Elementary and Middle School

Internet Use in Elementary and Middle School Science Classrooms

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In the undeclared race for universal Internet access in schools, it was the state of Mississippi—arguably one of the poorest of our 50 states and not usually associated with the cutting edge of the technological revolution—that recently proclaimed itself the first in the nation to install Internet access into every one of its more than 32,000 public school classrooms (Musgrove, 2003). If Mississippi has indeed linked every classroom to the Internet, and if the rest of the nation follows Mississippi’s lead, then we must almost be at the point where the products of today’s Internet technology—video, still photographs, virtual libraries, information databases, interactive simulations, chat rooms, “ask an expert,” networked collaborations, and more—become standard features of 21st-century American K–12 education.

But how these products are integrated into the routines of teaching and learning in elementary and middle school science classrooms, and whether they prove effective (and more to the point, cost effective) in improving student understanding and achievement in science, or broadening the appeal of science as a career path, remains to be seen. The results from earlier electronic innovations in public education, such as educational radio and TV are not promising (Oppenheimer, 1997). Proponents believe, however, that the computer revolution is the one that will truly reshape the educational landscape once and for all. And given not just the enormity of the capital investment that has already been made* , but also the seeming universal acceptance as truth that computers and the Internet are essential to the modern educational project, they might be right. Time will tell.

* “Available data suggests that public elementary and secondary schools in the United States spent somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4 billion on computing…hardware…and infrastructure, software…and professional development during the 1995–96 school year “(PET, 1997, p. 57). “A…model in which computers are deployed in all classrooms (at…a ratio of one-to-five) was estimated to require $47 billion initially and annual operating expenses of $14 billion (nationwide)” (PET, 1997, p. 59).

If universal Internet access in public schools is, indeed, almost a reality, it is certainly a late breaking phenomenon. Networked desktop computers have been available to schools for over 20 years, but less than 10 years ago, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported that only 35 percent of American schools and only 3 percent of classrooms were wired to the Internet. By 1999, after five years of enormous investment in wiring and hardware (Panel on Educational Technology [PET], 1997, p. 60), these numbers had risen to 95 percent of schools and over two-thirds of classrooms (Williams, 2000). Many factors contributed to this increased distribution of networked computers in schools—among these , federal, state and private investments; the relative reduction in price and increasing power of desktop computers† ; and the introduction of the federal “e-rate” for schools.

† "Moore's Law" has more or less held since first stated in 1965. The law states that the comuting power of a mass-produced computer chip can be roughly doubled every 18 months without increasing the cost of the unit.

Even though Internet-linked computers are now almost ubiquitous in American classrooms, their integration into the daily flow of teaching and learning remains uneven. Several factors may account for this. A recent study reported in Education Statistics Quarterly found that teachers who are newer to the profession and teachers in more affluent school districts are significantly more likely to frequently use computers in planning or presenting their lessons than more-seasoned teachers or those in schools with higher levels of poverty (Rowland, 2000). Furthermore, the Panel on Educational Technology (PET) reported that in 1996 only about 15 percent of the billions of dollars invested up until then in computer infrastructure in schools had been used to train teachers to take advantage of the new medium of instruction (PET, 1997, p. 7). This figure was in contrast to the 30 percent recommended by the panel and levels as high as 41 percent recommended in one study quoted in the panel’s final report.

Finally, the sheer volume of “instructional materials” available to teachers via the Internet can in itself be daunting. The quality and scope of these products varies enormously, but the evident attraction of the medium is that to a greater or lesser extent, all of these materials link students to information or people that they would otherwise have little or no access to. These materials, as a type, have obvious educational attraction, but they exact a financial, safety, and pedagogical cost that should not be ignored in the rush to get “wired.” It is the purpose of this article to help readers become more familiar with the pros and cons of using the Internet as an instructional medium and to summarize some of the particular caveats that have been raised with respect to Internet use in the lower and middle grades.

In addition, this article draws particular attention to one small subset of the whole genre—those Internet-based instructional materials that were developed (usually at universities or other educational institutions) by researchers who specifically had either state or national standards in mind and who made a conscious attempt to incorporate a constructivist or inquiry focus into their product design. As educational leaders consider their options for new instructional materials, we hope that this document will help them consider how using Internet-based instructional materials may help them achieve the educational goals they value without sacrificing other traditional educational missions. There is enormous pressure to get students on line, but a sober look at the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches to Internet use may help schools avoid costly wastes of time and money.

