Online resources
- GAISE
(Guidelines for the Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education)
a document endorsed by the ASA on the teaching of introductory
statistics
- CauseWeb (Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education) one stop shopping for resources, professional development opportunities, research on teaching and learning statistics. Includes jokes, songs, and cartoons.
- Merlot (peer reviewed teaching and learning materials, clicking on statistics will take you to CauseWeb)
- ARTIST (Assessment Resource Tools for Improving Statistical Thinking) has a database of assessment questions for introductory statistics courses. Select what topics and types of questions (literacy, reasoning, or thinking) you need and it will give you a list of possible choices. You can then download the ones you want to use.
- Isostat e-mail list server immediately connects you to the community of teachers who are the lone statisticians in their departments.
- If you have a question about a certain topic or how to teach
it, what book or type of technology to choose, assessment items, etc.,
this is the place to post it.
- You can also search the log of previous posts to see if your question has already been addressed.
- The list serve will also keep you up to date on what is going on
in the statistics community: conferences, journals, webinars, etc.
- Data
- DataSurfing This is a collection of links to various data sets online from Robin Lock at St. Lawrence University.
- Data360
- Wolfram Demonstrations Project has a collection of "applets" to demonstrate many different statistical topics. You do need to download their free Mathematica Player to use them.
Online Journals
Journal of Statistics Education published by the ASA
Open Source Software Tools
Cmap Tools - Concept Mapping Software
The Cmap Tools software is a free, easy to use concept mapping software system.
If you don't have Microsoft Office, or even if you do. OpenOffice is easily as good and in some ways better. For example, the built in equation editor is much easier to use than that available in MS Office. For those familiar with LaTeX, you can import/export LaTeX and use LaTeX.
This is becoming THE standard for statistical software development work and the basis for bioinformatics work. There are numerous readily available texts on using it for introductory statistics and as a classroom demonstration tool it is fantastic. A major bonus is that it is easy to install on a portable thumb drive so that you can use it anywhere.
Moodle - Learning Management System
If you don't already have a learning management system like Blackboard or Web CT, or even if you do. Moodle has many advantages and is freely available. All you need is a place to host it and a friend in IT (or IT expertise yourself).
Useful Commercial Software
Fathom - This is a great tool for quickly creating demonstrations of statistical concepts. If possible, let the students play with demonstrations using slider bars and randomization to explore sampling distributions, random data and relationships.