Creates learning situations in which students use the unique capabilities of instructional technology to learn in ways they could not achieve without use of technology. The History of the Death Penalty lesson plan illustrates how technology plays an irreplaceable role in this unit. Students develop hypotheses about death penalty spikes in selected years, and then test their hypotheses by collecting online data from a national death penalty database, using Excel to create a Death Penalty Graph, and revising their hypotheses after analyzing electronic presentations of the information. The unique information management and communications applications of technology allow students to test their knowledge of history as they hypothesize about execution spikes in 1690 (piracy), 1692 (Salem Witchcraft Trials), 1740 (the "Great Negro Plot"), the 1930's (Communist Scare), the drop in the 1970's (Supreme Court Ruling), and the resurgence in the 2000's. Students review primary source documents from the PBS Online web site, and research execution methods (hanging, gibbeting, electrocution, lethal injection) and other aspects of United States death penalty history on the Michigan State University Death Penalty Information Center web site.

Encourages and guides students as they devise their own uses of instructional technology in learning. The culminating performance assessment for the We the Jury Unit requires students to integrate work from all of the individual lessons and assignments into a comprehensive mock newspaper (Mock School Newspaper Rubric), in which students use numerous information technologies (e.g., word processing, database management, spreadsheets, graphic utilities) to present their understanding of the unit objectives. The examples of student work (Mock School Newspaper) illustrate the great leeway in layout and content integration provided to the students. They devise their own strategies while experimenting with a variety of learning approaches. One student graphed narrative attributes (e.g., compared the "amount" of reasonable doubt in different murder cases), while another integrated additional graphics not required in the rubric (using the image search on google.com). Another student incorporated information from their current event assignments to help connect the concepts of fair juries and unanimous verdicts. Some students chose to place their photo gallery on a single page, while others chose to spread their photos throughout the newspaper. Each student explored the Department of Justice web site to collect and analyze capital punishment data of interest to them, and each student was also required to incorporate three educationally-appropriate web sites into their final project.