The assignment is to compare information from Wolfram Alpha and Google squared. I have never used or heard of these search engines, but I am very interested in learning more about them. Wolfram Alpha is a long-range project that organizes data, computes information, and organizes it into graphs and charts to be able to summarize and analyze the information. I feel that this way of helping individuals interpret and organize data will be useful for many skills. Some examples would be financial computation, color computation, and mathematical step by step instructions.
Google squared helps to organize facts about topics, and it creates tables and charts to process the information. Google squared takes messy data and places it into simple tables. The information can be processed and searched more deeply.
I was asked to compare the United States population to China and India. China is 338.6% larger than the United States, and India is 293.4% larger. This information was easily accessible with Wolfram Alpha and Google squared. The information in itself is staggering, but the data analysis is quite amazing.
I will use both these search engines in my classroom. I did find Wolfram Alpha easier to use and read. These will both be great resources for classroom students. It will also help parents work with their children at home on skills that they may need to review. This could take a lot of stress out of homework for many parents.
Ouida McDaniel understood the point of this exercise better than anyone else so far. Here is a portion of her post:
ReplyDelete"After looking at this information I believe that the statics that are reported in Do You Know? did not show the whole picture. It is easy to be shocked that India has more gifted students than the U.S. has students if that is the only information that you are given. But when you look at the population size of each country you see that the population is so much greater in India that it follows that they would have more gifted students. India's population is almost 75% larger than the United States. I think as teachers we need to teach our students to look at all the data so they get a clear picture of a topic not just a piece."