Tuva Company News

Get Kids Help–Right When They Need It

Tuva recently launched a new feature that will significantly impact how students and teachers interact with Tuva Jr.: Live View.

Two Ways Live View Will Impact Instruction

1. Quickly Note Students Who May Need Your Attention

Some students constantly seek attention, while others do their best to fade into the background. Those who need your help most are not always the loudest.

Use Live View to identify students who:

are stuck or distracted
may be speeding through too quickly

2. Create a Dynamic, Responsive Learning Environment

Students thrive when teachers build opportunities for discussion, collaboration, and personalization. When you know where students are in a lesson in real time, you can:

pause them for discussion after they complete a specific question
partner them with others who have reached the same step
provide extensions for early finishers

Subscribe to Tuva or Tuva Jr. for Live View Access

With a Tuva subscription, you can monitor student progress on Tuva activities in real time with the new Live View feature. You’ll also get full access to our extensive library of lessons and datasets and unlimited capacity to upload data and create your own activities. View subscription information.

Synergy: Our Powerful Tools + Your Best Ideas

Real-world pedagogy and data literacy are at the heart of Tuva’s mission. Today, we are advancing that work further by enabling you to create custom activities in Tuva using your own data.

The Tuva Activity Builder allows you to place your best lesson ideas beside our powerful, accessible data visualization tools. That means the ability to quickly explore data and create, revise, and analyze graphs will be right at your students’ fingertips.

Five Reasons to Take Advantage of Tuva’s New Activity Builder

1. Strengthen Connection, Deepen Comprehension

Collect data with your students one day, then incorporate their dataset into a lesson on Tuva for the following day. Students will have a deeper connection to and comprehension of the data when they’ve collected it personally.

This deep involvement in the entire science process–from collection to sophisticated visualization and analysis–helps students see themselves as scientists, not just people learning about science.

2. You Pick the Phenomena, We Provide the Tools

Your creativity far exceeds the bounds of our Science Content Library; we simply cannot encompass every possible anchoring phenomenon. The ability to craft lessons in Tuva from your own datasets allows you to stick closely to your anchor phenomenon without sacrificing the benefits afforded by the Tuva tools.

3. Create Lessons That Speak to Your Students

Relevance drives student engagement. Use local data to center your math or science lessons around places familiar to your students. Alternatively, capitalize on your students’ unique personalities by pulling in data about topics you know interest them.

4. Make Graphing Accessible to All Learners

Our tools are designed to be accessible for learners with diverse abilities. So, when you create your lesson in Tuva you can rest assured all students will be able to engage meaningfully with data. (Learn more about Tuva’s Commitment to Accessibility.)

5. Strut Your Stuff and Help Make the Future #DataLit

You’re brilliant. Your work should be shared. You can now enable school colleagues and far-flung teacher friends to use more data in their instructional practice by sharing a direct link to your original lessons in Tuva. (And while you’re at it, remind them to hit you back. It’s a team effort.)

How to Get Started Building Lessons

Select My Datasets on the Dataset Library dropdown.
Insert or upload data.
Select the Create Activity button in the lower right corner.
Create your activity.
Select Publish.
Choose one of the options: Publish Privately or Request Public Sharing.

Now, start sharing!

Sign Up for a (FREE) Private Tutorial

We’d be glad to show you how to use the Activity Builder. Sign up for a 30-minute office hours session to meet virtually with one of our educational specialists for a one-on-one tutorial.

Tuva Bolsters Multilingual Supports

Multilingual learners are the fastest-growing population of K-12 students in the U.S. Throughout the past six months, Tuva has taken a number of steps to ensure multilingual learners have access to rigorous STEM instruction.

1. Added a Keywords Feature

Academic language differs markedly from the language used in everyday social interactions. Fluency in conversational English doesn’t equate to academic fluency. That’s because social vocabulary is usually acquired within two years, whereas academic vocabulary can take up to 10.

To support students as they develop academic vocabulary, Tuva has added a keywords feature. When students click on an underlined keyword, a definition will appear. These definitions are written at a 6th-grade reading level.

Many of Tuva’s keywords are tier two vocabulary words.

Tuva’s keyword feature defines terms not frequently heard in everyday conversation. This includes tier two vocabulary, academic language used across multiple subject areas (e.g. clarify, analyze, compare), and tier three vocabular, disciplinary-specific terminology (e.g. photosynthesis, velocity).

Other keywords are tier three vocabulary.

2. Authored WIDA-Aligned Lessons

Using the WIDA framework, we’ve begun weaving multiple English language development supports into our math and science lessons.

