The Next Chapter for Flu Trends

Posted by The Flu Trends Team

When a small team of software engineers first started working on Flu Trends in 2008, we wanted to explore how real-world phenomena could be modeled using patterns in search queries. Since its launch, Google Flu Trends has provided useful insights and served as one of the early examples for “nowcasting” based on search trends, which is increasingly used in health, economics, and other fields. Over time, we’ve used search signals to create prediction models, updating and improving those models over time as we compared our prediction to real-world cases of flu.

Instead of maintaining our own website going forward, we’re now going to empower institutions who specialize in infectious disease research to use the data to build their own models. Starting this season, we’ll provide Flu and Dengue signal data directly to partners including Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health (to update their dashboard), Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Influenza Division. We will also continue to make historical Flu and Dengue estimate data available for anyone to see and analyze.

Flu continues to affect millions of people every year, and while it’s still early days for nowcasting and similar tools for understanding the spread of diseases like flu and dengue fever—we’re excited to see what comes next. To download the historical data or learn more about becoming a research partner, please visit the Flu Trends web page.

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Google’s Course Builder 1 9 improves instructor experience and takes Skill Maps to the next level

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

When we last updated Course Builder in April, we said that its skill mapping capabilities were just the beginning. Today’s 1.9 release greatly expands the applicability of these skill maps for you and your students. We’ve also significantly revamped the instructor’s user interface, making it easier for you to get the job done while staying out of your way while you create your online courses.

First, a quick update on project hosting. Course Builder has joined many other Google open source projects on GitHub (download it here). Later this year, we’ll consolidate all of the Course Builder documentation, but for now, get started at Google Open Online Education.

Now, about those features:

• Measuring competence with skill maps
  In addition to defining skills and prerequisites for each lesson, you can now apply skills to each question in your courses’ assessments. By completing the assessments and activities, learners will be able to measure their level of competence for each skill. For instance, here’s what a student taking Power Searching with Google might see:

This information can help guide them on which sections of the course to revisit. Or, if a pre-test is given, students can focus on the lessons addressing their skill gaps.

To determine how successful the content is at teaching the desired skills across all students, an instructor can review students’ competencies on a new page in the analytics section of the dashboard.

• Improving usability when creating a course Course Builder has a rich set of capabilities, giving you control over every aspect of your course -- but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard to use. Our goal is to help you spend less time setting up your course and more time educating your students. We’ve completely reorganized the dashboard, reducing the number of tabs and making the settings you need clearer and easier to find.

We also added in-place previewing, so you can quickly edit your content and immediately see how it will look without needing to reload any pages.

For a full list of the other features added in this release (including the ability for students to delete their data upon unenrollment and removal of the old Files API), see the release notes. As always, please let us know how you use these new features and what you’d like to see in Course Builder next to help make your online course even better.

In the meantime, take a look at a couple recent online courses that we’re pretty excited about: Sesame Street’s Make Believe with Math and our very own Computational Thinking for Educators.

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how to Put Previous and next link in blogger

Many bloggers try to edit each and everything on the blog to customize the blog appearance. Weather it be images, widgets or anything. Sometime they fall into confusion that how to change the Newer and older post link at the bottom of the post. Here is a simple trick to change this or replace it with whatever you want in seconds. You can see a sample at the bottom of this post. You can even place an image in place of that or image and text both. Below steps will guide you to achieve this.

• Login to your Blogger Dashbord.
• Click on Layout.
• Click on Edit html
• Search for <data:newerPageTitle/> -This is Newer post link.
• Replace it with Previous or to place an image, replace it with <img src="Your-Image-Link" border="0" alt="Previous" /> or you can put both.
• Now, to change the older posts link, Search for <data:olderPageTitle/> and repeat the above step with appropriate changes.
• Click on Save Template.

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