Nuestra Tierra: a University/Public School Technology Integration Project

Findings

Findings from the study are reported in the next section. The results of yearly surveys given to all project participants are reported first, followed by a discussion of the project as uncovered through indepth interviews. Nidelia Montoya, a doctoral student in Educational Management and Development at New Mexico State, assisted Wiburg with the design, implementation, and evaluation of all quantitative data for this project.

Surveys from Year 1 and Year 2

A Likert-style survey was developed at the beginning of the project to align with the research questions which had been developed. This survey was administered at the end of year one and year two. The survey asked questions about three of the project goals: 1) collaborative curriculum development; 2) multimedia and learning; and 3) effective professional development. Results of the survey are reported below in Table 2. Our fourth goal, dissemination and sustainability of the project, was met in various ways, but is not discussed in this paper.

Collaborative Curriculum Development
The following frequencies are in percentages of the total number of responses. The responses were assigned a number value as follows: 5-Always; 4- Usually; 3-Sometimes; 2-Rarely; and 1- Not Observed; then means were computed using the assigned number values (see Table 2).

Table 2 - Collaborative Curriculum Development
Questions	Always Year 1	Always Year 2	Usually Year 1	Usually Year 2	Sometimes Year 1	Sometimes Year 2	Rarely Year 1	Rarely Year 2	Not Observed Year 1	Not Observed Year 2	Means Year 1	Means Year 2
1. Do team members engage in collaborative development?	71%	41%	14%	44%	7%	7%	0%	4%	7%	4%	4.43	4.15
2. Is there collaboration and cooperation between team teachers and school administration?	50%	29%	21%	38%	21%	4%	0%	25%	7%	4%	4.07	3.63
3. Is there collaboration and cooperation of team members between schools?	21%	23%	36%	35%	21%	23%	0%	15%	0%	4%	4.50	3.58
4. Is there collaboration between the public schools and the university?	50%	85%	50%	7%	0%	7%	0%	0%	0%	0%	4.50	4.78
5. Is there cooperation between Central Office and the Principals/schools?	24%	4%	42%	11%	25%	7%	0%	4%	8%	74%	3.75	1.67
6. Does collaborative curriculum development result in learning activities which are more relevant to the community?	21%	37%	22%	26%	14%	26%	0%	0%	7%	15%	3.86	3.67

Interestingly, there were both positive and negative changes in collaboration. While collaboration with the university began at a high level and moved even higher, reflecting a mean value of 4.5 to 4.78, collaboration between the schools and the central office decreased significantly in the second year, from a mean value of 3.75 to a mean value of 1.67 on the Likert scale used. Some of the decrease might be explained by the fact that we had the same number of support staff but had added twice as many schools and teachers. We became too busy to work consistently with the central office. However, the type of technology use advocated by this project also proved problematical. As teachers and principals began to implement powerful computer-based learning integrated with constructivist teaching, the gapbetween the schools in the project and the central office technology department widened. The district computer system had been designed to support technology-directed, rather than teacher or student- directed use of technology. As long as the computers were used only to deliver drill and practice instruction, there were few problems with the hardware and software. As teachers and students required better performance and more control in order to implement inquiry-oriented projects, the demands on the computer systems increased beyond what the central administration could support.

Multimedia and Learning (Student Outcomes)
Table 3 illustrates what teachers and the management team felt about learning issues during the project.

Table 3 - Multimedia and Learning
Questions	Always Year 1	Always Year 2	Usually Year 1	Usually Year 2	Sometimes Year 1	Sometimes Year 2	Rarely Year 1	Rarely Year 2	Not Observed Year 1	Not Observed Year 2	Means Year 1	Means Year 2
12. Has technology-based curriculum been developed which integrate different content areas?	17%	31%	50%	54%	33%	12%	0%	0%	0%	4%	3.83	4.08
13. Are student's personal experiences, including cultural backgrounds, used in learning products?	8%	30%	33%	48%	42%	19%	0%	0%	16%	4%	3.17	4.00
14. Are a variety of alternative assessments being used to demonstrate knowledge?	17%	26%	50%	48%	25%	19%	0%	0%	8%	7%	3.67	3.85
15. Are opportunities provided for students to ask questions and discover answers?	50%	48%	25%	37%	8%	15%	0%	0%	17%	0%	3.92	4.33

These positive findings in terms of participants' perceptions of the impact of technology on learning are also reflected in the quality of the projects the students created. All grade levels used HyperStudio to create stacks about the subjects they were studying. The students determined what was appropriate to place in their stacks. At the high school, which had the best technology infrastructure, the students created web pages which were virtual tours of the local area including an old village, a former sanitarium, a state park, as well as several supposedly haunted houses. The first year middle school also had classroom access to technology, and there were many computer projects completed by students. Assessments of these projects were closely tied to instruction. While working on these projects, students continuously asked questions and discovered answers with the help of teachers and peers. Students who had never shown any particular interest in research now asked to go to the library to get more information on a person, plant or place they were putting into their stacks. There was a higher-level of student-directed activity and self-assessment. In fact, we had planned to wait until year two before assessing students' perceptions of learning with technology, but because of the success of the pilot schools we gathered data from students about their learning experiences at the end of both year one and year two.

