Integrating technology into your classroom doesn't mean scheduling a monthly class trip to the computer lab. For students, technology integration is about incorporating easy-to-use tools and program features into your lesson plans and activities to enhance learning. When technology is used wisely, it can improve critical thinking and communication skills, and increase motivation in students. Choose one of the following five ideas as your first step in getting started.

Promote classroom participation with slide shows

Watch technology maneuver you through the next school-board presentation, open house, or curriculum night. Instead of delivering a 10-minute lecture, you can have your students create an interactive slide show about their classroom and courses by using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003.

Follow these steps:

• Identify what you want to cover, and divide the curriculum or course content into sections.
• Assign sections to student teams so that each team creates one or two slides relating important details about the content. Taking photos with a digital camera is a great way to illustrate concepts in action.
• Instruct the teams to save their slides to a common folder until all slides are combined and inserted into the final slide show.

In this activity, students reinforce important classroom and course content. Parents and community members benefit from seeing the students engaged in supporting the teacher and communicating important details. You might consider updating your Web site by replacing your traditional syllabus and classroom rules with a Web page version of this project.

Increase student motivation and accountability with worksheets

You can motivate students to set personal goals and regularly track their progress by using a grade-monitoring worksheet created with Microsoft Office Excel 2003.

Follow these steps:

• Use the AutoSum feature in Excel to organize a grade-tracking worksheet for your students. Include categories relevant to your course, such as date, assignment number, points possible, and score.
• Use the AutoSum feature to add the numbers in the score columns, to calculate the total points possible, and to calculate a student's final grade percentage.
• Save the Excel worksheet to a shared student access folder as a read-only file. Students can then reopen the file and save it to their personal folder.

Additional features such as adding a text box for student goals, creating a chart to track progress, and using the Goal Seek feature can enhance the effectiveness of this grade-tracking method.

Get to the point with the Outline feature

Although PowerPoint slide shows can be fun and effective, the essential details and structure of the content can get lost in the process. Using the Outline feature in Microsoft Office Word 2003 can help your students focus and view the content in an organized layout before they add transitions and create fancy animations.

Follow these steps:

• After students research their topic, have them start Word and use the Outline feature on the View menu. Students should enter their most important topics first and set them to Level 1. Use these Level 1 topics as titles for each PowerPoint slide.
• Students can list three to four supporting details for each topic and set these details to Level 2. (Text should not be formatted at this time.)
• After the outline is complete, have the students convert the Word outline to PowerPoint content by clicking the File menu, pointing to Send To, and then clicking Microsoft Office PowerPoint.
• The outline will automatically convert to slide show content. Now students can format text and add design and media elements to complete their slide show presentation.

This activity encourages students to focus on the main ideas and supporting details of their content before using the special features that are available in PowerPoint to visually enhance their presentation.

Develop critical thinking and comprehension skills with the AutoSum feature

Students sometimes struggle to highlight or summarize important details. The AutoSum feature in Word can spark their investigation into how to locate important information.

Follow these steps:

• Instruct student teams to open a prepared document or copy and paste text from a Web page. The team reads the file and then applies bold formatting to text to identify important information in the document.
• Next, students use the AutoSum feature on the Tables and Borders toolbar to compare the AutoSum results.
• After the comparison, talk with students about when and how the AutoSum feature works.

At the end of the discussion, ask students to consider whether their understanding of the AutoSum feature is affecting their writing style.

Data collection made easy with the Form feature

If you are collecting data from a science experiment, math manipulatives, or a survey, you can use the Data Form feature in Excel as an easier alternative to tediously copying data from a smudged set of student papers.

Follow these steps:

• First, determine the categories or fields and enter these in the top row of an Excel worksheet.
• When you are ready to enter data, use the Form feature on the Data menu.
• Instruct students to use a small form entry box to record their information into the worksheet. This avoids confusion with cell sizes and minimizes scrolling.
• Save the worksheet to a shared folder as a read-only file.

Student teams can later access the collected data for analysis if they need more time to study results.

Connect students to the technology

By consistently incorporating computer tools and applications into your lesson plans, you can increase student participation and understanding while connecting students more directly to the world of technology. Students who actively participate in classroom projects are more attentive and motivated to take responsibility for their success. Successful class participation is just one of the many benefits of integrating technology into your classroom.