Week 8 Reflection: Fathom

After working on many activities using Fathom, I really believe that this program can be an effective tool in a middle or high school classroom. The first thing that I really like about Fathom is how simple it is to display data accurately on a graph. I really like how easy it is to change the graph from a dot plot to a histogram by just going to the mini-toolbar in the top right hand corner of the graph and changing it. I also like how I can use summary tables to display more than attributes of data at a time. In the third task, it was really valuable to be able to show gender, place, and age at the same time, and to compare. The third thing I like about Fathom is that it displays central measures of the data such as median and mean very nicely, and it is very easy to evaluate the information that they are displaying. Along with this, it is really nice to be able to use different formulas in order to show mean, standard deviation, maximums, minimums, etc. Fathom has a lot of cool features that I am continually learning about, and I have really enjoyed spending time getting to understand this program.