Tool #7 Reaching Beyond the Classroom

Providing learning experiences for students to engage in activities that create episodic memories is one benefit of using on-line communities. Another benefit is that we can broaden our students' scope of the world. After browsing the various ways in which educators and students can collaborate with others, I think that Class2Class is a viable way for students to gather data for exploring trends, patterns, and/or probability. How could I use it? I would start a data gathering project for a proportions unit involving the colors of Skittles candy.

1. Content objective: Students will know and understand proportional relationships by calculating the proportions of different colored Skittles in one bag of Skittles and recording class data.
2. When you plan to implement: I would implement the project for about a three week period. As soon as the students begin their exploration of ratios, we would begin collection of the data. After students become proficient at finding the proportional relationships, they would begin to calculate proportions found from samples taken in other classes.
3. What tool(s) you plan to use: I would use the Class2Class website that allows you to post projects for collaboration. Skyping other classes would also be a possibility.
4. A brief description of the project (plan - two or three sentences): Students explore proportional relationship between the numbers of different color candies in a bag of Skittles. For instance, if it is determined that the ratio of red Skittles to purple Skittles was two to five, we would look at samples across the country. Students would then make some predictions based on the ratios known in their classroom and write their own questions like the following? If there are two red Skittles in every bag of 50, what would the ratio be if there were 1000 bags?