Whirling Winds has been a catalyst for our embracing and relying on technology in our everyday teaching and learning.  Our students are more engaged in the learning process as a result of discovering new technology horizons.  They may create Powerpoint presentations without having a formal assignment, stimulated by their excitement to use the technology.  Students have developed a very good sense of interactive collaboration, research, and reach beyond the school and classroom boundaries.  They now regard technology as a resource and an everyday tool they have at their disposal. 

Our instructional practice has been positively impacted in many aspects.  Our teaching strategies now revolve around technology.  We have learned many ways to integrate technology in our everyday lessons.  We access and project Internet sites such as museums, National Geographic, BrainPOP, NOAA and NASA to introduce or reinforce a lesson.  We have integrated many interactive sites into home learning assignments.  We have become very familiar with using spreadsheets to organize and display data needed in our science and math lessons.  Teachers and students are now very fluent and confident in using the Internet to research information that benefits the students and brings new teaching angles to a certain curricular unit. 

During the course of the school year, the computer lab was renovated, and the technology teacher had to transition into a temporary mobile role.  Being part of the grant team helped her make the transition easier.  The grant equipment and software assisted her in bringing technology into the classrooms and to the students.  They were able to use and see technology at work.  The technology teacher was able to impact all Sunset students through the use of the grant technology, using various web based programs such as BrainPOP and Discovery Kids.  She was also able to expand into Visual Thinking Strategies, which uses a sequenced curriculum of art images delivered through technology from many world cultures and different eras to teach thinking, communication skills, and visual literacy.  Using the tablet and projector in class has become a natural part of our teaching and learning sequence.  Students have been able to research interactively in the class and have become technology experts in the process.

Our team will continue to integrate technology through instruction and student interaction. We will continue our weather theme to complete weather journals, a weather quest, host a guest speaker, and develop a school-wide presentation by our students. As part of the goal of extending the project to the rest of the school, we share the equipment and help our colleagues learn how to use it.  Best Buy recently awarded Sunset Elementary a grant to expand "Whirling Winds" to two additional classrooms.  The next phase in "Whirling Winds" is to expand its reach through the acquisition of six student stations, as a mobile unit, to share as digital science experiment notebooks by all students in the Pangea classrooms.  Finally, our goal is to impact all classrooms at Sunset Elementary though the use of interactive technologies to fully implement project-based learning.