Welcome to a very special post that emphasizes authentic learning in the classroom. It is also filled with some amazing resources that will help you put some real in learning that will engage students. This is a guest post written by a very good friend of mine, Dayna Laur, who is a fellow National Faculty at the BUCK Institute (BIE).  I also encourage you to take a look at her book,  Authentic Learning Experiences: A Real-World Approach to Project Based Learning  , which will give you some ideas of bringing authentic learning in the classroom. First, please take a moment to subscribe to this blog by RSS or email and  join me on twitter at mjgormans .   Sign up and retweet…  and have a wonderful week! – Mike Gorman (21centuryedtech)

Booking Info – Are you looking for a practical and affordable professional development workshop for your school or conference?  I have traveled…

Science Teachers – If you are looking to find relevant, easy-to-use, authentic science (earth science, physical science, etc.) data sets and activities, check out https://www.tuvalabs.com.

There is also really easy-to-use data analysis and visualization tools that will be incredibly useful both for you and your students when it comes to the all-important NGSS practices. Enjoy!

A couple years ago I shared a stats-ish problem idea regarding the oh-so-fun 2000 presidential election. The problem was cribbed from a graduate level stats textbook but the data are straightforward enough for a – let’s say – 9th grader to grasp. What made me want to revisit the task is some fun data tools that Tuvalabs recently released. Tuvalabs, whom I’ve raved about in other forums, now allows teachers to upload their own data so that kids can play with it in a non-Excel format.

So the 2000 election. Yeah that was fun. Anyway, I uploaded the data I had from the original task and went to town. The data show the county-by-county votes for George W. Bush and for Pat Buchannan. You’ll recall that Palm Beach voters complained about the confusing butterfly ballot. Some voters claimed they intended to vote for Al Gore but accidentally punched the…

@tuvalabs on twitter

With a variety of science and other data sets!  And you can request particular data sets.  Students create graphs to analyze these real data sets all web-based or can download spreadsheets.

This seems like a fantastic fit with CCSS mathematical practices — real world data analysis.  Teachers sign up and create a ‘class’ code for students to log in with.  Data on energy use, global warming, changing vegetation and much more!

Check it out!!

https://www.tuvalabs.com/explore/