Language Support Tips

All learners, but especially multilingual learners, benefit from explicit instruction in academic language usage. Our newest lessons include language support tips such as sentence starters, instruction on parts of speech, or lists of helpful phrases for using data to inform, explain, or argue.

This image is a screenshot of Tuva showing a language support box. It says, "You may see different word forms of correlate. Each on serves a different purpose in speech. Verb- correlate/correlates, noun- correlation, adjective- correlated."

Prompt Discourse
Conversation with peers helps multilingual students build a more nuanced understanding of STEM concepts. It also gives learners more opportunities to practice academic vocabulary and language.

We’ve made a concerted effort to promote discourse in any new full-length lessons and activities. By adding “Discussion” prompts to the lessons, we encourage students to discuss their thinking aloud.

Try One of Tuva’s New WIDA-Aligned Lessons

Elementary STEM: Preparing for a Hurricane

A map of North America. The states are green. A white, spiral-shaped cloud is above the southeastern portion of the United States.

Secondary Math: Tackling Correlations

Six American football players in a pile. Some wear golden helmets, others wear black helmets. They are tackling someone.

Secondary Science: Sun Seekers of Turtle Island

The picture shows a rock with a spiral carved into it. A beam of sunlight hits the spiral.

Check out our other lessons intentionally designed to support multilingual learners. View our secondary STEM lessons with ELD support or our elementary STEM lessons with ELD support.

3. Enabled Easy Language Translation

Translanguaging boosts STEM comprehension. It also accelerates English language development. Thus, Tuva has prioritized making it easy for users to switch between languages in our lessons. Simply click the three dots in the upper right of the instruction panel to make the Google Translate widget appear.

A screenshot of Tuva which shows the portion of the screen where the three dots can be found.

Tuva Redoubles Commitment to Integrating Data Literacy Across the Math Curriculum

Math Content Library Revamp First Step in a Larger Effort to Support Teachers

Calls to incorporate data literacy in K-12 education are gaining momentum across the country. States like Virginia, Utah, Oregon, and California are taking major steps to create updated state standards or dedicated high school pathways.

Some of the states who’ve recently incorporated data literacy into their standards.

As a company dedicated to building a future in which all students possess data literacy and use it to contribute positively to society, Tuva applauds these changes. We also recognize implementing change takes work. Teachers, schools, and districts deserve support as they work to integrate data literacy across their math curriculum. To help maintain the momentum, Tuva is placing renewed energy on its resources for mathematics teachers.

As part of this effort, we recently revamped our math content library to make it easier for math teachers to locate lessons that will help them weave more data into their curriculum. The library has been reorganized to better reflect what teachers are teaching, with separate pages for each course.

“We’re hoping these changes will enable our math teachers to spend less time searching and more time teaching,” explained Tuva Math Educational Specialist Colleen McEnearney.

The content in the library has not changed; the navigation system has. Teachers are prompted to select a course: 6th-grade math, 7th-grade math, 8th-grade math, algebra 1, algebra 2, or statistics/AP statistics.

Each course page is divided into the big ideas of that course. These big idea buckets represent areas within each course where real-world data can greatly enhance students’ understanding of the content. For example, the 8th-grade math page includes the big ideas: interpreting scatter plots and associations; informal linear models; two-way tables; and formal linear models.

All lessons connected to a big idea are clustered on the page, so teachers can scroll through them all at once.

Previously, teachers had the option to sort lessons by course or concept, but this posed challenges. When filtering by course, they would see all lessons related to the course’s standards, requiring manual searching for specific concepts. Searching by concept, while possible, often resulted in diverse grade-level materials, necessitating manual sifting for grade-appropriate content within the old organizational system.

Tuva’s math content library revamp eliminates these time-consuming issues and makes finding the just-right lesson much more efficient. Explore our newly remodeled math content library.

Thank you for your data stories Professor Hans Rosling

Yesterday a data visionary, public educator, and storyteller Professor Hans Rosling passed away in Uppsala, Sweden.

Dr.Rosling was a professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. He founded the Gapminder Foundation in 2005, and decided to dedicate his time and energy to use data and statistics to debunk myths and provide a truer picture of our world.

In his 10 TED Talks — the most ever by a single person — he addressed critical global issues such as population growth, child mortality, poverty, and many others through the lens of data and simple statistics.

There has never been a more important time to enable our students and future global citizens to think critically about information, ask questions, use data as evidence, and have the ability to make sense of data and statistics they encounter every day.

All of us at Tuva have been greatly inspired by Professor Rosling’s vision and work, and in his passing, we are doubling down on our mission to make data and statistics accessible and usable for all.

Thank you Professor Hans Rosling, for your data stories and all your inspiration!

Sincerely,
The Tuva team