Sarah is in her third year of teaching. At first, technology seemed to be too big a hurdle for her; it was tough to find the resources she needed online. "I used to spend hours on the Web searching," she explains. With a combination of added experience and help from her fellow teachers, she's been able to get a better handle on the situation. She says, "Now that I have specific sites and projects in mind, it's more focused."

This year, Sarah created a Tech Tour in which her students examined early civilizations from a geographical point of view. Her students divided into teams - each dedicated to one of four civilizations - and combed through textbooks and Web sites to discover how things like climate and proximity to water affected the development of their chosen civilization. About a third of her class, Sarah estimates, even did research on their own time.

After building a concept map from their collective research, each of Sarah's students examined one particular factor in depth and created a poster with the information they gathered. They could have created an end product with technology, Sarah explained, but the most important thing to her was to create something that could be shared with other people easily - especially parents.

On the challenges of keeping students on-task:
"Kids are very smart with computers. It's just they're not smart the way you want them to be sometimes... it can create a nightmare if you don't know how to handle it."