Weekly Blog 4

Since the humanities students have dedicated most the last couple weeks working on digital storytelling, I was introduced to something completely new in class today when we used Fathom. Although I wasn't able to get too in depth in using this program, at first glance I would describe it sort of like Microsoft Excel on steroids. I was amazed at how easy and interactive it was. Basically, one can take any data set and with the drag of a mouse create a table, chart, or graph. Not only this, Fathom makes it very easy to adjust the graphs and tables one makes. I would say this is the most significant thing I learned today, especially because we dedicated a portion of class talking about the classroom applications of it. For humanities classes, we discussed how Fathom could be used as a way to display statistics or population data. As a class, we examined Vietnam War draft data. By creating a graph with Fathom, we were able to see trends in the draft lottery numbers. We saw that the later months tended to have the lowest draft numbers, which was a bad thing for people born in those months who didn’t want to go to war. This led to a revelation on how the draft process worked. This was just one example of how Fathom could be applied to a social studies classroom. The classroom applications of Fathom for math and sciences are rather obvious. These fields deal profusely with statistical data and numbers. Fathom is perfect for aiding in making sense of data of this sort. I do still however have questions about Fathom. I don’t feel that I really got to fully learn the capabilities of this program. I would love to know other ways people think that this program could be used in say, a history class, for example.