There is evidence that computer-based tutorial programs and guided programs of study can improve test scores, but whether the computer is the most cost-effective way to achieve such a goal (and where such a goal stands relative to other educational objectives) is the subject of continuing debate (Pea & Cuban, 1998). Computer literacy itself is often listed among the vital workforce skills of the future, and computers are frequently promoted as a medium that can make education more learner-centered, active, engaging, and equitable. If achieved, all these outcomes would be admirable, but when reviewing potential instructional materials, it is important to cast a skeptical eye over any claims of efficacy that come attached to a particular product. Questions that educators should ask when reviewing “technology-based” instructional products are not so different from those they would ask about any instructional materials. They are somewhat obvious, but no less important for materials delivered electronically than by other means. They include

Which educational objectives will this product help my students achieve?

Does this product do the job any better than the other ways we are already using (or have yet to try)?

Are the costs associated with using this product reasonable in light of other budgetary demands?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMPUTER USE IN K–12 CLASSROOMS

With the above questions in mind, let us consider three distinct ways in which computers have been employed in the service of K–12 education since they first began to appear in large numbers in that sphere some 30 or so years ago. Broadly, these three uses may be termed (1) computer as teaching machine, (2) computer as “library” or information source, and (3) computer as network. Although separated here for the purpose of analysis, these three types are rarely found in pure form. Each has evolved as the technology has evolved, and elements of each have been woven together into a myriad of educational products over the years. The notes that follow attempt to give a sense of the history of the development of each type as well as to direct the reader towards exemplars of the type that are included in the catalog of Elementary and Middle School Web-Delivered Science Instructional Materials. Ultimately, readers and users will have to decide for themselves what works and what does not in the light of their own unique circumstances.

Computer as Teaching Machine

Even before the introduction of e-mail in the 1980s and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, computers had made significant inroads into formal schooling in America. The initial use in schools focused predominantly on “computer education”—learning how to use the machines themselves (keyboard skills, word processing, spreadsheets, and computer programming) (PET, 1997)—and “computer assisted instruction” (CAI)—using the computers to assist learning of other educational content, less politely known as drill-and-practice (Feldman et al., 2000). The earliest CAI programs are unashamedly behaviorist in their approach, a characteristic determined, in part, by the technology of the day and, in part, by the pedagogical preference of the developers and users. Although today’s technology permits a much greater pedagogical flexibility, echoes of the early CAI approach live on in thousands of Web sites and CD-ROMS that offer today’s children everything from spelling and arithmetic practice to tutorials on mitosis or Newton’s Laws of Motion.

The next, more-sophisticated version of CAI is known as computer-managed instruction (CMI). CMI is CAI with the addition of a memory and some rudimentary tutoring skills. As students work through a learning unit on keyboard and screen, the computer tracks the pattern of the users’ errors and directs the students through further tasks and activities designed to remediate or correct their particular problems. The computer may also collect data on patterns of errors for multiple users, thus helping teachers identify common problems and adjust their off-line instruction accordingly. To date, the best CAI and CMI programs have achieved a level of sophistication roughly equivalent to a diligent, though rather narrowly trained, personalized tutor. By all accounts, the day is well in the future when such machines can mimic a highly trained “teacher” in the task of introducing new concepts to students and mediating a fully constructivist path to actual “understanding.”

There is undoubtedly a place for drill-and-practice in the sciences, just as there is in mathematics and language arts. There will almost certainly continue to be a market, therefore, for products that take this pedagogical approach. By and large, there is not much to be gained by delivering such products over the Internet, however. Publishers and marketers seem to favor the CD-ROM as a platform of such tutorial material. ExploreLearning, a free tutorial site aimed mostly at middle and high school students, is the only such site included in the catalog.

The Computer as “Library” or Information Source

The past 10 years have seen an explosion of content in the World Wide Web. A student in the average public K–12 classroom in America now has near instant access to a vast breadth and depth of information, delivered in every conceivable form (e.g., video, photo, database, text, simulation). So vast and relatively easy to access is this trove of information that a consensus appears to have formed in the United States that students in public schools should, as a matter of right, have access to the information resources of the Internet and that, without such access, they stand at a serious disadvantage relative to those who do have it.

The fear that those with less Internet access will be disadvantaged is hardly surprising given a history in which most educational innovations arrive in affluent school districts well before districts that serve economically disadvantaged students. And, in fact, Internet access has been more common in affluent rather than poorer school districts, in larger rather than smaller districts, and in secondary rather than elementary schools (Williams, 2000). But despite that, and despite the widespread enthusiasm for the abundance of Web information, significant problems remain across the demographic spectrum for those who actually try to use the information to which they now have access.