Effective Professional Development
The following table illustrates what teachers and administrators thought about the technology training.

Table 4 - Professional Development
Questions	Always Year 1	Always Year 2	Usually Year 1	Usually Year 2	Sometimes Year 1	Sometimes Year 2	Rarely Year 1	Rarely Year 2	Not Observed Year 1	Not Observed Year 2	Means Year 1	Means Year 2
7. Do you have a more positive attitude about using technology and teaching about New Mexico?	53%	82%	33%	15%	13%	4%	0%	0%	0%	0%	4.40	4.78
8. Has training been sufficient to encourage the use of technology in the classroom?	64%	59%	21%	30%	14%	11%	0%	0%	0%	0%	4.50	4.48
9. Has sufficient time been given to develop curriculum for the Nuestra Tierra Project?	39%	12%	39%	42%	15%	27%	8%	19%	0%	0%	4.08	3.46
10. Are you using expanded instructional strategies (questioning, cooperative learning) as a result of this project?	39%	48%	46%	37%	8%	15%	0%	0%	8%	0%	4.08	4.33

While the survey measured teachers' perceptions of how they were now teaching with technology, these perceptions are impressive, especially the findings related to changes in instructional practices. Taken together with qualitative findings, there is evidence that important changes occurred in how teachers were teaching and students were learning. The only question in which a decrease in agreement occurred, Question 9, was in the area of sufficient time. Project field notes suggested two explanations for this decrease. As teachers gained in their technology expertise they wanted to develop more computer-based activities and were more frustrated than they had been previously by the limited time a teacher has to engage in curriculum development. In addition, the university researchers, who were now mentoring teachers in two schools, were less available in the second year to assist teachers with this type of curriculum development than during the first year of the project.

Student Survey Responses
Four open-ended questions were asked of the students during the first and second year of the project, either by their teacher or by one of the research assistants. Eighty students were interviewed the first year and 163 students the second year. The questions asked were:

How did you like using computers as part of the Nuestra Tierra/USWEST project this year?
What did you learn? What project did you do?
What was the best thing and what was the most frustrating about using technology?
What would you like to do differently next year in a project like this?

At the end of the first year, 80 students completed the questionnaire. Over half these students chose to return the survey by e-mail, a skill learned through the course of this project. During both years students made comments about several areas and thus were at times counted more than once. The following remarks relate to year one.

Regarding the question of how students liked using computers as part of this project, 79% of the responses were that it was fun, neat, and enjoyable. Another 39% said that it made accomplishing projects more efficient, easier and that it was very educational.

When asked about the best aspect of the project, 64% stated that is was fun and easy, 5% said that it was great being able to look at a final product and to see results immediately. The most frustrating aspect reported by 50% of the students was that the computers often stopped working or were very slow, or that they did not have the necessary equipment.

At the end of the second year, teachers from each school were asked to randomly survey students about their experiences in the project. A total of 163 student surveys were completed. The most common response to question one was, again, that the students enjoyed working on the computers and found it fun. Sixty percent of the students mentioned specific new learning skills and projects as being a better way to learn in school. At the elementary level, 72% of the students mentioned specific content projects they had completed including poems, social studies reports, science projects, research projects and stories. A few of the students, less than 4%, said they did not like working on the computers or the project.

Answers varied the most for the third question which asked students to talk about what they liked best and what was most frustrating. The high school and middle school students were all enthusiastic about being able to access information easily and quickly on the web. At the same time, they reported they were frustrated that they couldn't download the needed information more quickly. The elementary school students enjoyed using the Internet, drawing, playing educational games, and typing on the computer. They were also frustrated when the computers didn't work, they lost their work due to a computer problem, or the printers didn't work. Technical help from the district could take three or four weeks to reach the teachers classrooms.

Student responses varied by school in response to the fourth question which asked them to talk about what they'd like to do differently next year. O�ate students were fairly satisfied with their current work and asked for more advanced classes. Sierra Middle School students wanted more access to the web and more time to do research on the web. Zia Middle School students wanted more time using computers and the web, and creating their own home pages. Jornada Elementary students wanted their computers fixed. (Jornada, an older school, had been plagued with hardware and network problems.) Students from Desert Hills, a new school, also liked what they were doing and wanted to continue the same kind of work next year.

