data for specific countries for datasets that aggregate data from an entire continent. For example, in the graph, I’ve compared the broadband penetration rate in specific countries in Europe.

The charts and maps can also be embedded in your website or blog. Overall, a nice tool for students and scholars and could definitely aid in their research on a topic.



BBC Data Art - Visualise the web

Data Visualisation is a great way to make sense of the amazing amount of data avaialble to us in 2010 and the BBC have being getting all creative to bring us their latest offering BBC Data Art.  Here are a few examples of how it works.

• 

  Flared Music

  Flared Music is a simple Flash visualisation which shows relationships between musicians as stored in the BBC Music / Musicbrainz database.

  Read more »

• 

  3d Documentary Explorer

  A visualisation using a BBC documentary as its data source. Explore material used in the making of the programme in 3d.

  Read more »

• 

  SearchWeb

  See how BBC search results are distributed across different sections of the site, and use the tree structure to navigate.

  Read more »

• 

  News Globe

  Search for BBC News and Sport articles and see the place names in them geocoded onto a 3D globe.

  Read more »

Check it out here.

Brilliant Web Based Graph Maker for Students

Create a Graph is very simple to use web based Graph Generator that I can highly recommend for younger students who may find a spreadsheet such as Excel a little daunting.  A very simple interface lets you select from Bar, Line, X&Y, Area and Pie graphs and takes you through each stage of the graph making process in simple to understand language.

There are examples and tutorials, not that you will need them and you can output graphs as either a traditional paper based printout or get a hyperlink to view your graph online.

Be sure to take a look at Create a Graph next time you are doing a statistics and data lesson with your kids and want to generate a graph simply whilst teaching your kids the steps required along the way.It's free of course with no sign up required and there are a few other useful tools to be found on this site also.

By the way if you are looking for a great lesson plan on Creating Pictographs on Computer with younger students.  Here is one from my lesson plan section.

Create your own surveys with Polldaddy

Polldaddy might sound a bit dodgy by name but it a really useful online survey tool to use at school.  I tried for the first time this week with a great deal of ease and success.  Polldaddy allowed me to survey my students about a research project they have been involved in in less than 10 minutes embed it in our class wiki and provided me with some really useful data.  I just used the free account and it met all my needs but obviously power users will find some purpose to the paid content.

As a long time Surveymonkey user I made the switch painlessly and will definitely use it again in future.  Laura Gibbs has a great instructional page on how to create a Poll and embed it in your won web space, wiki or Blog.  Check it out here.