The truth is I’m not sure what the inauguration and math have in
common, but I decided this morning that it was important for my grade 7 math class to
watch this historic occasion. As we sat in the computer lab watching
streaming video live from Washington it occurred to me that this was an
amazing example of the way that technology is changing the nature of
information and how we interact with information. We watched streaming
video on CBC, but there were a multitude of other ways that we could
have experienced the inauguration. A good list can be found here.
Other examples of the new ways information is being used and created in the 21st century:
- President Obama has a Blog (just like all of our teachers)
- We can now analyse his speech for word usage and create a visual representation like this one:
In the end we did give it a math spin. Homework was to
find out how many people were live at the inauguration and then use
mental math to estimate how many times bigger that was than our school population.