With there being so much information on the internet, how do our students deal with all this data?
In this video we will show you how to easily find trends and correlations. We will look at a tool called Google Trends.
[podcast]
Video Highlights
0:00:03 How to deal with data?
0:00:15 Google Trends
0:00:50 Search Terms
0:01:07 Find out what’s trending of the moment
0:02:13 How to correlate data and compare trendsealing-with-data-trends
This video is part of an hour long training on how to deal with data and Google Searches. You can access the entire video plus our entire collection of training videos in the Unlimited Support Program.
Transcript: Dealing with Data
Now how do we deal with data? So there are a couple of tools that help us dig down into all of this search data that we’re finding. The first one that I wanted to show you here is Google Trends. This is a great tool for you to use with your students when you’re trying to get them to understand the context of what they’re looking at in terms of a search result. So basically what you do is you go to www.google.com/trends and you will see that there’s a search box just up in the top and you type in your search term that you’re looking at.
So it could be, for instance, let’s have a look at global warming. I typed in the search term global warming, the page opens up here for me and this shows me all the search terms for global warming. Now you’ll see this goes back to just below to – where does it take us to? Beginning of 2004 right through to today and you will see that there’s a screen here and it graphs out the search phrases.Now some interesting things to take note of, you can find what’s trending at the moment okay? You will see here that there’s little letters sometimes on the top of peaks and what those letters stand for are news headlines that might have caused a sudden spike in search results.
[bctt tweet=”How to use Google Trends with your students. #gafe #aussieED #edu”]
So here if I look at the H, I’ve got Los Angeles Times and it says Bush to set realistic goals to combat global warming, so that particular news article created a bit of a frenzy. In November 2008 if I look at this G, I’ve got the Chicago Tribune it talks about the governor’s pledge to fight global warming together. So that’s the trend of what has happened. At the top, just above the graph here, you will see that there’s a graph here that you can check and it says forecast.
So when we click this forecast, Google will put out a dotted line and it will actually forecast what they think will happen. Now the great thing here about global warming is that we can chart graphs against each other, so search terms against each other. So you could sit here with your students and you could say to them “What’s another search term that would be like global warming?” So here we could put in here, for instance, climate change. Okay and so if I click that and click search we’re going to see that global warming and climate change are now plotted against each other.
If you’re looking at correlations, you will see there is a fairly good correlation between the two, global warming gets more searches than climate change. If you wanted to see the difference that this might make, you might want to look at the G20 for instance or you might want to look up Kevin Rudd as a prime minster who is pushing a lot about climate change and global warming and so on. So it’s just a nice way to be able to look at this. Now these are all search trends okay? So things that are happening in terms of search.
This video is part of an hour long training on how to deal with data and Google Searches. You can access the entire video plus our entire collection of training videos in the Unlimited Support Program.
