Evolving with the Internet: Taking Technology for Granted-Finally

A teacher who has used computers with students for years reflects on how advances in technology have improved its use in the classroom.

by Kristine Mueh, Science Teacher, Centennial Middle School, Boulder, Colorado

About five years ago, I wrote a story about my experiences and those of my students during an interactive Internet project called Kids as Global Scientists. The story was included in WestEd's 1995 publication Tales from the Electronic Frontier.

As I re-read that story recently, I remembered some things about the earliest years of the project that I hadn't mentioned in the article-

• days that the Internet was down in our building because direct connectivity was a new experiment in our district;
• the adventure of trying to evaluate the quality of student email correspondence by going into 60 different student accounts and searching for pertinent sent and received mail;
• the challenge of trying to learn about different aspects of meteorology by surfing around in the archaic, text-based "gopher" Internet browsing system. We learned a lot about meteorology in the process, but we also had to struggle with plenty of "computer stuff" to get there.

Then

In the early years of the Kids as Global Scientist project, we had a computer lab with 15 tiny black-and-white Macintosh computers, and we were sometimes corresponding with entire classrooms of kids who were working from only one computer and a modem. Only a few of our computers were capable of receiving some of the more interesting weather images. Students from the University of Colorado who were working on the project had to constantly download those images in complex ways so that my students could have some semblance of "real time" images.

Additionally, although this may seem trivial, the very process of typing in long email addresses and gopher sites was a frustration for my sixth graders. Even when they did make it to a promising meteorology site, they were often disappointed by meaningless (to 12-year-olds) strings of weather data or difficult-to-interpret information. There wasn't much on the web for them. And having 60 student teams, each with its own email address, was difficult for me to orchestrate at times. So although the experience was ultimately positive, it required a tremendous amount of technical support and preparation to make it work well for us.

And Now...

Even then, the increasing benefits of kids sharing data and talking to other kids around the world about science were evident, and the experience was powerful. But now . . . well, our current experience with Internet-based projects is beyond anything I would have envisioned when I first became involved in this kind of learning. Internet technology has evolved-and continues to evolve-from a sometimes-tedious tool with glitches that often overshadow the scientific concepts to be learned, to an invisible interface that we can generally take for granted. Increasingly, the Internet is less a distraction and more an effective tool for enhancing student learning.

Teaching and learning with Internet technology are becoming ever more enticing because the necessary hardware and software are improving exponentially. This year we participated in Hurricanes '98, administered by some of the same people who learned how to do it with Kids as Global Scientists. They sent me a CD, I stuck it into our school's server, sent it out to the 25 Macintosh G3s my students would be using, and my hardware/software preparation was done!

The Hurricanes '98 software had an efficient menu of buttons from which students could choose. Students could write and respond to other students and meteorologists on a message board and explore hours-old satellite photos of hurricanes and see them in rapid succession to analyze patterns. They learned about air pressure and the coriolis effect with beautifully animated modeling activities and competed with other students around the country to predict the path of an active hurricane. The contrast between this experience and where I started is inspiring; I feel as though I am taking part in an amazing revolution.

Grappling with Change

At the end of "Of Wind and Weather," the article I wrote for Tales from the Electronic Frontier, some questions are posed about the effect of all this new technology on my teaching and on my students' learning. Throughout that story, I described my personal struggle with the need to tightly choreograph lessons in my classroom and the desire to simply let student learning happen as it would, without a lot of structured plans.

Because I've experimented with technology in my science curriculum since the beginning of my career, that struggle seems to me to be a natural and productive part of teaching. And because there are always exciting new technologies in science and in science education, there will always be uncertainty for teachers willing to try new things. A willingness to experiment doesn't mean that a teacher must scrap student learning to experiment with new technologies, but it does mean that a teacher must learn to plan flexible lessons. It means he or she will be designing experiences in which the exact outcome is not certain, but certainly will be valuable.

Our experiences during the early days of the Kids as Global Scientists project revealed how very important-and sometimes uncomfortable-such flexibility can be. Student learning was certainly happening, but since we were exploring a new technology together, the things my students were learning via their Internet communications were not exactly the science concepts I felt they needed. They also had to wade through quite a bit of frustratingly non-applicable information to get to something useful.

Today's ongoing advances in hardware and software have created a more appropriate flexibility. In the Hurricanes '98 project, I didn't know exactly what my students would learn from their Internet travels-since communications with other students and scientists, real-time satellite images, and real-life hurricanes can't be choreographed or planned. However, I did know the nature of what they would see to a greater extent than I knew what my Kids as Global Scientists students would encounter. And I also knew that the Hurricanes '98 CD came with resources that would facilitate learning the specific meteorology concepts I found important. So although students still learn through inquiry and there's still exciting flexibility in content, the newest Internet projects allow some strategic scripting of experiences to optimize student learning.

Technology Includes Everyone

I think the most significant way Internet technology affects my students' learning is in giving a voice to those students who don't traditionally have much to say in a science classroom. Typically, there are a few boisterous, confident kids who claim a big chunk of my attention and energy. And, particularly in middle school, there are kids who don't enjoy participating in discussions because of a myriad of adolescent reasons-fear of seeming too smart or interested, fear of drawing attention to themselves because they don't like how they look, and so forth.

The Internet offers comfortable anonymity: my reticent students can talk online to other students and to meteorologists about science, and no one knows what they look like, how popular they are, how shy they are, or what their grades are. I have seen many special education students, quiet types, and others who don't generally participate in or enjoy science class really thrive during Internet discourse. Also, I've seen students who are intimidated by adults-and adults who have a hard time talking to kids of this age-have wonderfully fruitful conversations over the Internet. These kinds of interactions just cannot be achieved via traditional classroom experiences.

As Internet technologies advance, we evolve with them. Because technology has always been part of my teaching, and because it's becoming increasingly more comfortable to use, I approach new technologies (and new things in general) with less and less trepidation. Similarly, every year I see less initial student fear of technology; more and more students are willing to dive in fearlessly because each new class has grown up surrounded by such resources to a greater extent than has the class before. And now that Internet technologies have become so seamless, we can begin to take them for granted and really use them to optimize teaching and learning.

Kristine Elizabeth Mueh has taught middle school science for nine years-minus a two-year hiatus to get her masters degree in biology at the University of Colorado. She currently teaches sixth graders at Centennial Middle School in the Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colorado. She welcomes emails at