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Back to the Gallery index. Overview A Detailed Look: The TfU Framework A Detailed Look: Standards A Detailed Look: Timeline A Detailed Look: How the Unit Worked A Detailed Look: What New Technology Adds A Detailed Look: Materials & Resources A Detailed Look: What Students had to say A Detailed Look: What Parents had to say Conclusion & Acknowledgements The Water Habitat Project
What New Technology Adds

Why New Technologies in the Water Habitat Unit?
The ongoing implementation of new technologies in the Water Habitat Unit continually provides opportunities where meaningful uses of technology tools can:

  1. Unencumber the challenges primary students face in reaching the understanding goals of this unit;
  2. Enhance the depth and breadth of their understandings so that they can make positive, educated contributions in their world with what they know.
  3. Redefine understandings of how primary students can meaningfully use technology tools in developmentally appropriate frameworks for learning.
  4. Provide communication links in an immediate interactive time frame so that primary students can keep an "intact cognitive hold" on the connections between the communication they send and the communication responses they receive; there is a synchronization and synergy between the tempo of telecommunication and the tempo with which children can effectively and efficiently integrate interactive information and understandings.

As students learn to use tools of technology in the Water Habitat Unit, they learn and understand how to:
  1. use word processing, e-mail, websites, video-editing, videoconferencing and multi-media presentations for local to global collaborations on scientific inquiry observations and data understandings;
  2. use these technology tools to empower their literacy, geography, art and communication skills;
  3. nitiate and implement positive community collaborative service efforts that maintain and restore water habitats.

The Water Habitat Science learning students gain through online collaborative reading, writing, and communicating, enables them to meet the definition of TfU Performances of Understanding in which students "go beyond information given... to use what they know in new ways and situations to build understanding." As primary students are using tools of technology to build a community of support in caring for the Water Habitat, they are making positive contributions to the present and the future. Their work in the Water Habitat Science gives example to the following words of Steve E. Miller, author of Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Highway (Addison-Wesley Publishing. 1996)
"It takes a special kind of connection to foster healthy human development, the kind that brings support, care, stability, encouragement, variety and challenge...We need an environment that provides models of mutual respect and assistance so we can learn empathy for others and the interdependence of our collective well-being...Telecommunications can bring us together...it can help create communities...united by common concerns...Telecommunications can allow people of all ages to continue learning and growing and expanding their horizons..which is lifelong learning at its best."
For primary students who are using new tools of technology in the Water Habitat Unit, their progress towards meeting Washington State Essential Learnings in Science, Language Arts, and Communication has become "turbo-charged". They understand how these tools can enable them to learn and share their learning with peers near and far. When primary students have an opportunity use telecommunications with local to global peers as way of making connection to and learning about their world, they are eager to work on the necessary science, reading, writing, and communication skills that enable them to participate in that communication.
"Children find value in talking with one another--to share their knowledge, experiences, and to try new things. Technology simply allows us greater means of reaching and communicating with each other. We each bring to those connections our community in all its richness and depth. Technology allows us seamless connections among our many village connections." (It Takes Many Villages to Build A World: Honoring People and Learning: Internet Professional Development Module by Celia Einhorn, Betsy Frederick, Edwin Gragert, Barbara Meinhofer, Kristi Rennebohm Franz, & Adriana Vilela, published by World Bank World Links for Development Program, 1997)
As primary students are using new tools of technology in their Water Habitat Science, their curricular learning experiences become exponentially generative with the exchanges of e-mail. Often, initiated online collaboration in the Water Habitat Unit takes the participating classrooms of children and their teachers beyond the learning goals initially imagined!
"Emerging technologies have the potential to support and motivate learning, creativity, and problem solving. Inventively infused into active learning, they can open up the world for learners of all ages, in every setting." (Building Knowledge for A Nations of Learners: A Framework for Education Research. U.S. Department of Education. 1997.)
Criteria for New Technologies in the Water Habitat Unit

Use of new technologies in the Water Habitat Unit is based on the following criteria:
  1. How can the tools of technology unencumber challenges to understanding in ways not previously possible and enable us to extend and enhance the teaching and learning process beyond where we are now? How can the tools of technology energize the generative dynamics of our Water Habitat Unit?
  2. How will the tools of technology be introduced and meaningfully integrated into the teaching and learning experiences in ways that are developmentally positive and appropriate?
  3. How can the tools of technology help us integrate, document, analyze and assess student understandings?
  4. How can the tools of technology help us integrate, document, analyze and assess the multiple dimensions of the Water Habitat teaching and learning experiences?

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