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The Project: It all started with Rachel. She came bouncing into class enthusiastically the last week in January, 2000 with a project she wanted our 3rd grade GT class to organize. She wanted to find out how fast e-mail would travel and where it would go. She also wanted to learn how to set up an e-mail account and use one herself. Her classmates agreed that this would be a fun project and they discussed the details. Rachel volunteered to write up the introductory project letter to be sent out. With a little help from her dad, she returned the next class period ready to roll. |
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We signed up for a class e-mail account on USA.Net, typed in the message with help from Kayla and Katerina, and sent it off to three parents (see letter below). The Response: One week later, we found 492 messages from all over the U.S and beyond! Messages poured in from every state in the U.S.A and reached around the globe to far away places like Australia, Germany, Italy, France, England, Finland, Japan, Russia, China, Africa, and South America! Help! Thanks to Kayla's
mom, a third grade teacher at Kahakai, we had a
large blank map of the US to fill in as we received
replies. Students come to class once a week for GT.
The first week after we sent out the project
letter, we spent over an hour of class time
reading, writing, looking up and mapping our
replies. Out of 492 responses, we got 22 on the
map. It was hard work! Luckily, Kayla volunteered
to take the map home and work on plotting the
locations during the week. Kayla, along with her
mom, dad and sister, read the e-mails, looked up
the locations in their atlas, and put them on the
map. Kayla's mom said the family had a great time
working together on this family project.
Modifying the Project: The original project goal was to map all of the responses onto the map. But that soon became an impossible task with over 2000 responses within 10 days and 20 more days to go. So we've decided to modify the project to mapping as many as we can and counting all. What We've Learned: We have learned already that e-mail travels really fast! And it goes all over the globe. We also learned that we should have requested that the name of the city and state/country go in the subject line. But the most impressive thing we have learned is that the world is filled with warm-hearted people who are interested in helping children learn about their world. We have received the nicest letters from people all over wishing us well and taking the time to tell us about their hometown, state, or country. Mahalo! We would like to thank all of you who received our project e-mail and responded. Thank you for your kind words, information about your location, the pictures, the greeting cards - all of it. We continue to read and learn from all of you! At the end of the project period, we will report back the number of e-mails received and detailed information about where the e-mails came from. Be sure to visit our Weekly Diary and Learning Log to find out more about our project.
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Here is our project letter that we sent out: Hi! We are five gifted and talented students at Kahakai Elementary School in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii,located on the west side of the big island of Hawaii. We have decided after seeing this project done at another school, to map where our e-mail travels. We are curious to see where in the world our e-mail will travel via the Internet, and how many people it will reach, between the period of Jan 24 through February 28, 2001. This is not a pen-pal project, so we will not write you back (unless you request a verification). Please help us with this project! If you receive this e-mail, we ask that you: 1. E-mail us back at gtkona@usa.net and tell us your city/state/location so we can plot it on our map. 2. Forward this e-mail to everyone you know so that they can send it on to everyone they know (and so on, and so on . . .) to help us reach even more people. We don't mind receiving repeats, so send it on to everyone. We're tracking the number of responses we receive and will be making a graph in our class. We will post our results on our GT class web site after our deadline so that you can see how we did. Our site address is www.k12.hi.us/~kahakai/gt/gt.html With your help we can make this a very fun and exciting learning experience. PLEASE help us by sending us an e-mail.Thanks in advance from the GT kids at Kahakai Elementary. Kahakai Elementary Gifted and Talented
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