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I do enjoy data, even more so when it has to do with social studies.  Here’s a link for a quarter-by-quarter breakdown of GDP gains and losses.  What’s interesting is that the rule of thumb (I believe) is that a recession is declared when there are two consecutive quarters of growth.  By that rule, the current recession ended in September.  I’m not sure a lot of people believe that.

For the classroom, it can do a good job of showing students how complicated the economy is (as if they couldn’t figure that out on their own!).  The GDP data is broken down into four main sectors.  While the overall GDP and personal consumption expenditures show a recession starting in April 2008 (right when the oil prices started to go up…), net exports and services showed a slowdown beginning in January 2006, while in terms of government consumption and investment, there was not a recession pattern and there had not been one since April 1995.  However, if the first quarter of 2010 did not go well (that would be this past October through December) for the federal government, that data indicates a recession pattern could occur starting this past July — recessions are always declared retroactively, from what I understand.

Also, strictly in terms of how many months in a decade the economy was in recession (according to GDP data), the 1980s were the least stable, edging out the 1950s by a month (the early 80s had Reaganomics and recovery from the tumultuous late 1970s, while the 1950s presumably had issues relating to the conversion of the economy from war to peace, although there was an upshoot of consumerism, disposable income, and home construction during that decade, hmm…).  The most stable decade was the 1960s, with the 1990s at number two. The 2000s come in at 4th most stable, though keep in mind the data only goes back to 1947, so we don’t get the whole picture there.

In any event, here’s hoping things get better — and here’s the link, courtesy of the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis:

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=1&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Qtr&FirstYear=2006&LastYear=2007&3Place=N&AllYearsChk=YES&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid

I love this whole web 2.0 thing, because there’s so much cool stuff coming out for it. I was initially trying to find something that could be used for online tutoring (my question was that I know people do it, but how do they do it?) without using proprietary software, or really, anything that needs to be downloaded.  I came across Twiddla.  It’s essentially an online whiteboard, so you can draw things out and even chat to the person on the other side.  I think you can play videos in there as well, but they don’t work well — best just to post the link somewhere.  It works a lot better than a bunch of other similar sites I’ve seen.  You can even save the sessions, which are then played like an animation.  Of course, from a teaching standpoint, this has the potential to turn into unsupervised student time with a teacher, so evidently there are kinks to be worked out.  It’s cool nonetheless, but I’m not sure I’m doing it justice; click the link below and play with it.  You can just make a Twiddla session without signing up, so go for it.