After playing around with ArcGIS Explorer, Many Eyes, and Google Fusion, I have found that there is a large difference between them. I am familiar with ArcGIS from working at the City of Ann Arbor and helping maintain their sidewalks but did not realize the true depth of the program. It's an extensive mapping program that stores data and can publish the results in many different fashions. I was hoping there was going to be an aspect of ArcGIS that would allow the publication of "simple" data, for example, data from excel. Nevertheless, it appears that most if not all of the data is dependent upon geo-mapping. Granted this could be used in a earth science or engineering classroom where students would have to analyze data based on a map. The second data visualization site that I visited was Many Eyes. Many Eyes brought the attention to representing data in a way that I had not thought about before. The flow chart of UN Climate Strategy was interesting to me. I think that I could use this site in my Senior Math course where students work on statistics for half of the year. The only issue I had with it is that JAVA kept locking up my browser and I had to "kill" my pages several times. I hope that, the issue is worked out in the near future. Last, I used Google Fusion because I have used Google Docs for a lot of other school related work and haven't heard of it before. Initially I wanted to look at my student growth, by comparing pre- and post-test data. However, I ran into an issue because of the way I have my table setup in Excel made it a challenge to work with in Fusion. Therefore, I went and got some data, gas consumption of my 2001 Taurus, that was more user friendly for Fusion. This is how I know I am a math nerd when I was keeping track of my mileage and gallons used. Just now it came to me as I'm making my students prepare for the science portion of the ACT, that having them create their own charts and then commenting/analyzing classmates charts will help them on the test.
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