The students' responses reflected both the successes and the frustrations of this project. The students and teachers learned to use the computers for deep, project-based learning and many of the networks and computers were not adequate for this approach. As long as teachers used the computers for canned drill and practice type programs, which required little or no storage space, the computers worked. Multimedia and Internet use requires more memory than is available on floppy disks, as well as extensive use of saving between floppy and hard drives and file servers. The system had not been set up to allow students and teachers to use part of the file servers or the hard drives for working and saving; therefore this constant saving to floppy disks caused many of the old floppy drives to cease working.

Results from the Bilingual Classroom Research
This action research project was conducted by John Sandin, one of the graduate students on the university research team, and the bilingual social studies teacher, Sandy Montojano, during the first semester of the second year to see if students' attitudes toward studying history, and reading and writing about it, improved over the time of the intervention. Both the teacher and the research assistant are bilingual in Spanish and English, and testing and instruction occurred in both languages.

Sandin writes:

In order to discover students' interest in literacy activities in their history class, I created a pre/post bilingual survey instrument (see Appendix). I administered the test and explained each question in both English and Spanish. The pretest was given after I made some observations on the teaching/learning environment and before I used computer technologies in this class. After giving this instrument, the classroom teacher and I worked for several weeks with students creating projects which required the use of the Internet for research and a multimedia tool for presentation. During this period (the teacher) and I talked often about the students and their work.

Sandin, Field Notes
March, 1997

Results of analyzing the pre/post survey showed a significant increase at the .05 level in students' interest in reading and writing more about history as compared to their interest before our integration of electronic technologies using a constructivist paradigm. Other factors, such as studying history with textbooks, writing traditional reports (even with the computer), did not improve. An interesting result was that our intervention did not appear to increase students' interest in taking more history classes, even if computers would be a part of the next class.

During this same period the Sandin also worked with Monolingual Spanish-speaking students at the Newcomer Center High school. He and the teachers there involved these students in using multimedia to develop autobiographical stacks about their families and the geographic locations in which they had lived. Field notes, based on extensive observations, indicated how the use of graphics and sound supported students' growing knowledge of English while allowing them to work at an appropriate grade level for content learning in science and social studies. Students used the Internet daily to research news and weather, and then transformed what they learned into their own presentations and papers. They worked collaboratively on many thematic multimedia projects, learning language as they collaborated to perfect their products. Students were also supported in experiential learning through field trips and innovative teaching off as well as on the computer. While more research is needed on the use of technology within a constructivist approach for students learning English, the evidence from this action research is promising.

Additional Qualitative Findings

The following describes the results of additional observations, field notes, and interviews with teachers. Survey data suggested that teachers perceived they had changed their teaching and were integrating more of their students' experiences into the classroom learning environment. They also said they felt more comfortable with using technology. Field notes on classroom and school observations, as well as teacher indepth interviews, provided additional support that something had changed in the learning environments in the target schools.

Observations and Field Notes
As mentioned earlier, Wiburg, as PI, and Sandin and Saxton, as graduate research assistants, kept continuous field notes reflecting classroom observations, informal interactions, and structured interviews with teachers, students, parents and administrators. Each year, a teacher, Susan Smith, keep detailed field notes for the project from a teacher's perspective. These notes were given to the project director on a monthly basis where they were consolidated and sent to external evaluators overseeing the project for the funding agency. The foundation evaluators provided additional focus questions during the first half of the second year, resulting in a formative evaluation of the project. (Available online at http://www.cahe.nmsu.edu/uswest/.) The monthly reports based on notes as well as an indepth formative evaluation encouraged continuous reflection on the positive changes as well as the barriers found in integrating technology into meaningful classroom learning.

An early example of a changed teaching/learning environments comes Sandin's field notes related to a project in which he engaged with a participating high school social studies teacher who had always used traditional lecture and teacher-directed methods in his classroom. After some support on how to use computer programs such as HyperStudio, the classroom teacher and Sandin asked students what area of New Mexico history they would like to study. After several discussions, the teacher suggested they study a local town's history. The class agreed, and the students divided into groups which choose what aspect of the town's history they would like to investigate. The classroom teacher and Sandin acted as guides and content area experts, while students decided how the project would take shape.

