The sites we were asked to visit this week were like black holes to me.... they just sucked me in. I could spend hours on Google Trends coming up with different search terms and examining the data. As an avid Harry Potter fan I did do one search on Harry Potter and it was fun to see what events in the Harry Potter mania caused the biggest spikes in searches. I also could spend hours looking on some of the statistical sites we were asked to look at. The CDC website was by far my favorite. It contained so much relevant information and would be a great site to recommend to high school students who are doing a research paper/project.
I have learned a lot throughout this course on how to accurately use data to drive decisions. As I stated in the beginning of this class our district is big into testing and using those results to drive our curriculum decisions. Although I support this idea I realized we aren't doing a very good job analyzing our data. Using the class mean or looking at the range of scores isn't enough information to use in order to make some of these decisions. We need to do a better job of analyzing our data through z-scores, standard deviations, etc. I hope to help guide our district in that direction.
