How Are the Students Engaged? Technology can create new learning environments, or it can replicate more familiar activities. Rote recall and drill and practice require students to process information at a very low level. Whether multiple choice, short answer, or true/false responses are required on paper and pencil or via computer and mouse, these student activities can be found in classrooms where teachers are at the low end of the continuum. When students are asked to challenge what they know, evaluate new information and how it corroborates or conflicts with their current understandings, and form their own responses to poorly-structured problems, they are engaged in higher-order skills. Technology that allows students to gather real-world data, correspond with content experts, and collaborate with others demonstrates student engagement at the higher end of the continuum. A Tale of Two Classrooms: The Students How are the students engaged? Do they practice memory skills and provide short responses that are deemed either correct or incorrect? Are the students challenged with open-ended questions that may have more than one correct response? How does technology support and motivate student activities? Square Peg Beth McNichol was helping her second-grade students clean up after making bumblebee puzzles. Ms. McNichol had photocopied a large line drawing of a bee and her students colored the drawings and cut out the pieces. As she expected, most were the traditional black and yellow but a couple students always tried different colors. Beth labeled each piece of the puzzle and drilled the students on the names of the pieces. She would hold up each piece and prompt the class by saying, "This is the. . ." They usually all chimed in together. Tomorrow she will bring in some crackers and honey for the children to taste after their test. Ms. McNichol will give each student a copy of the bee diagram and have them match the names to the parts. Catching the Buzz Holly Wheeler's second-grade class is studying the life cycle of the honey bee. Several of her students understood that honey is produced by bees, but watching a laserdisc of a beekeeper take apart a hive and use a centrifuge to extract the honey was exciting for all of them. It made the honey she brought in to taste seem a bit more special. Ms. Wheeler also bookmarked several Web pages to show her students that provide simple facts about bees as well as pictures and movies of bees and beekeeping. Using her Web browser, Ms. Wheeler demonstrated a 3-D model of a bee in flight that she or one of her students could manipulate. Another Web page allowed the students to view a simulation model that described the success or failure of a hive depending on factors such as weather patterns, disease, swarming, or the introduction of another queen. Neither she nor her students had realized that bees, like people, had preferences about where they lived! Activity: Charting the Continuum (continued) ACOT™ Continuum Review How are the students engaged? Entry • • • Invention • • •