Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow

Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow ^sm project involves several school sites in the examination of the impact of a high infusion of technology upon students. We were fortunate to collaborate in several projects with the West High School site, which is set in an urban community and includes students from a variety of economic and ethnic backgrounds. The site provides students as much access to computers as students in regular classrooms have to books and pen and paper.

The Apple Classroom of Tomorrow ^smproject represents an attempt to provide students with state-of-the-art technology in a constructive learning environment wherein they enlist media to explore topics, solve problems, and pursue their own projects. Students are able to interact with a community of learners in various subject areas within a context that allows them to explore and learn with a range of multimedia software, databases, and word-processing software. They also have access to computers at home where they can pursue class work or projects that they might decide to initiate themselves.

While we were involved, the projects with which the students were engaged represented a wide range of problems, topics, and issues. Students might be given a task such as developing and launching their own rockets, developing video portfolios about themselves, constructing a scaled down version of the city of Columbus, helping develop leaflets for community agencies using a desktop publishing, or pursuing projects tied to different topics and themes. Often projects involved an extended exploration of topics using a variety of resources. The projects engaged for the present study were similar in that students were encouraged to explore topics using a range of media as vehicles for such explorations and to culminate their explorations in a presentation for others.

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