Safety on the Web has been one of the major concerns for both parents and educators. But even when adequate protections are in place, there remains the difficult problem (which exists with any information source) of constructing meaning from all the information now available to students. Determining the accuracy, relevance, and meaning of all the information students are confronted with calls upon a broad array of meta-cognitive skills, which students who are confined to the textbook or the school library seldom have to employ. This is an educational opportunity second to none, but few educators would argue that, for elementary and middle school students, information access itself is the key to their attaining conceptual understanding in science. No matter how easy or fun it becomes to find information on the Internet, learners will still be faced with the problem they have always had—how to know if the information is true and current, and how to know what it really means.

Compounding this problem for elementary and middle school Web users is the fact that only in rare cases do Web page authors clearly identify themselves or their intended audience. Students, unfortunately, may be oblivious to this lack of attribution. Having seldom been encouraged to challenge the credentials of textbook authors, there is little in their formal educational experience to discourage them from according to virtual text the same passive deference that they often give the printed word. The Web, therefore, is potentially even more dubious a source for science “facts” than print media.

But even when alert to the problems of accuracy and authenticity, it is still hard for students to sift through voluminous search results, separating the sites that were written for them (appropriate reading level, comprehension level, scope) from all the rest that were not (Soloway & Raven, 1997). Students who use Google or Ask Jeeves to “research” their homework or science-fair project will not be short of relevant information, but it will be pure luck if the information they turn up is presented at an appropriate level and in the kind of organization, detail, and depth that would enhance their understanding of the topic. And even when they do find appropriate material, nothing about the delivery system itself guarantees that students will spend the time and intellectual energy necessary to really make sense of what they have found. Teachers at all levels of education are increasingly facing student “reports” that are little more that cut-and-paste versions of somebody else’s Web site(s). Neither Google nor Ask Jeeves, therefore, could be described as an “instructional material” and neither is included in this catalog.

Fortunately, however, an increasing number of educational Web sites, posted by scientists, educators, publishers, and amateurs, do now offer discrete, age-appropriate, and sometimes interactive information on standards-related areas of the curriculum. As yet, Web-based “libraries” pitched directly at elementary and middle school students are rare—Riverdeep Inc.’s Living Library is the only one in the directory. Typical of a less formal “library” is the Virtual Middle School Library‡ , which combines multiple child-safe search engines and a limited collection of links to sites that might be of interest to middle school students and teachers.

‡ The Virtual Middle School Library was created and is maintained by a former librarian of the Stetson Middle School in Philadelphia. PA. The search engine used in this library is Infoplease.com, which shields users from the full resources of the Web. Searches on "four-letter" words produced between 10 and 100 results, each referring to dictionary or encyclopedia entries appropriate to middle school readers. Similar searches on unprotected search engines procuded predictably unsavory results.

Perhaps this scarcity of pure Web libraries reflects the fact that the field is already well covered by print and CD-ROM encyclopedias. But it might also reflect that, despite the public perception to the contrary, the Web is actually a rather cumbersome medium for an entry-level information search. The information needs of elementary and middle school students are not sophisticated; rarely do these students need the results of the very latest scientific research. More often, their needs can be met by edited summaries or catalogued databases of information presented in a form that is digestible to their levels of knowledge and understanding. Such summaries and databases already exist in traditional print libraries or on CD-ROM, and although these, too, present interpretational challenges to students, they are probably more appropriate for the needs of the elementary and middle school classroom than the seemingly chaotic and ever expanding Web.

The problems of finding useful and appropriate material are only slightly less acute for teachers. Teachers are, of course, more experienced and discriminating readers, but they are busy people and can easily become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information sources available to them on the Web. An understandable strategy, therefore, might be to find some portal that works well enough and stick with it, without regard for alternative resources. To assist teachers, a number of organizations have developed Web sites that are in various ways “libraries” of curriculum materials or informational content. ENC Science Topics and the National Science Digital Library, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation (NSF), respectively, and commercially funded sites such as Classroom Connect and Discovery Schools, offer information and resources to teachers, sorted by grade level or subject matter.