Sandin worked with other teacher leaders at the high school and involved them in not only using similar strategies but also in designing interdisciplinary approaches in which the English, Social Studies, and Science teachers, and later, the Spanish teacher, could become involved in a thematic investigation of the local environment. High school students developed hypermedia and web pages documenting the history of the local town and stories from the community and state. Field trips were included so students could interview local residents, take and digitize pictures, and design presentations as a result of their investigations. Observations and interviews with students indicated high levels of student motivation. Some of their products, including virtual tours of the community, can be seen on the Nuestra Tierra web page (www.cahe.nmsu.edu/uswest/).

At the beginning of the project we had observed these same teachers giving lectures and testing. For those learning English, as well as content, an inactive learning environment made it doubly difficult to learn and understand. After a year in the project, observations indicated significant changes in the classroom environments of the four classrooms at each site that were involved in the project. These same groups of students were now moving from learning center to learning center, some with computers, others involving discussing or writing or artistic creation. Many more students were involved in learning content with the help of technology tools and new teaching approaches. Most of the work students produced for Nuestra Tierra was done through group projects. Students developed cooperative learning skills while producing multimedia projects of their work. Not only did they learn how to work together, but they also taught each other content and technical skills.

Indepth Interviews
Perhaps the most enlightening of all the data collected in this project came from indepth interviews conducted with project teachers (Saxton, 1998). During the first year, Mary Saxton, the other graduate research assistant, interviewed one teacher at the elementary school over a several month period. These in-depth interviews, which required a full hour of teacher and interviewer time every week, were so interesting that she decided to continue interviewing the elementary teacher ,as well as interview two additional teachers, one at the high school and one at the middle school during the Fall of year two.

In the words of teachers, some of the changes that were being observed became clearer. All three teachers described how they moved from a state of anxiety, at the beginning of the project, to feelings of comfort and confidence in using technology after more than a year in the project. A high school teacher shared his feelings during the project's first professional development workshop, "I went in there with this impression that I had to know everything about technology. So I was trying to read all these articles, which I didn't understand, about HyperStudio and HyperCard. I thought, 'What the heck is this? What is HyperStudio? ' I had no idea. .. I just couldn't fathom how they were producing these projects!" These were an elementary teacher's feelings on the first day: "We had just come form out first USWEST inservice.. the 'HTTP's, the HTLM.'.. The first day! and I couldn't even turn on the computer (laughter). I knew I should not have been there. If it had been a class, I would have taken a drop right away."

These two teachers turned out to be stars. A year later they were part of a state-wide teachers- teaching -teachers project, (Gonzales, 1997), traveling from district to district to provide Saturday technology-integration workshops for teachers. How did these teachers move from embarrassment and anxiety to confidence and leadership? The teachers seemed to think it came from the one-on-one follow-up support provided to them at the school site. A high school teacher remarked "You followed up on our introduction to HyperStudio. I think that is great. To leave us, to do one thing, and not follow up is a big mistake. Because here's where my clarification took place. Once you followed up on it, everything became crystal clear for me." As the year progressed, the teachers became more and more proficient on using the tools introduced in the workshops. They began to create new multimedia environments for their students. They led frequent teacher workshops for their peers during the second year.

The teachers described their changed teaching as very likely to be permanent. An elementary teacher commented: "I have grown to realize that there is no way at this point in my teaching career that I could teach without having computers in my classroom. I couldn't imagine teaching without computers. And realizing that has enhanced my curriculum.." The teachers also came to recognize what using technology could do for helping students to take more responsibility for their own learning. These teachers moved away from the front of the classroom and became facilitators rather than lecturers during an increasing part of the day. A high school teacher comments: "Now I have kind of passed on the learning tasks to the students. That is what a teacher should do, they should be a true facilitator. So technology has allowed me to be the facilitator. It has allowed me to teach my students skills that they can use and apply once they leave high school. Many teachers don't pay too much attention to that. Their job is to teach history, their job is to teach science." Another high school teacher reflects: "I'm not sure when it dawned on me, but it did ..that I learn through doing. I figured the kids would learn this way too. I started kind of turning that over to them. Instead of lecturing in front of them and giving the information to them while they took notes. I made it so they discovered for themselves what the answers are. And that seemed to be more fun for the kids and more fun for me, too.."

These teachers experienced, along with a growth in their confidence in using technology, a new love of teaching. A middle school teacher in the project, who had been thinking about retiring prior to Nuestra Tierra, became excited again about learning and teaching. She commented: "This project has revitalized my interest in teaching. I haven't been so excited about teaching in many years." Teacher project participants also reached out to others in their schools and families. A high school teacher talks about how he helped his father, an educator for 37 years, learn to use a computer. "The man would have never ever, ever dreamed of using a computer. I got him so excited by some of the things that I am doing and some of the things that I am involved in, he wants to learn it. He wants to learn It! Do you know what is amazing to me? How quickly he has learned it."

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