I discovered the Google Ngram Viewer from this TED Talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel who are both fellows at Harvard University and Visiting Faculty at Google. They created the tool to analyse the millions of books being digitised by Google to allow them to search for cultural trends.
Using the Ngram Viewer would certainly be an interesting data handling lesson for children!
Great to see you enjoyed the post Kathy – thanks for sharing your ideas too – Wolfram Alpha has that same sort fo feel to it doesn’t it.
This is so much fun! It reminds me of an activity I do with my students to introduce them to wolframalpha. They type in two-first names and it produces a frequency graph and other interesting data. This kids love it. I think this Google model will become part of a lesson as well.