Kevin Erlinger Science Teacher
Urbana Middle School
Urbana, Illinois

District #116/UMS Technology Plans

Urbana's district technology plan opens with, "The Urbana School District #116 will incorporate technology as a natural part of education to ensure that all students will have the opportunity to develop lifelong learning skills necessary to be productive citizens in an information-driven, global society." It is clear that Urbana #116 wants technology to be a fundamental part of each student's day; it should flow easily into classroom lessons and assignments and not be a "side" activity for students to do. In making it a part of their daily routine, it will help students to become technologically literate--a life skill for all people today.

As the first part of the vision focuses on students, the second focus of Urbana #116's vision focuses more on staff. "By providing staff access to technology resources and the means to become technologically literate, staff will be able to combine and integrate technology with new models of teaching that acknowledge each student's individual learning style and help ensure that each student has an opportunity to become a lifelong learner." Teachers are the ones who will help the students to become knowledgeable and comfortable with technology; this vision ensures that they will have the resources and training to do so.

The technology plan for Urbana Middle School closely follows that of the district. Its vision statement says, "Our vision is to utilize a wide variety of technologies throughout the curriculum to provide our diverse student population with the tools and resources to help them learn and achieve in the future." It elaborates further by indicating the Middle School will attempt to provide up-to-date technologies in sufficient quantities and accessibility to all students and staff, to give students opportunity for exploration in technology, to provide staff with the means to integrate technology into the classroom via training, time, resources, and incentives, and to continue to provide for technology coordination through a full-time position.

My classroom situation falls in line with our building plan. As a science teacher, I always strive to incorporate technologies into the curriculum. The world of science utilizes numerous technologies as tools to further investigations and discoveries. Therefore, it is important to stay in touch with this and educate our students through these technologies. Specifically, I have two computers in my classroom that I use for such tasks as data analysis, web browsing, and data collection. Furthermore, my students utilize a digital flex cam for microscopy as well as computer based probes for data collection. It's not the function of technology to be provided for technology sake, but it is there to encourage students to think critically and open their minds to the world of science.

Improving My Classroom Use Of Technology

As a science teacher I feel that there are numerous ways in which I can improve the use of technology in my classroom. In the past, the Urbana Middle school computer lab has had limited hours in which you could bring classes of students into it for use. In fact, my teaching schedule only allowed me access for three of my five classes. This made it very difficult to do technology related activities when only a portion of my classes could be in the lab. Starting this year, the lab will be open for classes the entire day. This opens up many possibilities that I had never pursued in previous years. I have utilized the one computer in my classroom for demonstrations (web sites, data collection with computer based probes), overviews , individual enhancement or enrichment. I will now be able to schedule the computer lab to utilize graphing software, spreadsheets for data entry and calculations, web research, and web based curriculum projects and tools such as NCSA's MapIT!. Last year two other teachers and myself attended an ESRI training workshop for Arcview GIS, and I am looking forward to trying this with my students.

Furthermore, I plan to try to alter some of my assignments from previous years to an electronic format. For example, this year I am planning to teach my students to write electronic lab reports utilizing word processing, spreadsheet analysis, and graphing. One activity I have donein the past was to have students take a concept such as acceleration and produce a poster explaining the concept. Now I plan to change it so that they will create a web page on this concept. This allows the students to draw from the web as well as be able to incorporate their own ideas. I feel this could be very powerful for the students. I will also continue to utilize GPS units, motion sensors, probes, the flexcam for microscopes, cd roms/video laser, disks and the other technologies that are available or become available to me.

My Dream Classroom

What would my "Dream Classroom" look like if I could have all the technology I wanted? Wow, what an excellent question. This is rather difficult to conceive because of how difficult it is to get technology into our schools and classrooms. I think the first thing that I would like to see is plenty of space. I would like to have a room that would have tables in the front with wired computers for every student. I would like to have a demonstration table with a computer attached to a projection unit. The back portion of the room would be a "state of the art" lab. Each lab station would have a computer as well as numerous probes and sensors for data collection. Of course I would like to have video editing equipment as well as numerous digital cameras. I once read about a physics professor in the early 60's (I believe he may have taught at Cleveland State University) that would give all his students movie cameras and told them to film examples of acceleration. I would love to be able to do something similar with my students. Obviously, it would be great to have all of the science toys available such as powerful Vandegraf Generators and spectra photometers.

As I stated before, technology itself should not be the focus of a teachers instruction. What is important is to teach students to think critically, be creative, communicate ideas, and problem solve. These are my goals as a science teacher, and I strive to accomplish them with or without technology. It just so happens that technology can be a wonderfully fun and effective tool to reach these goals. I honestly have a hard time describing the typical day in my "high tech" classroom. Even with all this technology, I still see myself having students swing pendulums made from string and washers. The difference might be that a motion sensor is aiding in data collection, and the computer is generating a real time graph of frequency as the students hypothesize and test ways to change it.

Return to ePortfolio