Sites, Gadgets and Widgets

Warning: entirely a novice.  Trying to give that perspective on using these tools.

My university, Grand Valley State University, is in Michigan, a famously economically hard-pressed state.  Much like Wisconsin, any kind of education funding is suspect and under inspection.  We have think-tanks requesting faculty emails, and newspapers and TV stations soliciting financials.  (The financials are public info - no worries.  The emails - creepy.)

We got an email from the administration with some information to contest the spin being put on the data, and I started wondering about making it a webpage.  So I used it as a chance to practice with Google sites, embed a Google spreadsheet, and a Wolfram|Alpha widget.  Unfortunately, you can't embed a W|A widget directly, you have to wrap it in a Google gadget, then embed it in the site.  This site was very helpful, and the whole process boiled down to pasting the W|A javascript code in the Google gadget builder. I was using the builder at this page, just adapting their most basic example.

The W|A gadget was pretty easy to manufacture, following their steps.  After entering a request, you'll see options for sharing.  The far right W|A sigil starts the widget builder.

The thing that took me the longest to get was just me being dense.  To get at component properties, select a component in your proto-widget.  And then the settings will show in the bottom left.

Then to get the embed code to paste in your blog (will work directly) or to put in the gadget to put in a google site, click on the code button in the embed box on the finished widget.

The (sort of) finished project is here: Facts and More: How does GVSU stack up?

And, of course, I'd happily take any suggestions for improving that page. 

Teachers vs Athletes

VS.

Whose side are you on?

I know this is silly.

I love quotes, so I have quotes of the day popping up in all sorts of places.  One today was:

"America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week." - Evan Esar

"More like in a minute," I think.  I tweet the quote and twask: Problem: how long does it take the average prof. athlete to earn the average annual teacher salary? Calling W|A!  (Mr. Esar is listed in wikipedia as a humorist.)

@SethBurn asked back: "@mathhombre Are minor league baseball player's professional athletes? How about women in the WNBA? AHL hockey? MLS soccer?"

Hmmm.  Admittedly I was thinking about MLB, NBA and NFL.  Onto  Wolfram|Alpha!

My first try was "average salary professional athlete" which got me the average US salary ($40,690/year).  One of the suggestions was "athlete salary" which returned this data.


That's a lot of info.  To see all that for the future searches, just click on the search terms, which will take you to the W|A search page.

"average teacher salary" finds for all US education, training and library occupations, $46,610/year.  All right! Elementary teachers (a suggested search by W|A):  $50,040/year for 1.54 million workers.  Secondary teachers:  for $52,450/year for 1.06 million teachers.  It interpreted secondary to be highschool, so Middle School teachers: $50,630/year for 650,000 teachers. It occurs to me to ask for a comparison here: professional athletes vs teachers, which isn't much more informative.

So I calculate the average teacher salary (excluding special education and vocational teachers): (50040*1.54+52450*1.06+50630*.65)/(1.54+1.06+.65) = $50,944 as an average teacher salary.

What about the pro athletes?  I think the original Wolfram Alpha figure is interesting.  But what about the big time leagues?

Baseball: "average MLB salary" got the major league baseball teams, "average baseball salary MLB" didn't work (some results about the energy expenditures of playing baseball).  Can't get it to give me the number.  Finally googled it up: $2,944,556 in 2007, for 28 players*30 teams, 840 players; NFL $1.4 million in 2006 for 53 players * 32 teams, 1696 players; NBA $5,215,000 for 432 players.  (The 30 teams can have up to 15, but not all do.)  So the average major league professional salary: (2,944,556*840+1400000*1696+5215000*432)/(840+1696+432) = $2,390,000 for about 3000 professional athletes.

What about hockey?  I am a die-hard Red Wings fan, so it breaks my heart, but I don't think the NHL is a major professional sport in the US anymore.  And if the Wings are out, MLS is right out.

The original question involves breaking down by hourly wage.  Which raises the question of how many hours an athlete works.  I considered a lot of approaches, but ultimately decided that most pro athletes work year round now, considering conditioning, and long hours during a season.  Maybe.  So we'll consider the 50 weeks by 40 hours per week. About $1,195 per hour.  $50,944/$1,195 is about 42.

Like I shouldn't have known the answer would be 42?

