Week 3 - NetTrekker, Spreadsheets and More

So I was a little concerned with the spreadsheet assignment that involved Net Trekker. I've used Net Trekker before and have really found it useful as a place to find great resources or to spark new ideas. My concern came when I searched for a science lesson that involved a spreadsheet and all I came up with were chemistry titration experiments. And then I found a template for Jeopardy of all things. And I thought - what does Jeopardy have to do with spreadsheets?
Well, as I found out, this template uses a spreadsheet with hyperlinks to the different sheets that have the answers and associated questions. Pretty cool, something I had never seen before and very easy to set up - the template can be found here.
As far as using spreadsheets in the classroom, I do quite a bit of data management in classes when students are compiling group data, figuring class averages etc. I guess that's why the Jeopardy surprised me - I had never considered using a spreadsheet to that end. So I ended up downloading the template, creating a review of Simple Invertebrate Biology, and using it in class on Friday morning to help my students review for Monday's Quest.
It became more of a learning experience for both the students and myself then I had intended or planned on. When an answer appeared on the screen that I had created, the students started to create potential questions. We found that there was more than one possible question for the answer provided and so the very stuffy, "canned" review I had planned to simply reinforce some of the content became a much better experience as the students evaluated my answers and questions. In the end, I couldn't have created a better review as they initiated conversation and tried to guess the question word for word and then come up with other possible (and I must admit, much better) questions so the time was spent more on conversation than on regurgitating content and definitions. I think that next time around, I'll have the students working together in groups to create the answer and question combinations for a Jeopardy category. If I can get them working in GoogleDocs spreadsheet (still some issues with figuring out the hyperlinks to go to a different sheet and not a URL in the online format - any hints?) the class groups could create the whole game and then analyze each others categories and assess them as the review for one of my assessments.