The developers of these sites generate very little of the content they present, but they likely screen the links they offer for their usefulness, reliability, accuracy, and the completeness of the information presented. However, busy teachers may be in no position to judge for themselves what implicit filters were used in this screening process, so it is important for administrators and curriculum specialists to inspect such sites for their fit with local educational values and standards. ThinkQuest and iEARN differ from those already mentioned in that the material presented on these sites is principally developed by individual teachers or teams of students who “publish” their work for use by other teachers and schools.

Computer as Network: Online “Real Science”

Although it is the Web’s ability to deliver information that has most captured the public’s attention, the majority of federally funded instructional materials developed for the Internet in the past 10 to 15 years has focused less on information retrieval than on the Web’s ability to engage students in real science. The result is a class of interactive and collaborative “Web-science” projects that connect students to scientists who are doing actual science in the field.

In a variety of ways and in a variety of topic areas, these materials lead (mostly middle and high school) students through a course of study that may involve actual or virtual fieldwork (including collecting and submitting data), contacting “experts,” Web research, and virtual field trips. Acknowledging the difficulties inherent in use of the Web by students of all ages, curriculum developers to varying degrees combine the form of a curriculum (comprehensive or modular) with that of a library, providing easy Web access to all the information that a student would need to enhance understanding of issues covered by their program. This information usually includes both primary source material (generated by the developer) and links to carefully chosen secondary sources on the Web. But the information itself is not the centerpiece of these projects; rather, it is the power of the Web to engage students in real time with a real issue in partnership with real scientists.

This approach to computer use has been called computer-enhanced instruction (CEI) and is a creature of constructivist pedagogy. CEI departs from CAI and CMI in that the computer is not the learning medium at all—it is only a tool that elegantly combines features of other familiar tools (telephone, TV, mail, library, calculator, animator, etc.) The technology gives the students the ability to contact others, download source materials, or use supplementary software in unique or creative ways to fulfill the overall learning objectives, but it does not set the tasks or ask the questions nor does it replace the teacher (and in some cases the community of other learners) as the mediator(s) of sense-making.

The vast majority of so-called CEI in classrooms is probably informal and spontaneous. A teacher might use the Internet as a resource during his/her lesson preparation or as a direct resource for students during their homework or other research. What the teacher or students actually find will depend on luck and experience, but it will be up to the individual teacher to ensure that the resource meshes both pedagogically and substantially with the objectives already set in place. Teachers also find a variety of ways to link their students with “experts” or with other students in distant cities or countries for the purpose of sharing experiences and ideas related to the curriculum they are studying. Again, where this is done informally, the results will depend to a great extent on the skill of the teacher in ensuring that student-to-student or student-to-expert communications go beyond the superficial and actually enhance the learning goals of the home classroom.

A less common version of CEI is embodied in many of the materials that appear in Web-Delivered Instructional Materials. The difference between these titles and informal CEI is only the difference between any published instructional material and the teacher-made curriculum that so many teachers employ. In these cases, developers and publishers have done the footwork—mapping out learning objectives and learning experiences and creating Web resources and tools to enhance that process. As with any “curriculum,” the effectiveness of these depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is the enthusiasm, tenacity, and skill of the teacher in keeping students creatively engaged.

At their best, these projects enable authentic, student-centered education in one of its purest and most sophisticated forms by engaging students in the study and solutions of real problems. Biodiversity Counts (plants and arthropods), Classroom FeederWatch (birds), GLOBE (weather and climate), Journey North (seasonal migrations), and WhaleNet (marine mammals) offer students the chance to assist scientists as they go about their business in their particular domain. Leveraging Learning (environmental issues) and WISE (inquiry) do not involve actual field research, but they use the Web to pose real and interesting scientific questions and connect students to the resources that allow them to study the issues and pose solutions. All of these programs provide a structured format through which students explore the topic at hand. Each site offers information specific to its own topic and audience, as well as links other Web sites, known to the developers to contain related information. The role of the classroom teacher in these programs is much as it is in other project-based learning situations: The teacher is the moderator of the pace and the depth of the learning, setting the tone and facilitating the peripheral activities that help students synthesize their experiences and make sense of the data they access through the Web. In a well-run classroom using projects such as these, the students themselves take on a considerable degree of responsibility for their own learning, making or contributing towards decisions about the quality and quantity of the work they are doing.

Telecollaboration: Students as Scientists—In the early and mid-1990s, NSF funded several “Testbeds for Telecollaboration” at research institutes around the country and charged them with supporting and researching the implementation of network science curricula. Funding for these testbeds has since ended, but through their work, a variety of collaborative projects were set up in which widely dispersed classrooms could study authentic scientific issues (Feldman et al, 2000). The telecollaboration model differs from the other “real science” projects in that the students are no longer helping or observing adult scientists do their work in the field; now the students are the scientists in the field. Classrooms across the country and around the world sign up for a semester or a year to collaborate on highly focused scientific investigations formulated by the curriculum developers but driven and staffed entirely by these widely dispersed students.

