Learning becomes more meaningful to students as they make connections during the process of gathering, analyzing and drawing conclusions about information. Once a task is chosen and students determine what resources they need, encourage contact with the larger community by letter, telephone, fax, and electronic communications such as on-line services and the Internet. Technology-based research can be specialized, current, and enable students to obtain resources outside the school site. For a project on the stock market, students can collect information from an on-line service and use a database to organize it. Electronic mail enables students to work collaboratively with peers in other locations to write and assemble the pieces of a multimedia presentation.
Students can collect and organize information while on a field trip.
Elementary students on a visit to the local power plant can write down the information as it is presented by the tour guide. By having the computer hold the ideas and materials from the field, students can go over them again and again, reinforcing their learning by further access to their first-hand information. By using one of the new multimedia computers designed for video input, students can videotape the explanations of what they have concluded about the impact of comet fragments on Jupiter, and incorporate them as QuickTime movies in multimedia documents and presentations. The effect of real-time laboratory graphing on learning graphic representations of distance and velocity. Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt.