The Database: America's Presidents

Homes, B. (1998). The database: America’s presidents. Leading &Learning With Technology,25(7),6-11.

A database is a great resource for organizing newfound knowledge; The Database: America’s Presidents, emphasizes how 21st century learners must add additional skills to their educational repertoire, entitled the “Six C’s”: compute, communicate, conclude, confirm, categorize, and classify. Utilizing a database to collect and organize data as a class, engages students in their professional growth and leadership; reports indicate that students who have the opportunity to play a role in the success of the classroom’s collection of information have a heightened sense of responsibility and are more motivated to complete accurate work.

Databases in the classroom can be used in a myriad of ways, organizing and making any subject matter accessible. For example, the United States of America is comprised of fifty individual states; studying their state capitals and any other relevant information, such as the state bird or flower, could easily be organized using a database. Beth Holmes, a technology trainer for preservice and inservice teachers, created and used an “American Presidents” activity and database in order to establish the importance of a database in a learning environment. Upon completion , a database may be used as an educational game; for instance, using the “American Presidents” database, find the three presidents who had the most children, or who had the same amount of children as there are in your family, or who was the youngest children. This could also be an opportunity for the students to discover interesting miscellaneous facts, such as the various pets in the White House. Databases can be used as a means of organizing any subject matter, whether it be the key information pertaining to the elements in a periodic table or the main functions of the organs in the human body, databases have proven to be extremely useful.