In each classroom, students follow a carefully laid out curriculum, often requiring the use of electronic “probes” or computer-based labs (CBL) to collect local data relating to a phenomenon, such as ozone, birds, weather, seasonal change, or, in one case, energy use in their school buildings. The students complete their allotted research in conjunction with other local study tasks designed to give context and background to the field research. They then upload their observations and data over the Web to a central database, from which they and others can download the entire global (national, statewide) data set and use special software to view, manipulate, graph, and interpret the data collected by all the distant research sites .

In principle, analysis of this large-scale data should enable students at each site to observe patterns and truths in the large data set that would be difficult to discern from local data alone. However, even the best data is hard to interpret, and student-collected data is rarely of the highest quality. This situation is further complicated by the fact that science teachers are not always skilled data analysts and that the math teachers who do know how to analyze data and teach others to do so are not always willing or able to collaborate on these projects. Nonetheless, the process can work well, and several of the early generation of telecollaboration projects remain in operation today. Among these, Classroom FeederWatch, EnergyNet, Global Lab, and Journey North each retain key elements of the telecollaboration model: a core curriculum, data collection and analysis, data sharing between large numbers of sites, and a focus on real-world scientific phenomena or problems (e.g., the Alice data analysis program and GLOW, a Web-based data-sharing application, developed at TERC in the mid- to late 1990s, respectively).

EVALUATING THE COSTS AND BENEFITS OF USING WEB-BASED INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS

No matter how objective one tries to be when evaluating and comparing the substance of technology-based instructional materials, there remains one overarching question that colors every decision that has to be made about them:

What is gained or lost by using technology instead of other approaches or media?

Anyone who comes to this question already believing that the use of the Internet is inherently valuable to their students will weigh the factors differently from those who are undecided or skeptical. However, whether enthusiastic or wary, anyone who actually uses these materials quickly discovers that they change the dynamics of the classroom. Internet use alters the relationship between teachers and students (and among students), because it shifts the locus of expertise away from the teacher (and teacher-approved texts) to the world of cyberspace. Information and misinformation can now arrive in the classroom at a rate quite outside the control of the teacher. Furthermore, the simple physical logistics of Internet use can demand managerial changes in the classroom that may prove either liberating or unsettling to teachers and students alike, depending on the skills and attitude of the teacher and on the expectations and support of constituencies outside the classroom walls (administrators, parents, colleagues).

Sorting out the net gains and losses of Internet use can be a difficult process, particularly when there is so little time in most teachers’ schedules for planning and so little money in school budgets for training and support of teachers who wish to experiment with the medium. Under these circumstances, it is little wonder that only a relatively small fraction of students’ computer use in classrooms involves extended problem solving and research relating to content matter. Contrary to the hopes of many promoters of classroom computers, the most frequent way in which computers and the Internet are actually used by students tends to be for record keeping, database management, or tutorial functions rather than as interactive engines of critical thinking and problem solving (Rowland, 2000). In other words, far from computers changing the way education is done in the classroom, the machines have instead been co-opted to support the way business has always been done (Cuban, 1993).

Internet technology has not been a silver bullet for any of the identified ills in American public education any more than the long line of technological innovations that preceded it. Educational radio, film strips, and TV each arrived with great fanfare, but while each added new resources and flexibility to the classroom, none of them changed the fundamental nature of the classroom or shifted the locus of control of learning in the way many had hoped (Cuban, 1993)§ . This may be both good and bad news. We may be glad that schools have, by and large, resisted the temptation to isolate learners in front of clever teaching machines. But there is less to celebrate in the resistance to using the Internet for what it can do preeminently well, namely, facilitating the creation of learning communities between and among isolated classrooms or individual learners and, thereby, making the classroom walls porous to the many resources of the world that could enrich the local educational experience.

§ In 1922, Thomas Edison predicted that "the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system and … in a few years, it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks" (Oppenheimer, 1997).

