Sunday, April 19, 2015

California Drought Trends

This article in the New York Time offers a great chance to discuss graphs and trends with students:

http://nyti.ms/1FFYEBC

I would show the bare bones graph (minus numbers and data) first:



This would allow me to ask the low floor "what do you notice" question and then eventually lead to some specifics.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Doctopus, Goobric and Google Classroom...woa

Doctopus allows you to create personal files for all students will all types of parameters. Very awesome:



Goobric allows you to attach a rubric to a Doctopus Assignment. You can customize the rubric, add comments (including audio) and do great stuff like leave audio comments (and much much more):


These can also be integrated with Google Classroom:


Lots to think about and its all very exciting.

Great Google Drive Resource

http://cloudlab.newvisions.org/

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Graph Stories

Every graph tells a story. I am thinking to show the graph of time vs. elevation without any context first. Something like this:



Then add in the context, piece by piece, until they see how the context sets the stage for meaning:


This might follow a discussion of the New York Times article from which I pulled this graphic:





Friday, April 3, 2015

Filling up landfills with K-Cups


Illustration by John W. Tomac

This marketplace article gets me thinking about some powerful what-if questions:

What would happen if we continue consuming K-Cups at the same rate?

What would happen if we took all the K-Cups and put them side by side?

What if we stacked the K-Cups into a tower, how high would they go?

Here is a comprehensive article from the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/the-abominable-k-cup-coffee-pod-environment-problem/386501/

And then there is this:




A lot of the media buzz around K-Cups is based on this mother jones article, which claims that K-Cups could circle the Earth 10.5 times:














This calculation traces back to Murray Carpenter's book "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us." 

Based on the height alone at 1.75 inches and production of 8.3e+9 K-Cups from Green Mountain along, we get 4,375,000,000 inches, about 9.2 times the circumference of the Earth

So this is perfect for a lesson centered on debate. Its time to find out which number is the most reasonable and why.