Technology Integration

This morning a 6th grade science teacher met with me to finish up planning for our two-three week session in the lab. The plans revolved around increasing student understanding of cell structure, both animals and plants. I never had biology, so this was all new to me and pretty neat stuff besides.
We had planned the time to create a Keynote presentation. Students knew already how to grab full size images, add them to their home directories, and later add them to their slides. So there was no real learning curve here.
Last year I found a neat cell drawing on the floor of the hallway, and thought what a great idea….use a drawing program to create the student’s version of the cell structure.
Shortly before, I had added a new drawing program, Canvastic, and this time, I thought, was perfect for introducing it to the teacher and these 6th graders.
So that’s what we did. At the end of 40 minutes (some classes are longer, none shorter), several students had completed the animal cell drawing. It was great to see them learn the software so quickly. I’ve always believed that putting the software in front of the students was never a risky act.
The premise I’ve had was that students remember more whenever they are asked to complete more challenging tasks on the road to a presentation, or finale, of an assignment, and learning this new software program was one way to do it.
Students were engaged and learning as they went back and forth between the diagram on the web page and the drawing they were creating.
This process seems to be successful; but I’m nagged a bit with this question: Isn’t this more like substitution? Isn’t this process more like writing a paper and then coming to the computer lab “to use technology” to type the paper? Students didn’t draw their cells before coming to the lab, but they were copying what they saw.
Anyone have thoughts about this?