Webb of Thoughts

The Reunion Tower - Dallas

For this weeks assignment, we were to find a Google Earth resource from Jen Wagner’s Wiki and think about how we could incorporate it into a classroom setting.  Since I’m become a math teacher, I didn’t really think many options were available.  I thought I would be pretty limited to distances.  Turns out I was very very wrong.  There are some very creative people out there who have come up with some excellent ideas.   I looked in depth at the website Real World Math.

I got clicking around and found that there are a 8 different concept lessons on this site.  These topics include: exchange ratea, scientific notation (2), volume of solids, estimation, pictographs, polyhedrons, and line graphs.

I decided to explore the volume of solids lesson more in depth.  The page not only outlined objectives of the lesson, but had a in depth description of the lesson as well.  I downloaded the kmz file and the Microsoft Word file that was listed on the page.

Head Building - Nice, France

In Google Earth, it was fascinating to “fly” around the world checking out the neat shaped buildings of the world.  Math problems were presented at each location.

The Word file was a simple grid that you could hand out to your students so they can fill i n their answers as you go through all of the locations in the kmz file.

I will definitely try to incorporate lessons like this when I get out there and begin teaching.   I will also be trying to put something together for my mentorships.

When I was looking for some blogs to subscribe to a few days, I found a hockey related blog: On Frozen Blog.   On the blog, there was a post entitled “Should Hockey Players Wear Pink — Ever?“. You can read the original post here.   The post discusses that the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League will be wearing pink jerseys for this upcoming month for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  Also, there have been a few different incidents where the entire ice surface was painted pink to raise awareness for breast cancer.

Hershey Bear's Pink Jerseys

I’m quite fine with fundraising through professional sports for charities.  However I was quite disturbed when I read this quote from the blog:

“Everyone is going pink for October, but that doesn’t necessarily mean money is being raised for cancer research. After all, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, not Research Month. That means that anyone can put a cute ribbon on their products or even produce specialty pink products without actually donating anything. While this isn’t against the law or anything, many shoppers are being fooled into thinking that their purchase makes a difference.”

Pink Ice (Image from Flickr)

This quote originally came from an article entitled “When Breast Cancer Pink is a Scam“.  This particular article states that many companies are exploiting the pink ribbon for marketing purposes.  Am I the only one sickened by this?  The fact that businesses are using fake cancer awareness to turn a larger profit.  They know people are more likely to buy products where some of the proceeds go towards a good cause.  I can’t believe that companies are trying to fool people into buying their products knowing this.

I know that hockey teams or organizations that run charity nights aren’t trying to pull a fast one on us.  However much they say will be donated to these charities will likely be donated.  However, some of it will probably get lost somewhere along the way.  I think if you’re wanting to contribute to these charities, you should make a donation directly to them.

Also, on a side note, it was just announced that Team Canada will be wearing green jerseys at the World Juniors in Saskatchewan. Scott Smith, chief operating officer of Hockey Canada, said “Green is the colour … hockey is the game.”  Smart move on Hockey Canada’s part.  The green and white Riders make more money in merchandise than the rest of the CFL combined.  And, I heard this from a friend, so correct me if I’m wrong, but third most in all sports in Canada, just behind the Canadiens and Leafs.  I like it, but I bet all of Canada outside of Saskatchewan will hate it.

One of my mentors, Michael Kaechele,  asked me if I could come up with some sort of problem for his math class.  His math class is currently taking a unit on perimeter, area, and volume.  I wanted to do something a bit more than just a little word problem . I decided to use a video and create a real-life problem, similar to what Dan Meyer does (although nowhere near as good).

I used the University of Regina’s Academic Green as my example and asked how far of a walk it would be to walk around the perimeter of it (assuming it is a perfect circle). I measured in steps, mostly because I didn’t have anything capable of measuring a large distance and partly because I felt it brings a real life aspect to the problem. I then took it further to incorporate an area problem and asked how big of an ice rink could I fit into the green if I wanted to do so.  To close off the video, I ask what is wrong with how I measured for problem, hoping to spark some thoughts that maybe steps isn’t the best or most consistent way to measure.  I also hope they discuss the fact that the green isn’t a perfect circle, and how that could change the problems.

Anyways, this is my final product:

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for any future videos!

I stumbled across this thanks to one of my mentoring teachers on Twitter, Michael Kaechele.  You can find the original post by Gary Hayes on his blog, here.  Using statistics he found across the web, this counter calculates how many social media events have happened.  It figures out how many blog posts have been made, how many tweets tweeted, how many YouTube videos watched, and it goes on and on.  Just check it out below (may not show in Google Reader).

I was really surprised by how many YouTube videos have been watched.  It’s an enormous amount!  Since I started creating this blog post, 114 seconds ago (1:54 mins), 1314812s videos have been watched (the numbers will be different for you since the count starts once you load this page).  I will never come close to watching this in my entire life!  Now at 246 seconds (4:06 mins) there has been $177359 made from global media messaging and data.  That is a lot of money in a short amount of time.

Gary also lists these stats on his page. I’ve reposted them in this post, you can see them here.

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

These stats really blow my mind.  I knew social media was big, just not this big.  These numbers really put into perspective how big social media really is and how much it is part of our world.

From Flickr (click for original)

Yesterday, I stumbled across this article by Katie Ash. It talks about two different incidents where students used Facebook to post school shooting threats.  In the first story, a student’s post went unnoticed for five months until authorities learned of it.   In the second story, a threat was made in PEI and administrators decided to keep the school open just with tighter security. Apparently, the decision to keep the school open was because there was no way to contact students and families on such short notice.  Needless to say, parents were not pleased that they were not made aware of the threat.   Katie goes on to suggest that parents are expecting schools to be able to get the message out quickly with all the available communication tools of today.

This article brought up some interesting thoughts.

How can a shooting threat go without action for 5 months?   Was it only because it was made through Facebook?  If  dangerous threats like this are occurring on Facebook, should accounts be monitored?  What if this student came a week after his post and “shot the place up”?  Should something not have been immediately when the threat was made?

Now with regards to letting parents know quickly.  We do have incredible technology capable of reaching enormous amounts of people in no time, why couldn’t it be utilized to warn students and their families of such a threat?  They certainly could make a list of cellphone numbers to text, twitter accounts to tweet, emails to email, and so on.   The radio works great, but I’m sure even less people listen to it than ever before, so more and more ways to communicate a message like this should be explored.

What do you think about these two situations?  What can be done to better handle similar situations in the future? They certainly made me think about how technology should maybe be monitored and how effectively it is currently being used.