The most beneficial part of this project to me was being able to learn how to use Fathom and what it is capable of doing in a classroom environment. It would be great if the classroom that you were in had laptop computers so that students could follow what was going on as you demonstrated how to start a collection, a table and a graph.   As the lesson was being taught students or pairs of students could follow along as you were working with Fathom. Working with and learning how to use Fathom just verified my feelings about how important it is to include technology in lesson plans. I believe that technology gives students an opportunity to take explorations to a new level and further expand on ideas. If teachers are given the proper preparation materials and training then technology in the classroom could be used nearly everyday.

I did find that this project was fairly difficult because I had to narrow what topics to cover so that students wouldn't be overwhelmed. This area of data analysis covers numerous items and in a short few days only so much can be taught and learned. I do think that this unit would be perfect following a probabilty chapter. You could relate what was learned in that probabilty lesson and also what has been learned from solving and graphing linear equations with this data analysis. I just was not sure what data analysis topics to cover and how much time to spend on a certain topic.

I chose this topic because I think students will definitely understand the real-world applications and relevance. This topic has many areas of interest that could be explored by the students so that a fairly accurate graph on a certain topic could be found.

I was also fairly vague in some of the homework and activity exercises and this was done on purpose. I would want students to be able to think on their own and come up with an accurate example of a linear model that could be used so that a best-fit line and least squares solution could be found. By having this open ended homework I would expect to receive numerous examples knowing it is difficult to think of variables that show lineearity.