Which chart should you use?
I just stumbled upon this graphic for choosing which chart you should use to represent different data. It seems well done and is definitely worth a look. Click the image for a closer look on Flickr:
Posts from the ‘data handling’ Category
Feb 22
Pie Chart Flags
Another interesting website, this one visualises flags as pie-charts that reflect the proportions of the colours in their flags:
It would be a fun and worthwhile activity to use this site to exercise KS3 students’ abilities to mentally construct and destruct pie charts in a game of ‘guess the flag’
More Radio 4 Media
Below I review two media resources that are well worth a listen, for teachers, interested adults, and perhaps older students. These are not resources in themselves, but I am sure that educators will find stories and examples in these programmes that can have direct application in the classroom.
Cosmic Quest
Cosmic Quest This fabulous narrative history of human understanding of the Cosmos tells one of the greatest stories in the history of ideas. It is pleasingly compact, and easy to listen to. All the episodes are available to listen to from the BBC website.
In Our Time – Probability
Melvyn Bragg’s excellent In Our Time broadcast and podcast on probability last week was an excellent discussion of the history of probability with, among others, Prof. Marcus du Sautoy, who is always worth listening to! The podcast can be found here.
Furbles: Data Galore!
I’ve written a new piece of software for tecahers of students aged between 7-11 to help teach different sorts of graphs and other aspects of data and probability. They are cute little creatures that students invariably love, and are most effective when used with an interactive whiteboard or a data projector. The Furbles website can be found at
Click on the demo link to find a demo of the program and more information regarding the full version.
Flickr – A Free Problem Pictures
At University I was introduced to a really interesting CD called Problem Pictures. It had some fascinating images that all had some mathematical significance. I printed out about fifty and they made the walls of my classroom bright and appealing. It also had questions related to each photo, but I found that I rarely used them, preferring to create my own questions and ideas.
Enter Flickr, a great online photo sharing tool. Though you will not get questions related to each photo, the database is huge. Typing into the Flickr search engine ‘geometry’ turns up 10,810 photos at the time of writing. Most of them are really relevant; some of them are utterly spectacular. Here is a random sample:
I have found that putting an image full screen on an interactive whiteboard when students come into the room is a great way of capturing the students’ attention straight away.
