The Data and Story Library - DASL

DASL (pronounced "dazzle") is the Data and Story Library is an awesome database of sets of data that are specifically to help teach topics of statistics. They are all real sets and are all categorized by topic/subtject (eg automotive, food, health, sports etc) and mathematical method (eg boxplots, mean, outliers, regression, scatterplots etc). So theoretically if you wanted to find a set of data that could be used to help teach a specific topic you could search for, say, "correlation"
These are some great data sets to get through the mechanical nature of statistics. It's not very current data but it's great for practicing statistical methods.
For the longest time this set of data was not available but just recently it was hosted by Data Description Inc. so now we have access to it again.

Analysis

There are far too many sets to talk about analysis but when the site was down I blogged about one of my favourite sets on Smoking and Cancer. Take a look at that post to get a sense of the data. When you get to any data set, to see the actual data file, click on the Datafile Name

This will show you the text file of the data with the download link at the top of the page.
From that point you can do the analysis. Each data set will have a detailed description of each variable and a short story and sample analysis of each set
There are many data sets on this site for every statistical topic and on a range of subjects. One thing you might have your students do is just explore on this site and find data sets that can be used to exemplify a particular statistical concept.

Download the Data

Site: http://dasl.datadesk.com/ 

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.