Site of the Day: Tuva Labs

"The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it's going to a hugely important skills in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids." - Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google [source]
Today's site of the day is geared towards the science and math classrooms. I came across Tuva Labs last week through one of my many link sharing tools. I like Tuva Labs because it is really geared towards real life data analysis as opposed to data that we, or our textbook company, made up to have the problem set work. As much as the kids still are getting the analysis part, it is a lot more effective when they have real data to work with.

The site itself is broken into two segments: data sets and activities. The activities are developed to use the data sets. For example, here is a lesson on Eruptions in the Caribbean that is geared for grades 6-8.

The activities can be customized to your own classroom and modified to meet your needs. You can assign activities to your class and then track student's progress. The students can then explore the data set in five different graph types and click on the data points to learn more about that particular point. It's pretty neat!

If you are interested in checking it out, I recommend using their Tuva Labs Teacher's Guide page to get started. Best thing is that it is 100% free!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empowering Students with Choice Boards

Image
An example of a student choice menu that has students chose one item from each "course". I've been working with a teacher lately who has struggled with her students completing a summative paper in her class. This trimester, we're working together to find a way to increase buy in and hopefully have a higher percentage of students complete the project. While investigating options for her, the first thing that came to mind was using a choice board or learning menu to enable her students to select the method that would work best for them rather than prescribing a multimedia project. There are a wide range of ways that you can put choice boards in to action. Tic-Tac-Toe, Menus, Choice Board... there are lots of different words to use to search for them. But the premise for all of them is the same. Give your students a selection of options to chose from and let them go with it. Beyond hopefully boosting engagement, the teacher gets the added benefit of not have a ga
Read more

How fast are you? Ok, how fast is your internet??

With a week left in October, it'd be awesome if we got more teachers (and students) at our schools to click on the link in the message below to do a free one minute SchoolSpeedTest! It only takes a minute and we'd love to get more data. Thank you for your help! As we continue our October SpeedTest Month, we'd like to thank all of you that have participated in the School Speed Tests.  So far, we have had over 60% of Maine districts take part, with some schools performing over 150 tests so far!  However, we still have some districts and schools that have yet to take part.  The good news is that there is still plenty of time to do so!  All we're asking is that each school in your district perform 10-20 tests before the end of the month! As a reminder, participating schools will receive SchoolSpeedTest data that will help find network bottlenecks, support network planning, demonstrate the need for increased connectivity/hardware funding and support your district readin
Read more

Backwards Educational Technology Flowchart

Image
I think by now every who has followed this blog knows that I take in a TON of information each day in hopes of finding you information that I deem to be useful to pass along to make your day easier. I feel a bit like a clearing house in that regard. Many have told me that technology is awesome, but that it is so hard to determine what tool to use and when not to mention learn how to use it. Fortunately for you, that's pretty much my job (so use me!). In a recent summary of links from the Diigo education group, a member had posted a link to Katie M. Ritter's Backwards EdTech Flowchart. Once I read her post, which you can read by clicking here , I knew that I had to pass along her flowchart to you guys, too. The basic premise of her flowchart is simple: decide what you want to do and the flowchart will help guide you to the tool you could use (including links to all of them). It's a pretty well thought out flowchart and especially useful for those of you who are just starti
Read more