Anyhow, that's about a week.  So congratulations on your estimate, Mr. Esar.
 

Math and Tech: Thor's Day

Why do we have Norse-named days anyway?  I want a cartoon here of Thor's screwdriver and pliers.

Thursday Morning

Wolfram|Alpha - Maria Anderson

• Start playing with Wolfram Alpha.  Enter line (1,2) (5,5).  Wow.  Notice what extra information there is.  Maria set us the problem of how to graph a line with a point and a slope.  (Took some work.)
• How to have students share: best in a chat room, where students can chat the cool entries that they find.  Otherwise can use a discussion board.  An interesting post is that the URL with your result will always bring up that exact same page you saw. Well, with the proviso...
• Wolfram|Alpha is updated weekly.  If it can't do it now, try next week.
• Maria's favorite Wolfram Alpha posts.
• See the data available on a specific topic: here's my town - Grand Haven, nutrition, etymology of a word (Even shows rhymes! But not for orange.)
• Try comparisons: cities, companies, species (took some clicking on options to get this result), publications, ...
• Notice or beware that this works on smartphones.  (Goodbye TI)
• Is W|A skynet?

Specific Uses

• Have students use Skynet W|A to factor.  What do they notice? Connections with graphs? Can they generalize?
• Careful: log(x) means natural log to W|A.  lg(x) means log_10 (x)
• Find data they are interested in for applications, display, etc.
• Replace graphing calculators.
• On assessments, give them the graph or info they would have gotten from W|A.  Now what can they do with it.

Consider the uses for this.  Maria's example was: you go into a hospital.  A nurse, one of your former students, is calculating a dose.  Do you want her going by memory of what you taught, or using the W|A on her smartphone?   What if the nurses you've taught are at about 70% on average?

Thursday Afternoon

Synchronous learning - Jill Mueller

Wiziq

• Free.  Do need to sign up.  Anyone can be a teacher.  Classes have whiteboard (with tools), audio, chat, ...
• Teacher turns on permissions for students: whiteboard, microphone, etc.
• Has some basic math symbols in the whiteboard typing.
• Compare to Elluminate
• Teacher can turn on screen sharing to show what's on for them.  Very handy with MathXL or ... anything.  Can't chat while sharing a screen.
• Non-teachers can share screen, but it shows up as a non-resizable window.
• Can monitor wiziq window and your screen share simultaneously.

Vyew

• Many similar features
• Create a lobby, and then you link students to there.  Vs. creating a new link with each session in Wiziq.
• Don't have to register, you can just join.
• Teacher can set status of participants.
• There's a screen sharing tab, and it doesn't obscure the chat.  (Not sure how the teacher will see the chat without switching back to the vyew window, which will then show itself, infinity, boom. )

One of the participants recommended DimDim, saying that it integrates well with Moodle.

My gut reaction is that I'd use  wiziq for one time or infrequent sessions, vyew for a regular gig.  Students could bookmark your lobby, and make it dead easy to connect.

Open Session

• Finish my Camtasia student film
• Start my required mini-presentation for tomorrow
• Work on mindmap on Conditions of Learning
• Google document to share participants' contact info (nice idea, Susan)

Quick Post: Wolfram Alpha

From a gaming site:

Background Research

If you don’t care about where my information came from or how I compiled it, skip on over this part, but for the naysayers out there, this is what and how I did it. I’ll include links at the bottom of this article in case you kids at home want to try it out. In a rather complicated nut-shell… I referenced population data in Wolfram Alpha by state and county and compared that proportionally to the registered DCI users from the DCI player database online. I then cross referenced every county in the US via its latitude and longitude as recorded in the US Census from the year 2000 against the addresses for every National Qualifier event in the US and Canada as found in Wizards' online event locator. (The addresses found in the event locator were tossed through an online tool I found which converted them to latitude and longitude.) I then bounced all those coordinates though an Excel calculation to take into account the curvature of the earth and give me accurate distances (as the crow flies) to each event from every county. Once I had those HUGE data tables arranged and I had broken Google Docs spread sheet I reorganized the data into usable bits to tell me things like the minimum distance that someone in each county would have to travel to an event, and how that differs from the 2009 event schedule etc. I also weighted all the averaged distances by the affected population that would have to travel them.

I am not teaching my students to use the available resources sufficiently well.  That is all.