Instructify

When I was a lad, I hated when math story problems used metric units. Sure, the rest of the world is able to adequately measure stuff despite using the metric system, but I prefer good old American units like inches, pounds, or Fahrenheit. Like Grampa Simpson said, “The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it!”

At some point, however, your students will need at least a cursory understanding of base-10 measurement, whether they plan to be scientists or mathematicians, or if they just want to take a drive through Canada. Next time your lesson plan calls for them to go metric, let your students know about the World Wide Metric Conversion Calculator. This site will take your miles and ounces and convert them to kilometers and grams. It can even change them back, with no ill effects from the transformation.

Maybe World Wide Metric will make your students more trusting of the metric system than I was growing up. They may end up liking the metric system enough that they start using metric time. -BILL FERRIS

World Wide Metric Conversion Calculator

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Visualize Measurements with SensibleUnits

That’s a Lot of Pennies: The MegaPenny Project

Can’t get your school district to pony up the cash for an expensive interactive whiteboard with a clicker system? Well, you can take care of the whiteboard part of that set-up here, but how to get the response system? Thanks to the folks at Poll Everywhere, all your students need is a cell phone.

• You can set up a poll with different responses.
• Then, have your participants send a text message to “41411″ with their vote (Cast ####) as a text message.
• You’ll then get results that you can share (on your Wii-remote interactive whiteboard).

Another online tool for polling using cellphones is Wiffiti, which shows results as a as a really neat visualization (shown above). Here’s how:

• Set up a screen at Wiffiti, then have participants call in
• Send a text messages to 25622 (this also spells 2LOCA).
• Start your message with the at sign ‘@’ and the screen code, for example txt: @myscrn2 Hello everybody!
• Sign your messages, txt name John Doe any time, and it will remember your name.

Wiffiti is better for open ended responses situations.

So stop confiscating your student’s cell phones, and start putting them to use in the classroom. -ALICE MERCER

When I got my first computer before going to college, it amazed me with its massive 366MB of memory. How would I ever use all of it? That computer cost nearly $2000.

Since then, hard drives have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper. Want proof? OpenDrive Beta will give you a gigabyte of storage for free.

OpenDrive is like an online hard disk for backing up data or sharing files with others. Collaborate in real time using OpenDrive’s Collaboration Pro feature. You can also sync with uploaded files, so if you update your novel-in-progress, OpenDrive will save your changes both on your computer and in the copy you’ve squirreled away online.

Years from now we’ll laugh at the idea of a paltry gigabyte of storage. Until then, feel free to marvel at OpenDrive’s massive amount of memory. And you can’t beat the price. -BILL FERRIS

UPDATE: Dizzy with the possibility of all that free storage, I forgot to put a link in the article. You can try out OpenDrive by clicking here.

OpenDrive Beta

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Whether doing a story problem in math class or calculating square footage of a house, I’ve never been good at visualizing measurements. Three hundred square feet could be an apartment or a shoe box for all I know.

If you or your students are as bad at weights and measures as I, take a look at SensibleUnits. This site takes a unit of measure and converts it into real-world objects that will help you visualize what you’re looking at. Two square miles is the size of 12 Vatican Cities. A hundred ounces equals 4.7 basketballs, 19 human kidneys, or 3.8 hardback copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And 700 square feet translates to a single squash court, 4.8 parking spaces, or 1.1 cricket pitches (and who among us can’t relate to a cricket pitch?).

If you’re a math teacher, you can use SensibleUnits to write more interesting story problems (”If you have 45 domestic cats - 500 pounds - on your porch and a dog chases away 10 of them, how heavy are the remaining felines?”). SensibleUnits makes visualizing mass and distance easier than ever, even if the images are a little weird. -BILL FERRIS

SensibleUnits

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Are you looking for a new look for your data? Are you tired of the same old boring bar graph? Do you wonder if you have the right visual for the occasion? Will a line graph tell the story, or would a Venn diagram do a better job?

For answers to these and other vexing questions with graphics, check out A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. This site lists the major (and minor) visualizations and separates them by category: data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor, and the combo special of the visualization world, the compound visualization. With so many choices, you’re bound to find the right one. Another version of this type of site is also available at Information Design Patterns.

After that, you’ll need some ways to make your visualizations come true, and plain old Excel by itself, may not make that happen. Fortunately, there are some options. One is Chart Chooser, which has ready-to-go templates for Excel and PowerPoint, organized by type. For the adventurous, check out Many Eyes, an online data visualization site from IBM, where you can view visualizations by others, or upload data of your own to play with. To broaden your palette to the possibilities, check out a site like information aesthetics which highlights new and innovative data design. Really, you’ll never use that default pie chart in PowerPoint again. -ALICE MERCER

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
Information Design Patterns
information aesthetics - data visualization & visual design
Chart Chooser
Many Eyes

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