Graphing: Facebook Birthdays

 

Target Age Range: 4th-12th grades

Skills Covered: gathering data, graphing, technology, keyboarding

When I used to teach in a classroom, it was easy for my students to gather large amounts of data for graphing…there were 24+ people in the room at all times.  As a homeschooler, it takes a little more creativity to gather data from a large group of people.  We have emailed friends and family with questions before, but getting responses takes time.

Enter the world of social media!  There are many ways to gather quick information from friends on Facebook or Twitter.  By simply asking a question, you’re likely to have quite a few answers in a matter of minutes.  Even better, a platform like Facebook makes it easy to gather some data without ever asking a question.

Recently, my 7th grader was asked to create a data sheet tallying how many Facebook friends were born in each month.  To find the info, he simply had to go to the upcoming birthdays page where a month-by-month list was found as he scrolled down the page.

After tallying the data, he went to one of my favorite free spots on the web, Create A Graph.  He chose to create a line graph to represent the data.  Pretty professional looking, huh?  You won’t believe how wonderful this graph generator is!

In total, this lesson took less than 30 minutes from start to finish.  Not bad for a motivating, technology-integrated math activity!

Need a living math “how-to” guide? You might like Loving Living Math!

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