Additional Assignment #1

Google Squared develops something like a spreadsheet, so students can look up a topic, and get categories related to the topic, all out in front of them. I looked up football national champions, and it gave me not only the champions, but a description, a picture, and their birthday.  Students can look up virtually anything, and modify it to their choice. I was so shocked looking at this new information I had never seen before! I will use this piece of technology with my students because they can easily look up countries, like Dr. Strange did, and have all the information they will need on one page. They can change the countries to their desire, and have all the information they need readily available to them without having to search various websites for other information on the country, like currency. This will help my students find information they need fast, instead of browsing the internet for hours looking for certain things.

Wolfram Alpha is fun because students can look up the definition of a word, or the number or people in a city. Students can find answers to multiple questions on this page without having to go to another site. They can look up examples for harder math problems, to figuring out what time it is in Australia. In the future, if a student asks me a question and I want them to find it on their own, one of the sites they can browse is Wolfram Alpha. I would recommend this website to students of all ages, it is really remarkable!

I absolutely had no idea about Google Squared or Wolfram Alpha before this assignment, but I'm glad I do now!

When I read Did You Know? 3.0, I was overwhelmed almost by all of those numbers, but the information that stood out to me, was the information about China and India having more honor roll students, and more people knowing English. After I was how the population differences change the statistics, I felt America was a little less uneducated then people assume. I still hold on to the point that America should still push their selves to be better anyways. There is nothing wrong with trying to achieve greatness, and Americas school systems lack the effort.

I learned from this exercise that statistics are meant for shock value. Everyone hears crazy statistics everyday, and most of the time no one thinks to look them up and see where they are derived from. Using Google Spread, and Wolfram Alpha you can look up almost anything to see if what it says, and I think this is something I can show my students, or anyone, so they can look up crazy things they hear and see if its true or not. Perhaps this is showing my students and peers a little bit of independent learning, and theres nothing wrong with that.

The "Stable Boy and the iPad" article just goes to show, young minds like that boys can some things as quickly as any college graduate.