Tuva is excited to participate in a session alongside WestEd and NSVF Ignite on EdTech Research that Empowers Educators and Entrepreneurs at the New Schools Summit in San Francisco on May 11, 2016.
It promises to be a fantastic session, exploring the paramount topic of how rigorous education research can inform the design and development of tools and products to drive more effective teaching and learning in the classroom.
Are you planning to be at the New Schools Summit? If yes, please join us at the session.
During the initial design phase of Tuva Activities and Lessons, one critical decision we made was that activities on Tuva would only initially support one item type – open-ended questions.
Why? We felt that activities and lessons based on authentic datasets gave both educators and learners a unique opportunity to look beyond the straightforward multiple-choice and True/False questions.
With actual data and tools at our fingertips, educators can pose a number of interesting, open-ended questions that gave learners an opportunity to:
Practice and gain exposure to the language of data, statistics, and graphing.
Construct arguments and support their reasoning with evidence from the data and their own visuals.
Explain their thinking in words, giving them an opportunity to focus on their grammar, sentence construction, as well as learn the techniques of quantitative reasoning.
Describe in words the various aspects of the data, including:
Any patterns or interesting phenomenon they discover.
Distribution of various attributes, such as its shape, its spread, or its center
Image: New Item Type on Tuva
Over the last twelve months, we have received a variety of feedback from educators across math, science, statistics, and many other subject areas about being able to ask (and immediately grade) straightforward, multiple-choice questions at the beginning of the activity to assess for basic understanding, and then gradually build towards the more difficult, open-ended questions.
I am excited to announce that we will soon be adding these two new features – Multiple Choice Questions and Automatic Grading – to Tuva Activities and Lessons.
For Tuva Basic teachers, you will be able preview these new features via a number of different activities on the 25 Free Tuva Datasets.
For Tuva Premium subscribers, you will see this feature gradually introduced across all of our 400+ activities and lessons around 315+ datasets, as well as many of the new activities and lessons we release moving forward.
At Tuva, our goal is to make data accessible and usable for data novices and learners, enabling them to learn and master foundational data, statistics, and analytical concepts and skills.
The Open Data Movement has catalyzed something incredibly powerful – free, open access to millions of datasets from a vast number of organizations such as the World Bank, NIH, NASA, CDC, NOAA, FDA, Census Bureau, Department of Education, Department of Energy, and many many others.
We believe that these open datasets can serve a powerfully unique purpose. These datasets can be transformed into opportunities for deep inquiry, exploration, and learning. They enable educators to teach and students to learn critical data exploration, visualization, analysis, and interpretation, as they dig deeper into topics aligned to their curricula and standards, their interests, or their day-to-day work.
To continue to realize on our vision, we are excited to formally announce the launch of Tuva Collections!
What is a Tuva Collection?
A collection is a group of ready-to-use datasets, activities, and lessons around a specific content area (such as Linear Models) or topic (such as Social Justice).
How many collections are on Tuva?
Currently, we have 4 Tuva Collections (and plenty more in the works!). They are:
1. Signs of Change – Discovering events and phenomena in US History using US Census Microdata
3. Civic Literacy Through Data – Explore social issues including gender equality, gender identity, immigration, and racial justice in the United States through the lens of data
4. Employment in NYC – Exploring Employment in NYC through the lens of the 5 Boroughs, Race, Educational Attainment, Gender, and many other factors
Are you open to collaborations to create a new Tuva Collection?
Yes – we have many more Tuva Collections in the works so please stay tuned!
Over the 2014-15 school year, teachers and students in thousands of classrooms across the country and around the world used Tuva to bring relevant topics, authentic datasets, and data-based, inquiry-driven activities, and lessons to their students.
Since we released the “Upload Your Own Data” feature in January of this year, educators and students have uploaded thousands of datasets for their math and statistics classes; biology, chemistry, and physics labs; and for a variety of projects on Tuva.
Checkoutsomeof thetestimonials to learn about the the kinds of powerful, memorable learning experiences educators are able to create for their students on Tuva.
Today, we are excited to officially announce the launch of Tuva Premium to further empower educators to teach and students to learn critical data literacy skills.
The basic version of Tuva (Tuva Basic) will remain 100% free for all educators and learners. Tuva Premium will bring a number of additional, powerful components across content, graphing, insights, and support services for our school customers.
What are the differences between Tuva Basic and Tuva Premium?
Tuva Basic will remain free for math, science, english, social studies, and other educators and learners around the world. As an educator, you will be able to create your own classes, enroll all your students, and assign and grade activities on Tuva.
With Tuva Premium, you will get:
1. Access to our entire bank of curated datasets and inquiry-based activities and tasks.
2. Comprehensive Student-level and Class-level insights into their growth and progress.
3. Unlimited Dataset Uploads for all teachers and students.
4. Dataset Requests, and dedicated on-boarding and ongoing support.
Public, private, charter, and parochial schools around the country have already purchased a yearly subscription to Tuva Premium for the 2015-16 Academic Year.
If you have any additional questions or would like to purchase Tuva Premium for the 2015-16 School Year, please write to us or call us at +1.646.481.2150.
At Tuva, our mission is to make data and statistics accessible and usable for data novices and learners around the world. We believe that the best way to learn data and statistics skills and concepts is by actually getting your hands dirty with the data; exploring, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting it in a variety of ways and across different contexts.
To realize this vision, we have built Tuva – a powerful learning platform that brings together:
2) Dynamic, easy-to-use, yet powerful data analysis and visualization tools, and
3) Inquiry-based, highly engaging lessons and tasks.
Educators and students in over thousands of schools and hundreds of higher-ed institutions in over 70 countries use Tuva in a variety of different ways in their classrooms.
Today, we are announcing another significant addition to Tuva. We are excited to collaborate with some of the most reputable organizations, institutions, and instructors in the world to bring to you hands-on, interactive data literacy courses on Tuva.
These courses will empower people working across education, healthcare, international development, and other sectors to learn and master foundational data and statistics concepts and skills that will be relevant to their work.
We are actively working on the interactive course design, the content, and the appropriate credentials for the first set of courses on Tuva. Subscribe to receive updates as we launch courses on Tuva.
