WISE facilitates classroom interaction.

"WISE helps me interact more with my students. What I like best about technology in the classroom, as a teacher, involved the interactivity it allowed the students. I started teaching at a private school where I had a relatively small number of students, and I was therefore able to respond to each student and work with each student where they were. My jobs at public schools with 160 kids a day obviously made that unfeasible — that's when I became really interested in technology as a tool to allow students to act andget feedback on their actions."

WISE projects motivate students.

"The WISE technology motivated my hard-to-motivate students. I teach in a typical inner city middle school with a diverse student population: ethnically, economically and in levels of ability. I was privileged to be a part of the WISE "Deformed Frogs" project this year. Because I paired the students, matching their strengths and weaknesses, the students who would typically resist hand-written note taking produced a significant amount of work. The proof for me that learning really took place was in the final debates: students who were unmotivated at first demonstrated a tremendous amount of knowledge on the subject matter as they presented their evidence for the debate."

WISE opens doors to the "real world" of science.

[Technology] gives the kids an opportunity to go out and see what's out in the world at that moment. And that will hopefully spark a curiosity that they'll go home and think. I think the introduction of a planned project to children in school will broaden the horizons so they'll go out and do some more research or just kind of a surfing around and try to find out the questions they've been trying to answer.

WISE offers new learning opportunities.

The thing I'm most excited about using WISE ... is that we are limited in our resources that we have at school. I see [the computer] as a door to many locations where we can just click and go. So that's exciting part to go and visit places and see things that we can't physically do. I think there are ... interesting and motivating things that [students] find that peak their interest, which they may not get as excited about if they opened the regular textbook.

WISE is exciting.

We had a couple of classes that ended early, so we had some really great debates where the kids got really excited and were truly defending their ideas about whether or not there is a life on Mars, or how the little dust particles came to be. To see them get really excited about it was fun. It's different when you take [knowledge] and use it on a computer, which is a tool that they don't normally use for education ... it makes it interesting and is better than just me spouting at them.

WISE encourages critical thinking.

[Something I found particularly exciting about teaching with WISE was the students'] adjustment of being able to think critically "Does this make sense?" instead of kids tending to swallow everything and saying, "Oh, there. It's all true." I liked how [the project] seemed to intrigue them, and I heard some great questions from the kids [that] wouldn't have come up if they had been reading a textbook."