While watching the video Did You Know?, I would say I halfway misinterpreted the data. The US is behind in the international academic scores; therefore, when the video stated "India has more K-12 honors students than all the K-12 students in the US", I was deceived. I did not consider the population of the country. I just considered how America ranked in certain subject test scores compared to India. My family is close to several families that are from over seas, and all of them talk about how important succeeding in academics is in their country. Students come home and study for hours, and many of them are expected to make nothing lower than a perfect score on tests. With that being said, when I read the statistics given in the video, I came to the wrong conclusion. However, when the statement "if the learners do learn English there will be more people in China speaking English than the entire population of the United States" came on the screen, I did not misinterpret that. Every United States native knows English. I mean there is nothing else they would know unless they are home schooled in a Spanish speaking household. I thought it was common sense that China can't outrank us in our own language. I just assumed since the population of China is so much greater than America's, of course there would be more people speaking English in that country if they all learned our language.
According to WolframAlpha, the population of India is 1.21 billion, the population of China is 1.35 billion, and the population of the US is 309 million. If all the Chinese learning English do in fact learn the language, 23.56% of China's population would know English. Not even half of China's population is learning English. The number of English speakers in China is higher than America's simply because China's population is roughly 4 times greater than the US.
I conducted two other WolframAlpha searches. The first was the life expectancies of countries in the world. The top three countries with the highest life expectancies are Macau (84.4 yr), Andorra (82.5 yr), and Japan (82.1 yr). My assumptions of this data were pretty accurate and I had expected Japan to be ranked in the top five. My second search was the percentage of Christianity in the world. The result was that only 32% of the world's population consider themselves a Christian. The US was the leader in the Christian faith with 12% of the worldwide fraction and one of the lowest was Jamaica with 0.1% of the worldwide fraction. These numbers didn't upset me as bad when it clicked with me the statistics were based on a worldwide scale and not an individual country scale!
Gary Hayes Social Media Count
I was very intrigued by the media chart created by Gary Hayes. In a way I was a little blown away. I know the internet is used by people all over the world, but to see the numbers of things happening in one minute really brought it into perspective of how many people are doing the same thing in the same time frame. What really amazed me was that in 36 seconds, 124,999 photos were uploaded to FaceBook. That's a lot of photos!
With technology being used and changing at such a rapid rate, it will be my duty as a teacher to keep up. I will need to stay up to date with what is going on in the technological world so I can help my students learn what they need to learn. While I don't believe the use of technology is as important in elementary schools as it is in high school, I do believe kids should be exposed to the world around them instead of being trapped in a bubble.
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