TEN WEBSITES EVERY STATISTICS INSTRUCTOR SHOULD BOOKMARK

Newsletter for the Section on Statistical Education
Volume 5, Number 1 (Winter 1999)

Academicians can generally invoke a lively discussion by posing the question "Which texts would you recommend for the bookshelves of any person in your field?" With the emergence of WWW resources, we can play a similar game with websites. Another version of the question is the proverbial "If you were stranded on a deserted island..." which we can now replace with "If your Internet provider only allowed you initial access to a small number of sites, which would you choose?" We will assume that you can follow links from your chosen sites to other places, indeed several of our favorite sites have relatively little content of their own, but are prized for their organization of links to other sites. To keep things focused, we will choose sites that are useful for teachers of statistics. URL's for the main site are given at the end of each description, although you can visit the page at http://it.stlawu.edu/~rlock/10sites.html to gain easy click access to any of the underlined sites.

1. Journal of Statistics Education Information Service -contains links to several statistical education organizations (including the Section on Statistical Education of ASA), newsletters, discussion groups and, especially, the online Journal of Statistics Education (JSE) and the JSE Dataset Archive. Note: As of the beginning of 1999, the ASA has agreed to sponsor JSE so some features from these pages will be moving to the ASA's website. (http://www.stat.ncsu.edu/info/infopage.html )
2. The CHANCE Project - has resources that emphasize using current news media as motivation for studying issues in probability and statistics. A highlight of this website is the monthly Chance News abstracting recent articles from newspapers and magazines with suggestions for pedagogical uses. (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance )
3. DASL - The Dataset and Story Library - is a collection of datasets and related documentation (stories) that may be searched by data subjects or by statistical techniques. A great place to visit for class examples, this site is one of the web's premier sources of data intended for use in statistics instruction. (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/ )
4. JAVA Applets - has links to interesting online applets for demonstrating statistical concepts. Located at Duke University, the site has links to many other sites. The list of contributors at the bottom of the page is a who's who of people active in writing applets for supporting statistics instruction and good place to browse to find other applet sites. (http://www.stat.duke.edu/sites/java.html )
5. Exploring Data - is an excellent collection of links and resources for teaching an introductory level course. Part online text, part online course materials, and all well presented by Rex Boggs at Glenmore HS in Rockhampton, Australia. (http://curriculum.qed.qld.gov.au/kla/eda/ )
6. CTI Statistics Website - has an emphasis on the use of computers in teaching statistics and includes a rich set of reviews of statistical software from a teaching perspective. The Centre is associated with the Statistics Department at the University of Glasgow. (http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/cti/ )
7. Statistical Instruction Internet Palette (SIIP) - is a project devoted to developing web resources for teaching statistics. Directed by John Behrens at Arizona State University. This site includes one of the fullest and nicest collections of links to WWW data sources at Dr. B's Wide World of Web Data. (http://research.ed.asu.edu/siip/ )
8. FEDSTATS - is billed as the "One-Stop Shopping" source for government data with links to more than 70 federal agencies. Be sure to try the A to Z link. (http://www.fedstats.gov/ )
9. Statistics on the Web - has links to more general statistical resources on the web, with a good section related to teaching statistics. Put together by Clay Helberg at SPSS, Inc. (http://www.execpc.com/~helberg/statistics.html )
10. WWW Resources for Teaching Statistics - outline from a talk at the 1998 Technology in Statistics Education Conference sponsored by the Boston Chapter of the ASA at Babson College. Contains all the links mentioned above and more. (http://it.stlawu.edu/~rlock/tise98/ )

So, how many of these sites were already listed among your bookmarks? Of course, this is a subjective list, and the real fun of the game comes from the discussions about the great sites that were omitted. If you've got a website or two that you think should be included, send an email to rlock@vm.stlawu.edu and then check back at the 10sites page to see if additional sites have been added.