Stats

      As our group finished our projects for the week it was interesting to see what is out there for places to get data for a statistics project.  It is actually very easy to find a government webpage which carries statistics that can be manipulated into graphs or tables as the user wishes.  I did assume that because these are government webpages that the facts on them would be true and unbiased.  Lets just hope that that is true.

     I also really enjoyed looking at Google trends and the correlation of certain terms.  Our group chose to look at Special Education.  The time of the year where there were valleys and peeks seemed to match with many school calendars.  There is a low period that comes with the summer months and deep spiking valleys at the end of the year.  To expand this and find another term that matched with the SE term, we looked at ADHD.  This almost perfectly matched with the peaks and valleys.  We then added Autism to the mix.  This term had a much higher traffic volume than the other two terms.  This made the data for the pervious terms seem obsolete.  

      Overall finding these trends was actually educational not just for the Stats class.  The information can be used when discussing SE in schools.  This week was full of projects that seemed to take much longer than I expected they would.  We as a group did get it all done, but as it turns out Stats seem to be much more in-depth and involved than I thought they would be! 

Creation of the survey

   Creating our survey as a group was a pretty simple process.  Deciding that the survey would check students, grade 4-8th, on their knowledge of Internet safety was another easy decision.  Lucky for me our group member Laurance works as a tech teacher at his school and was able to easily administer the survey to a large group of students.  The results are to be looked at yet, but knowing grade level vs grade level results will be interesting and actually meaningful to the teaching of Laurance.  His students know what he has taught them.  The questions were not created off of his curriculum, but rather what we felt were safety concepts all kids should know.
  I also had a tough time thinking of jobs that will be created in the future.  I like the idea our group has come up with of an Ozone creation/design specialist.  The concept will probably come about in the future, but who really knows when.  I get the idea of thinking that we are teaching for jobs that do not exist yet, but what does matter is that many of the skills we teach now will always need to be taught to our students.  Team work, social skills, and collaboration will all be needed regardless of the time or job to be accomplished.