This video has been circulating around the blogosphere for a few days now and I finally got a chance to watch it myself today. In the video below Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gap Minder, presents 200 years of history in four minutes. The video focuses on the connections between health and wealth from 1810 through 2010. As you might expect, the video shows what can be done with Gap Minder.

Rosling has also presented some interesting TED Talks over the years. You can see one of them below.

Applications for Education
Both videos are models of using data to tell a story. While your students might not produce stories of the same depth of those made by Rosling, they could use Gap Minder to begin to create a story based on data sets they find or create.