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!