Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Additional Assignment #1

This is a project done on Wolfram Alpha about the world's population
   Before watching the instructional video, I had never heard of Google Squared or Wolfram Alpha. Some educational implications would be that these sources offer people the opportunity to see the expansion or our world, different cultures, or even the sheer fact that we don't just take statistics that we hear but actually get the accurate figure between the two sources. We were instructed to add in China and the US but I continued to list several more countries because it was interesting to compare and contrast the size. I think that the availability of these sources in the classroom will be great in teaching. It allows students to do a broad variety of things from comparing and contrasting the different results, to comparing different countries and even giving them a chart that is quick and easily accessed. It helps them visualize and gives them something tangible to work with! The "Did you Know" video still has a certain shock factor, but after seeing these statistics and the growth rate of countries it's not as shocking now. It is still very overwhelming that if only 25% of China's country spoke English it would exceed the 100% of our English speaking country. Something to think about really!
    After reading the "Food for Thought" article I realized that the I-pad is something that we shouldn't shy away from but embrace. It has a lot of great features and is indeed easier to use than many people that I have talked to make it out to be.

1 comment:

  1. I said the same thing about the ischool video. It was interesting but I think if it ever had the chance to be widely used students would loose communication with each other. By not going to school and staying at home using the ischool, kids would not be learning social skill which is vital to success in the world today. I also had the same comments about the virtual choir. That was soo amazing! I was wondering the whole time too how they pulled that off!

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