Gapminder Updates – Great for Maths, Science, Geography, Social Studies, History & More!

Scrolling through things I had starred for holiday reading, I noticed that Gapminder.org has been updated. I have blogged previously about Gapminder and the fantastic Hans Rosling, it is a fantastic tool for visualising a wealth of World data on lovely scatter graphs that animate changes through the years.

Watch one of Hans Rosling’s classic TED talks to see what it’s capable of:

There have been a number of great updates which can be seen in this diagram I’ve borrowed from Gapminder.org:

You can see the blog post detailing these on Gapminder, but to summarise:

More data;
Downloadable data – each set is available as a Google Spreadsheet ;
Data displayed as scatter graph or plotted on a map;
News & videos. (Bookmark their RSS feed in your Google Reader!)
For Teachers section that is soon to be updated with teaching ideas & resources.

How have you used Gapminder in your classroom? I’d be fascinated to hear.

PS: I also note that Google (who bought our Gapminder a few years ago) have a little strangely brought out a very similar tool: Google Public Data Explorer. This has some nice alternative data sets to investigate.

PPS: Another short Hans Rosling video – just because he’s great