Distilled Demographics Video Series
Distilled Demographics, PRB's new video series, highlights key demographic concepts such as fertility, mortality, and migration. Through these videos, each under 10 minutes, you can learn demography's real-world application and impact.
In these videos, Carl Haub, PRB's senior demographer, talks about:
Deciphering Population Pyramids
Addressing Population Myths
The Birth Rate: What It Is and Why It Matters
Great data and science site. I like the nice real world connections for the data. Also, great science site. Science content using interactivity and data (gotta get math involved).
Killing two birds with one stone. Here are some interesting facts about social networking and use among 35-54 yo age group growing by 60% recently according to Forrester.
Also, if you are looking for a read-aloud to do with math students, here's a great example to use with them. The topic is social media, the content is proportional reasoning, data analysis, and interpreting real-world data. For example if usage among 35-54 yos has grown by 60% what does that mean among the sample of 4500, what does that mean among the sample of the US population, if previous usage was 15% of that age group, what percentage of that age group now use it? Etc.
Good math/science reading is as close as your local USA Today/Yahoo homepage/iGoogle/news RSS
Get the Math is a multimedia project about algebra in the real world. See how professionals working in fashion, videogame design, and music production use algebraic thinking. Then take on interactive challenges related to those careers.
A simulation of the stock market. A great running application to use in algebra classes, as it allows students to use algebraic concepts to manage their portfolio. Not directly skill or concept related, but can utilize graphing, formula use (as simple as P/E ratio, to regression analysis, to derivatives). For those teachers who think a little outside the box. I would be glad to hear how others might envision using this in their classroom.
Classes of all ages from all over the world are asked to join us in creating a data bank of just how far paper airplanes can fly. All classes will launch their own paper airplane and record the mean, median, and mode for their class. Comparisons can be made between schools, states, countries, and age groups!
Great opportunity to involve students in an engaging activity (yes, I truly believe they would like to make paper airplanes and fly them) but make sure that there is real math behind the activity. Have them do some predicting about how far the planes will fly, after they've been made who's plane will fly farthest (and why), let them fly their plane & make an adjustment to it before gathering data, and then of course gathering and analyzing the data and comparing with another class!