Harshil Parikh

Beyond the Paper-Hand Turkey

I love the time honored tradition of the Paper-Hand Turkey as much as the next guy (though I’m not sure how much that actually is) but making paper turkeys in and of themselves doesn’t add much value to the lives of students.

Holidays have real histories and real economic ramifications. When planning lessons about Thanksgiving, especially in the age of Backward Design, Purposeful Play and Common Core, we should make sure the goals of our lessons matter.

To help you plan, we’ve composed three ways to teach about Thanksgiving using real world data and that cover meaningful topics.

1. The History

The real story of Thanksgiving is significantly more interesting than the myths and should be part of the American narrative. The Mayflower actually had two types of travelers. Pilgrims moving to the New World to have space to practice their religion in peace and entrepreneurs coming to the New World hoping to make a living.

Use Tuva Labs datasets to explore who was on the Mayflower. Examine the numbers of Pilgrims in relation to everyone else. Look at the numbers of men and women. And discuss the social ramifications behind this combination of travelers. Examine who lived and who died. Ask students to find the correlation between social status and survival. Explore who signed the Mayflower Compact and what that tells us about our roots as a democracy.

Check out the legacy. Examine how many people in the U.S. today can trace their roots back to the Mayflower.

Students can examine the numbers of Native Americans living in New England and their swift and sad decline compared to 1620. This activity can be a cornerstone of your curriculum because it’s a truth you must return to when teaching American History.

2. The Economics of the Thanksgiving Table

Let your students explore the Tuva Labs data set about how much people spend on the holiday and examine if it is worth the expense and why. Explore if dinner has become cheaper or more expensive as the holiday evolves.

3. The Economics of Black Friday

Black Friday is a phenomenon that fascinates my students. Thier conversations vacillate between disbelief coupled with disgust and how much they really do want the new X-Box. A great exercise is to examine how good the savings actually are. Add the savings to it the opportunity cost of waiting in line, giving up Thanksgiving, being cold and uncomfortable and you know, possibly getting trampled by other crazed shoppers. Decide if and when braving the black Friday sales are worth it.

Our Black Friday dataset allows you to examine how many people participate, how much they spend and how those numbers have changed over time. Pose the questions, what direction are we going as a society based on that data? Can we make conclusions based on this?

The history and economics of holidays are always great ways to provide important lessons on played out topics. Not that I don’t love the art of the Paper-Hand Turkey, but there is more to Thanksgiving than that.

6 Ways to Talk about Ebola in the Classroom

1. Acknowledge your students

Acknowledge what your students know and identify the common misconceptions. This may seem obvious but activating prior knowledge it’s an important step in creating new understanding that is often skipped because of time constraints. Ask the kids what they know, where they learned it, and what they want to know. Acknowledge that Ebola sounds scary. Then, make room for questions. You can do this via a simple Do Now, a KWL or a Think Pair Share.

2. Examine the credibility of experts

Chose two experts who have been vocal about combating Ebola in the U.S. Look at their credentials and determine if they are qualified to make public policy around medicine. Are these people doctors? Nurses? Army Generals? Congresspeople? Televangelists? Chatty old ladies? Engage in a discussion about whose expertise is most applicable to a medical event and why those professionals should have the public trust.

3. Get down to the facts

The best way to stop fear is by empowering students with the knowledge they need to make safe decisions. Ebola is not new; we know how it is transmitted. The CDC and others go into detail about when people become contagious and how they transmit the virus. Students should not fear riding the subway and taking the bus. Plus, if de Blasio can do it, we can do it!

4. Teach Compassion

Most civilians in Africa who contract Ebola do so when caring for a loved one. Ebola is transmitted when we do the most human of things – care for each other. We need to show compassion for those who travel overseas to help and for those Africans who contracted Ebola while caring for others.

Show the photo of President Obama hugging Nurse Nina Pham and pose the question: what is the message behind the president’s action? What should we learn from this?

Send thank you letters to the medical volunteers. If you can find an address, electronic or real life, please let me know. I can’t find anything.

