The one thing that is constant in this day and time… is Change. Compare your life as a child and the technologies that we took for granted, to those of our students, and think about how different their world is from the one we were taught in 10, 20, or 30 years ago.

The nature of information has changed !!!!!in just the last 10 years, much of it in recent months. This enlightening presentation will help educators to understand how contemporary information is affecting our world and how we might tap into the new information environments in order to better prepare children for their information-driven, technology-rich future.

At the turn of the century, teachers in classrooms across the U.S. and many other parts of the world were becoming acquainted with newly arrived multimedia computers and broadband* access to the Internet. We were exploring new techniques for utilizing these seemingly magical tools to facilitate better teaching and learning. We also recognized the importance of these technologies in preparing our children for what will surely be a future that is heavily influenced by computers and global networks. We explored a wide variety of new web-based instructional services and learned to build webquests* for our students, to provide rich inquiry activities to help students learn to use the Net to teach themselves and to use their growing knowledge and skills to produce new knowledge and valuable information products.