Tool #7

Reaching Outside your Classroom: Online Digital Projects


Content Objective: Using Skype and Google Docs, students from two different classes will collaborate on a shopping exercise to determine what to buy and how much it costs for a cooking exercise.

We could collaborate on a shopping exercise. A Life Skills teacher teaching a Social Studies class takes the students on weekly or bi-monthly Community Based Instruction trips to local markets. Another Life Skills classroom that teaches Science has cooking labs in the Life Skills kitchen on the same time basis. The two of them can collaborate with each other. The cooking class can make up a grocery list of things needed for the lab experiment (cooking exercise) and the use Skype for synchronous learning in communicating directly with the other class this list. They can show the kitchen and what they intend to do.

When they return from the trip the class could use Google Docs for asynchronous learning to post the receipts and divide up and add the market items within groups etc. How much was spent on food items vs. non-food items or how much was spent on vegetables would be examples of this. The shopping class could then run a track of items bought over the year and come up with conclusions at the end of the year.