InTime site

The area I viewed was Information Literacy.
I viewed 4 videos:
1)Fictional Presidental Candidate-Grade2-3-The students first studied the presidential process. Then they created a fictional Presidential candidate. The technology they used was Hyperstudio. Hyperstudio is described las a mutimedia athoring tool, but is very easy, like paint. So the students created a song, poster and campaign materials for their candidate. This particular project sounds great. The political process is a hard concept for students to understand at this age level. This would be a great way to have deeper learning, other than rote learning. So maybe when there is a particularity difficult concept to learn maybe a project based learning would be the way to go.
2) Habitats- Used KidPix, a paintlike program. Students study habitats and organize information. Then when they understand what is in their habitat, they create an animal that could survive in that habitat. They draw the animal on KidPix. This would be a great project for the fifth grade classroom in my school, they do habitats. Again, I keep forgetting about the technology that we all ready have in the classroom. I certainly could use a paint program, or one of the drawing programs we just learned about to use in this assignment.
3) Shakespeare 5th grade-Web Quest- Here the teacher, or librarian, designed a web page were the students go and discover information about Shakespeare. They discuss phrases like "dead as a doornail". A webquest is LOTS of work for the teacher. The teacher must research and design a web page for the students to go to, look up information, and do activities. The important part is that students are directed to quality sites with information at their level. Even though it is more work for the teacher, the student engagement will be higher. I could design a webquest for any classroom project, like we have a Dust Bowl project.
4)Assertive Technology in the writing Process-Inspiration-In the pre-writing phase students brainstorm using Inspiration. Then go onto the qriting and post writing part. Again we have Kidspiration for organizing information at our school already. So why don't I use it? I could have students brainstorm on a variety of subjects.

Well here is the problem, I would love to use what we have, but I can never get my students into the computer lab. So last year, I bought for the library with CSF, enough computers for a classroom to use. But as of yet, we can't print to the printer yet, don't have microsoft works on them (do brouchures), and they don't work half the time, for I don't know why reasons.
I guess the point I am making is technology is great, IF it works.