5. Stage a Debate

As congress, the military and the American public battle it out over border closures and mandatory quarantines, one up congress by staging your own debate. Make sure your students have credible sources to start with.

6. Be a data scientist

Let your students become scientists by allowing them to explore Ebola data in Africa using the drag and drop data visualization tools on Tuva Labs. You can create your own questions or use one of the ready-made activities.

Join the discussion!

Please join the discussion about addressing Ebola in the classroom and share your ideas and critiques.

Tuva Places First at the LinkedUp Vidi Competition

We went to Crete this past month to show our work at the LinkedUp Vidi Competition, which was held at the ESWC conference. We presented how Tuva is making open data useful for teaching and learning. The competitors’ presentations were very impressive and polished, and included Rhizi, Konnektid, DBLPXplorer, LODStories, eDL mobile app, Solvonauts, and agINFRA.

After presenting to conference attendees, we received some great feedback and had the opportunity to connect to and build relationships with the open data community and several other startups. Several meetings included people from the Open Knowledge Foundation, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Mozilla Science Lab, software carpentry, and many more.

We feel very fortunate to have placed first, and are very pleased with the 3000 Euros we’ve been awarded. After the competition, the various LinkedUp successes were interviewed about their experiences while being part of the competition. Below, you can see a compiled video of these interviews. Enjoy!

Tuva Shortlisted for the Vidi Competition!

We are excited to share some great news! Tuva was recently shortlisted for the Vidi Competition, and we will have an opportunity to present our work at the European Semantic Web Conference in Crete, Greece later this summer!

So, what is the the Vidi Competition? The competition is the second stage of a three-stage competition (Veni, Vidi, Vici) called the LinkedUp Challenge, with the goal to “push forward the exploitation and adoption of public, open data available on the Web, in particular by educational organisations and institutions.”

For those that might be curious, “Veni, Vidi, Vici” is a Latin phrase from the times of the Julius Caesar’s conquest of the Roman world, and it translates to “I came, I saw, I conquered”.

A Chance To Show Your Support – Vote For Us!

Here is how you can help. Alongside the actual competition, the organizers are running the People’s Choice Vote, allowing the larger education and open data community to support and vote for their favorite idea or product that truly has the potential to impact the world.

Voting will take just 2 mins. Here is how you can do it:

1. Go to the Tuva abstract entry. Here is the link: http://tuva.la/1hp2fBP

2. Click on the “Join and Participate" button and create an account.

3. Click on the + 1 icon to submit your vote.

Thank you once again for all your incredible support.

Visiting the MUSE School

Connecting with Joe Harper at the Big Bang Conference in Rhode Island, we were invited and humbled to visit the MUSE School. Each and every school we visit is a special day for us. The teachers we meet and the students we speak to motivate us to keep going. To meet the community at the MUSE School, I flew cross country to Los Angeles. Their school sits at the bottom of two hills. After parking and checking in at their office, I was enthusiastically greeted by Tania Lopez-Hipple – a math instructor. We toured the campus, went through several rooms and I loved seeing the walls of each classroom filled from floor to ceiling with work produced by their kids. When I say from floor to ceiling, I mean their ceilings drape with student work cause there’s no space to tape anything more. These teachers make a point to showcase their students.

I learned the faculty at this school take an interest in every child in their classroom. Each teacher works to incorporate subjects like math and English into the child’s current project – they work to intrinsically motivate their students. One kid I met was designing and building his own miniature golf hole by incorporating concepts from geometry.

We continued on to the multipurpose room where a quarter of our organic lunch was grown on campus. Tania and I, sitting with another teacher, discussed the value of independent research projects. These types of projects last for three months and engage with kids around their own interests. We discussed how Tuva can be a support tool for the students to incorporate data analysis and mathematical concepts into their independent research projects. This is the beginning of a collaboration that we’re eager to learn from and engage in. We’re excited to see the kids at the MUSE School get excited around data they’re interested in.

As we move forward be sure to come back to our blog to see updates and student work being showcased on our blog.