Group items tagged

"Professional cartography is now in your hands. Maker! was designed by cartographers with an eye for detail. Style your map with shaded thematics, proportional symbols, and more. Maker! makes the tough statistical and cartographic decisions for you. Anyone can build complex, data-rich maps."

The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 7 million unique features whereof 2.6 million populated places and 2.8 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes. (more statistics ...). The data is accessible free of charge through a number of webservices and a daily database export. GeoNames is already serving up to over 11 million web service requests per day.GeoNames is integrating geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from various sources. All lat/long coordinates are in WGS84 (World Geodetic System 1984). Users may manually edit, correct and add new names using a user friendly wiki interface.

If you discuss sun protection in your health program - here is some information for you. I had skin cancer removed when I wasn't even 30 yet! Skin Cancer has been an issue in my family and I hope you discuss this with kids. Here is information from my inbox. "With the UV Index on the rise, it's time to remind your students to Slip! Slop! Slap! and Wrap! In our effort to raise awareness about a health issue that is largely preventable and too often ignored-skin cancer, EPA encourages you to promote sun safety before the second annual Don't Fry Day on the Friday before Memorial Day (May 28, 2010). As millions of us prepare to enjoy the great outdoors this Memorial Day weekend, EPA and the National Council on Skin Cancer Prevention are reminding Americans to practice sun-safe behaviors. We need your help; go online and pledge to incorporate sun safety into your spring and summer activities. Take the Pledge: www.epa.gov/sunwise/dfdpledge.html Participating classrooms and informal education organizations will receive a Don't Fry Day poster and a set of sun safety stickers. The stickers feature SunWise animals showing children how to Slip! Slop! Slap! and Wrap! Additionally, you will be entered into a random drawing for a SunWise Prize Pack. The prize pack includes a set of UV-sensitive beads, a real-time UV monitor, UV-sensitive nail polish and other sun safety resources. To learn more about Don't Fry Day, visit the National Council on Skin Cancer Prevention's Don't Fry Day resource page, www.skincancerprevention.org, where you can find background information, skin cancer statistics and facts, and public service announcements you can put in your school's newsletter or distribute electronically to parents."

overlay statistics on world maps. Useful tool for many types of classes

Jeff Utecht talks about how Foursquare exploded across a school campus.  Explains that we can not control our communities and the tools they use.  Instead we have to embrace.  Great ideas of how to use check-in services as motivators and simple rewards for students being present when/where it matters.  Provides great statistics to back up the claims put forth.

Article about Georgia Dept of Ed rollout of common core standards and their self admitted botched rollout of state standards several years back. The worst issue from my discussions with Georgia Public school teachers was the attempt at Math I, II, III, an attempt to combine Algebra, Geometry, Trig and Statistics. Not only did the teachers complain but so did parents. I know of several math teachers who quit over this. This is what happens in experiments like this. Standards sound great but who writes them? What happens when they are cumbersome? Look at technology standards which many (including me) think are way too heavily influenced by industry.

Liz B Davis Sep. 4, 2011 "The front page of today's New York Times boasted an article about the "failure" of technology in the classroom. Titled, In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores , the article describes a school in Arizona where, despite a huge investment in technology, there hasn't been an increase in test scores. The article is based on one school in one town in Arizona, hardly a statistically significant sample. Larry Cuban, an outspoken critic of technology in schools since the early 1990s, is quoted multiple times. Not one of the many experts in the field of educational technology, whom we know and love, was interviewed (or at least quoted) in the article."

Some major computer science programs at top universities are seeing a slight uptick in the number of women going into the programs. Citing statistics from Harvard (up from 13% to 25%) and MIT (a 28% jump in 3 years), and Carnegie Mellon (from 1/5 in 2007 to 1/4 last year.) Most think it is the economy although some attribute programs to get more women interested in the programs.

Tip from this story is that if you're getting ready to graduate and want to get a job, get a paid internship during college: ""While there have been some modest signs of improvement over the past few months, statistics show the employment situation for college graduates and other young adults remains difficult." Unemployment among youths in their early twenties has improved somewhat from a low last year, but at 14.5% remains above the average unemployment rate. While choosing an in-demand major tends to improve the odds of getting a job, the employment difficulties affect almost every field, experts said. They added that "getting an internship - particularly a paid internship" during college can be very helpful when students later begin their job search. A recent survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that "60% of paid interns working with for-profit companies received job offers compared with 38% of people with unpaid internships."

"Of course, I have always held the opinion that we are all still scientists in our own unique manner.  In light of that, I have chosen to write about how I think on this blog post.  There are two main types of blog posts on this site to 'demystify the life of a scientist'.  The first deals with large numbers or various statistics reported in the popular news with no real context provided."

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Nice set of manipulatable visualizations to explore basic data and trends and relationships dealing with poverty, gender, and level of educational attainment.

State Tuition and past 10 years state tuition rates

A great new resource from the creator of 'A Maths Dictionary for Kids'. Download and print beautifully designed and wonderfully useful maths posters on a good range of topics. Your classroom walls will never be the same again. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

A superb interactive BBC maths video with games about probability. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

"These are interesting findings. It's a really cool academic study. It's a freakin' amazing data set! But these findings cannot be immediately translated into what the headlines have suggested - that immediate use of value-added metrics to reshape the teacher workforce can lift the economy, and increase wages across the board! The headlines and media spin have been dreadfully overstated and deceptive. Other headlines and editorial commentary has been simply ignorant and irresponsible. (No Mr. Moran, this one study did not, does not, cannot negate the vast array of concerns that have been raised about using value-added estimates as blunt, heavily weighted instruments in personnel policy in school systems.)"

Successful TED talks are 60% stories but, as this example shows with Sheryl Sandberg, it can mean being vulnerable and sharing the personal side of yourself.

"Within the decade, it will either become the norm to teach this course (high school Algebra I) in middle school or we'll have finally woken up to the fact that there's no reason to give algebra weight over statistics and IT in high school for non-math majors (and they will have all taken it in middle school anyway)." - Shelley Blake-Plock

RT @ransomtech: A good discussion starter: "21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020" http://bit.ly/dTqAxj

There was happy news for people like me Monday, when the National Endowment for the Arts announced the latest results of its annual survey of American reading habits. The percentage of Americans who reported reading a novel, a short story, a poem or a play has gone up, from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in the last year - the first increase in that percentage since the NEA began investigating national reading habits in the 1980s. The NEA's 2002 report was titled "Reading at Risk;" this year's report is called "Reading on the Rise."