In which Gapminder addresses the connections standard
Posted By Barbara Lindsey on April 14, 2011
A great session I attended at NECTFL 2011 was The Impact of the National Standards on Language Education & National Initiatives with Marty Abbott, Eileen Glisan and June Phillips. Shared in this session were the results of a national (U.S.) survey of world language teachers on how and to what extent the Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century shape classroom language practice.
When language teachers were asked to rank which were the most difficult goal areas to teach, Communities and Connections rose to the top. This supports findings reported by Anna Chamot and Sheila W. Cockey of the National Capital Language Resource Center. You can download their NECTFL 2008 presentation, “Communities and Connections: Hardest Standards to Meet or Greatest Opportunities” on the NCLRC NECTFL Presentations page.
Looking specifically at feedback regarding the Connections Standard, the NECTFL 2011 presenters shared that teachers felt there wasn’t enough time in the curriculum and that it was difficult to connect with other disciplines and other departments. They were also concerned that they lacked the necessary expertise to address other content areas.
But if we focus on creating those interdisciplinary connections for our students through the comparison and analysis of readily available data sets on a variety of global issues, then Gapminder World is an easy-to-use, online/offline (and free!) tool to do just that. Gapminder makes world data sets more accessible by presenting them in a visually compelling, dynamic, graphical interface. Information on all the data sets are available on the data tab and the creators intend to regularly update the data. If you have issues with internet access you can use the free Gapminder Desktop. In this video, Hans Rosling, one of Gapminder’s co-founders, explains why and how to use the free desktop version of Gapminder.
The site itself has a wealth of resources including two that I think will be very useful in helping to create target language learning scenarios that are authentic and address important global issues.
The ‘For Teachers‘ area offers a featured resources section with a variety of lesson activities and guides that you can use to get a sense of the many learning possibilities this tool has to offer. Don’t forget to view the video on this site to see how some students use the data to formulate interesting questions and hypotheses about Haiti’s life expectancy and income compared to other countries. Although it’s a small group at the moment, there is a forum where you can share ideas and learn from others. You can also adapt and use any of the featured resources, one of which—the Human Development Trends, 2005—is particularly interesting because it is available in twelve languages.
The ‘Labs‘ section has some pre-made sets of data to compare (no lesson plans included) that you could use as part of a lesson you’ve already created or as the basis for a new unit or activity. As with the charts you create, you can ‘play’ the statistics in chart mode, with or without trails, and/or in map mode. You can modify them by adding countries and then share your final chart via email or by posting it on a blog or other website. With the Gapminder USA lab, you can compare U.S. states on a variety of statistics with each other or with other countries of the world.
While I haven’t developed an activity yet using Gapminder, I will definitely be looking to create a professional development session on this for pre- and in-service language teachers. If you have used Gapminder with your students we’d love to hear from you!
Hat tip to Carl Anderson and Hubert Lalande who tweeted 10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics where I rediscovered Gapminder World.
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