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Getting kids to talk and think about their own research is at the core of Inquiry-based learning. TERC's Telecollaboration project invites classroom teachers to conduct data-rich investigative projects in their schools and to use the Internet to link those projects together into a nation-wide critical thinking network. These investigations are interesting, open-ended and quantitative; they draw kids into an ever deepening analysis of causes and effects. For example, in our Guided Tour, we investigate the relationship between book reading, television watching, and several other activities. Other projects might examine the tensile strength of different brands of chewing gum, or the breeding rates of cockroaches. The important thing is to get kids asking questions, collecting data, thinking about the nature of evidence, posing hypotheses and drawing reasoned conclusions. The Telecollaboration project puts your classroom at the hub of a nation of investigators asking interesting questions and learning how to draw reasoned conclusions from the evidence at hand. Here are some additional ideas to keep in mind when designing a project for the classroom: You will lead and model conversations about the relationships between the variables in the data your class collects. Sometimes you will find relationships; other times not. You must also help the kids formulate hypotheses to explain these apparent relationships. Help your students design and perform experiments to test these relationship. Finally, the Telecollaboration Web space provides you with a natural place to debate these hypotheses and findings with other participants. Currently, the Testbed allows only one set of data for a given project. But in the future, we hope that classrooms can follow these initial discussions and experiments with revised studies involving new sets of data and eventually new research questions. With the Guided Tour, unlike the real thing, you will collect your data without leaving the computer. Also in this version some of the data manipulation will be done for you at the central server. You won't have to use other software. In future projects, however, you will use Claris Works or TableTop or our own free software, ALICE, to analyze the numbers your project creates. Please invite your kids or students to take part and please join our discussion forum with thoughts and observations on how to make the data analysis with kids as rich as it can be. 
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