However, even if schools were to embrace the Internet as a window to dynamic new learning communities, the Internet could not function in that way for naïve and vulnerable learners, such as middle and elementary school students, without a great deal of hand holding and supervision from well-trained teachers. Both elementary and middle school students need a warm-blooded community to mediate their learning. This community needs to be intimate, safe, and guided by assertive but caring adults, and it needs to be bounded by flexible but predictable codes of behavior. There is little on the technological horizon to suggest that either smart machines or the Internet community itself will soon develop the potential to mediate learning in the way it is currently mediated in a constructivist classroom. Teachers, at their best, are intelligent, flexible, and caring authority figures who guide young people through the exciting but often onerous process of learning. If students are to become self-directed learners, it will be much more the result of a shift towards a constructivist pedagogy and classroom management style than the use of any particular instructional technology.

What instructional technology can do, however, is free all parties from many of the logistical dependencies and drudgeries of the traditional classroom. The teacher can now relinquish the role of sole source of information or arbiter of “truth,” while students learn to pace and record their own learning in ways that were hard to manage in the past. They can also communicate with peers and experts beyond the classroom walls to expand their pool of information and advice. Where before they might have had to watch or listen to demonstrations and explanations as a group, students now have access to computational, analytic, and tutorial software on an individual and as-needed basis. This is not to say that virtual experience is any substitute for actual hands-on exploration in science, but these technologies do offer real and useful innovations that can liberate all parties from the one-size-fits-all model of classroom management. But to take full advantage of these innovations—to allow them to change the way learning happens—educators must change their managerial style. The teacher must relinquish the role of “lecturer” and instead become the “coach”; the focus on individual students as competitors must be replaced by a focus on teams of learners; and the insistence that assessment be based primarily on the retention of information (be it facts or formulas) must be replaced by an assessment based on performance. These changes have merit far beyond the use of the Internet or other computer innovations and are not dependent on such use. But where such an approach to teaching and learning prevails, there is every reason to suppose that computer-enhanced instruction can enrich the classroom experience and deepen the existing teaching and learning relationships.

Therefore, if any of the materials in the catalog appear to meet your needs for science instruction, you should consider in particular this question: “How do students interact with teachers (or experts) to assist their understanding of science content?” In other words, how will the teacher communicate with the students about what they are learning as they study science in this new way? How will the teacher know whether the students are taking from the materials the things that were intended to be taken from them and how will the teacher track the pace and sequence of student learning? This question bears directly on the kind of learning that can take place through the use of these instructional materials.

Ultimately, one cannot know what it means to use any Internet-based instructional material until one gives it a try. There is a broad range of available options in this catalog, some that require major investments of time and money and some that demand very little. Anyone who has investigated the matter this far is probably curious about the possible benefits of using these materials, even if they are still uncertain or skeptical about their usefulness. We would urge readers to pick something that dovetails reasonably well with the rest of their instructional program, give it a try, and then ask the same questions that would be asked of any other instructional material: Does this material address the science content my students are required to learn within a particular grade and domain? Does it match the requirements of local and/or national standards and tests? If not, how does the scope of this program dovetail with other programs I use in my curriculum? Does this material employ appropriate principles of teaching and learning? How does this program assess student learning? Is this material trustworthy and authentic?

No matter what the peripheral benefits may be of using technology in the classroom, the principle requirement of any instructional material must be that it be a credible platform for the instruction of the content presented. Ultimately, this is the only standard by which “technology-based” instructional materials should be evaluated.

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References

Cuban, L. (1993). Computer meets classroom: Classroom wins. Teachers College Record, 95(2), 185–210.

Feldman, A., Konold, C., Coulter, R., Conroy, B., Hutchison, C., & London, N. (2000). Network science a decade later: The Internet and classroom learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Musgrove, R. (2003). Mississippi state of the state address. Retrieved May 17, 2003 from http://www.governor.state.ms.us/news&information/03sostext.htm

Oppenheimer, T. (1997). The computer delusion. The Atlantic Monthly, (280)1, 45–62.

Panel on Educational Technology [PET]. (1997). Report to the President on the use of technology to strengthen K–12 education in the US. Presidents Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Pea, R., & Cuban, L. (1998). The pros and cons of technology in the classroom. A Web debate with audience questions at the Tapped-In site. Retrieved May 23, 2003 from http://www.tappedin.org/info/teachers/debate.html

Rowland, C. (2000). Teachers’ use of computers and the internet in public schools. Education Statistics Quarterly. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.

Soloway, E., & Raven, W. (1997). Does the internet support student inquiry? Don’t ask. Communications of the ACM, 40(5).

Williams, C. (2000). Internet access in U.S. public schools and classrooms: 1994–99. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics.