Urbana in the last eight years has seen its vision become close to reality. In the 1990-91 school year, Urbana formed a Technology Committee that met on a monthly basis over the year. The committee of representative teachers, administrators, librarians, and community members from NCSA, the College of Education, local business people and parents developed an action plan and presented it in the spring of 1991. The six steps called for "district leadership in educational technology, the integration of technology into our instructional program, inservice to support the technology integration, adequate funding for the technology equipment, and a plan for dealing with the issue of equity regarding technological tools across the district."
In 1994 the district hired a technology director and the committee began work on a Technology Plan that incorporated topics that literature at that time deemed necessary. In 1995, Dr. Robert Neilson, Assistant Superintendent; Theresa Michelson; and Pam VanWalleghen, co-chairs of the District Technology Committee,wrote a new five year plan that was approved. In October of 1997, most of the five year plan had been achieved. The District Technology Committee broke into four groups to begin addressing the ISBE Blueprint for Technology. Goals were set in the four areas of Community Involvement, Engaged Learning, Professional Development, and Technology Deployment in alignment with the vision after assessing the current reality. Jim Peterson, Technology Coordinator for our district led the Committee's efforts and completed the final plan. This plan was approved by the Board of Education on June 9, 1998.
The Mission stated and has essentially remained:
"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. These skills will enable students to work ethically and collaboratively with diverse populations across school, state, national and international boundaries. 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."
Although our progress was slow and we still do not have the resources we need, I feel the district has made tremendous strides to meet a very well thought-out, planned, goal.
During the same time period from 1990, neither Urbana Middle School's technology plans nor its technology appeared to progress as smoothly as the district's plans. In the early stages the staff was about equally divided among those that saw no use for the computer, those that wanted it for word processing, and those that desperately wanted it to be classroom accessible for its access to the outside world. The district, however, was very supportive in supplying all kinds of computer classes for the staff and more staff became receptive to computers. The school hired a wonderful technology coordinator Pam VanWalleghen, but the administration changed and she was booked into computer classes all day long leaving the lab inaccessible to the teachers and their classes. Most of the teachers continued to have no computers in their classes. Eventually, the building was wired and every classroom got two drops. Gradually, a few Computers on Wheels (COWS) made their way into the classrooms. In the 97-98 school year, Pam was freed from the computer lab to work in the classroom with teachers and to write grants. In 1997 a technology equity audit revealed that Urbana Middle School fell far behind other district schools in the number of computers per student. The Middle School received fifty computers through the district and the High School Alumni Association. Pam helped teachers and students to win another Web server and software and hardware to do advanced multimedia projects. The lab next year will not be offering formal classes, but will be open for the entire nine periods for classroom teachers to use with their students.
Although the actual practices at the Middle School have changed somewhat through the years, the 1997 Urbana Middle vision states that :
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.Accepting this responsibility, Urbana Middle School will:
I feel that our school has done a good job in fulfilling its responsibilities and that this year we will see even more students exploring technologies in their curricular area.
I feel that I can realistically improve the use of technology in my classroom, because of the training I have had in the last year and because of changes in the way our school will be using the computer lab. Last year I used the in-service school improvement time to review with other teachers the technology that we acquired that year which included a large number of National Geographic laser discs, some CD ROMs, a flex camera and some Vernier probes. In addition to that training which is content specific for science, I will have had intensive practice in the technology covered by these two CTER classes. Another area that has changed is that the computer lab will now be available all nine periods of the day for classroom teachers. This will allow students to work as a class on assignments and to gather information from the Internet. I am also hopeful that the computer that resides in my room will be more accessible. Although it is a fairly new Power Macintosh 5200/75 LC, in the last two years it has spent more than half of its life outside of my room having every conceivable part replaced. The last hard drive replacement appears to have cured its problem and I would love to be able to count on using it in the room since it is the only classroom computer that we have.I am looking forward to trying the Water Quality Project that we are developing in this class. I think that our group has done a good job of embedding the technology within the curriculum and we have the project planned for the very beginning of the school year. This also means that I will be spending more time early in the year helping students learn how to write their electronic reports, do spreadsheets and graphs, use the flex cam and the digital camera, and the GPS unit. By the end of the year the students and I will have solved most of those unusual problems that always arise in working with something new.
I am looking forward to having our technology coordinator in the lab to help train students in the new technology and her help in developing training exercises. Our access to the Web will also be improved with the new T1 line that is being installed this summer and we are also hoping for more printers.
Dream ClassroomMy dream classroom would be double or triple the size of my current classroom. My current classroom has all the lab tables fixed to the floor in long narrow rows. There is no room to walk much less have computer stations. Oops, I digress, this a dream not a nightmare.
My dream classroom would have a large area for G3 's with enough to have a computer for every four students. The computers and other technology would be easy to operate, accessible for all, and practically indestructible since this is a science room with water and normal eighth graders. (Unless in dreams, it is possible to use virtual students instead of the real.) The computer area would be well supplied with printers, scanners, multimedia hard and software, a TV, VCR, and a laser player. My classroom would even have a telephone and an air conditioner. It would have a virtual reality cave with the appropriate programmers and support to model scientific concepts. The science equipment would be the latest and the most accurate.
Students would wear electronic ID cards that interacted with the doorway to my classroom notifying a central computer that the student was in my classroom. Taking roll would be a thing of the past and so would interruptions from the office asking if a certain student is there, or to please write him a pass to the counselor or the principal. When a student was needed somewhere else, the ID would vibrate and the pass information would appear in a screen. The office would have all this information revealing how many minutes Johnny was in class and where he was all day long. The beeper function would only work for school business. The Big Brother program would gain even more meanings.
In terms of science, the state, the district, the nation would have agreed on the standards that all students needed to know at a certain grade level. There would be many kinds of materials and labs available to help all students reach those goals. Lab assistants would check out materials to students. Students would plan with the teacher their choices to meet those goals and keep track of their progress with computer programs. Assessment would be in a variety of forms including presentations and evaluations to a variety of audiences. Students who demonstrated that they had met the goals would be free to pursue other interests in science. The teacher would act as a facilitator in developing learning plans and in helping students meet the goals. Most learning would occur in small groups rather than whole class instruction.
On any one day, students would be working on different projects doing different things. Some students might be working in a group to show proficiency in measurement. Others might be posting the results of their water investigations on a home page or discussing their results with students anywhere in the world. Students would be engaged in problem-based learning and able to use technology to effectively research their finding and communicate those findings to a much greater audience.
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