Gone Phishing … Creating Graphs and Charts Online

Phishing Scams…

So, with the state of the economy and the holiday season upon us, scams are definitely on the rise. Unfortunately, online scams are running rampant, especially within our school district’s email system. On a weekly basis, I have teachers forwarding emails they are receiving from businesses, especially banks. So, I went online to get some information about phishing scams, and found this great video created by the guys at commoncraft.com. They have tons of videos on topics from scams, to blogging, to electing a president…all in plain English! You can find their videos on their site, or on their youtube channel.

Here is their video on phishing scams:

This is a great video to show to students as well. So many of them handle many computer issues at their homes (crazy…but I see it all the time) that all it takes is for the kid to open the email, say “mom, I need your password for this thing the bank needs” and badda boom badda bing…scammed! It is all about understanding the amazing ‘beast’ that the Internet is.

Graphs, Charts, and Equations … I feel an obsession coming on

So, my last post was about this sweet site Sue Waters posted on her blog called Crappy Graphs. The site allows you to create a graphs and venn diagrams about whatever you want, label the x and y axis, and draw your graph. I can see never ending opportunities to use this site in classrooms of all disciplines. Here is the graph Sue created in her blog post:

How true is that!? Her use of understanding and effort is something that my previous school used to have students graph after receiving their standardized tests scores. It really helped the kids come to grips with the fact that most of the time, when minimal effort was provided on their part, minimal understanding happened.

In the classroom setting, this can be used for students to graph their progress in many areas of the classroom (test scores, homework turned it vs. grade in class, etc). When it comes to integrating graphing into your curriculum, Math and Science are obvious classes people can see this being used, but what about a Reading class? What about students tracking their level of understanding throughout parts of a book being read. Or a graph based on a character in a book, with the contents of the graph reflecting the “ups and downs” of the character’s stress/anger/attitude/etc…What about a Social Studies classes? Graphing a country’s morale during a period of time in history, or the state of the economy of a country over a period of time.

Of course, with any graphing activity, analyzing the graph is a must. This is where higher level thinking questions and discussion prompts can be worked into the lesson and the ‘true’ understanding of the content is exposed. How can you see graphs used in your subject?  

Want more choices? Here is a blog post about a site that helps you create line graphs, pie charts, venn diagrams and even math equations called graphjam. Here is mine