Special Blog Post #1

Comparing the populations of India, China, and the US
In this special blog post we were told to read Dr. Strange's blog post "Many Students Misinterpreted the Data in Did You Know". In that post we were told to use WolframAlpha.com and compare the populations of India, China, and the United States. I found out that the US is ranked the 3rd largest population in the world, compared to India and China, who are ranked the second and first. The US has 309 million people, China has 1.35 billion people, and India has 1.21 billion people. Clearly, they out rank us in the United States, so of course they are going to have higher numbers of people who speak English than us, because they have almost 5 times the people of us!

Using WolframAlpha.com

We were told to use the search ourselves and compare two sets of information. On my first search I typed in "compare the populations of Alabama and Mississippi" and found out that Alabama has almost 2 million more people than Mississippi. While Mississippi has 2.979 million people, Alabama has 4.803 million people. In my second search I typed in "compare the number of boys and girls in the state of Alabama" and found out that there are more women than men in our great state! Women win with 2.427 million and then men have 2.286 million.
I don't think my students would use this search engine as much as I would. I find it a very valuable tool and I can use it pretty much everyday. I can use the graphs and figures in slides and I can compare and contrast things very easily with this. (I even downloaded the app!)

Social Media Count

I visited Gary Hayes Social Media Count and saw that social media (and pretty much everything else)is changing at a scary rapid pace. Its unreal how fast things are changing and how fast our social media is growing every second, let alone minute. I think this will help my future children I teach. Twitter is becoming bigger and bigger, which I love because I use Twitter a lot actually.
The only thing I think that could hurt my future career as a teacher is that its going to be harder to keep up with the changing social media. I'll use my parents as an example. They know about Facebook but they do not know a lot about Instagram and Twitter, which are the three top social media sites. As technology grows and social media grows the harder it is going to be for them to catch on to the latest trends. I'm afraid that might happen with me, BUT the great thing about working with kids, is staying in the loop!