Urbana District #116's first formal plan was written in 1991 by a committe of teachers, parents
and community representatives. In 1995 Dr. Robert Nielsen, Assistant Superintendent for
Curriculum and Instruction, along with Theresa Michelson and Pam Van Walleghen, co-chairs of the District
Technology Committee, wrote a new five year plan for our district which was reviewed and edited by
the committe and approved by the Board of Education. This plan was evaluated and updated
each subsequent year. In October of 1997, with the great majority of
objectives of our plan in place, the District Technology Committee broke into four groups to
begin addressing the ISBE Blueprint for Technology. On June 9, 1998 this plan was approved by the
Board of Education. Although much has changed in the "nuts and bolts" of the plan over the years, the
technology vision of our district has remained relatively unchanged.
"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."
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 lead the Committee's efforts and completed the final plan.
The one outstanding feature of the plan in my opinion, is the goal of providing ubiquitous access to technology
for students, staff and community.
Urbana Middle School Technology Plan
The Urbana Middle School Technology Plan, drafted in the Spring of 1997 by a committee
including the building technology coordinator and a group of teachers and parents, is a work in progress
since so much has happened to change the face of technology access and integration in our school over
the past year. Our vision, however, remains unchanged.
UMS Vision Statement
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:
- Provide up-to-date technologies in sufficient quantities for all students and staff
- Provide quality facilities and flexible access to technology for all students and staff
- Provide students the opportunity to explore and experience existing and emerging technologies in all curricular areas
- Provide staff with the incentives, training, time, and resources to effectively use and integrate
technology into the curriculum
- Provide teachnology coordination through a full-time position(s) with responsibilities for research,
staff development, evaluation and recommendation of technology, trouble-shooting, grant writing, and public
awareness.
As the technology coordinator for UMS, my classroom is the entire building. Our vision came closer to reality
this spring when the district bought 30 PowerMacintosh 5500 computers to upgrade our old LC lab. The Urbana
High School Alumni Committee then "matched" the buy with 20 PowerMacintosh 5500 computers for classrooms and
the old lab machines were also moved to classrooms. We also eliminated regularly scheduled classes from the
computer lab so it is available all nine periods of our school day for teacher sign-up. We have an exciting
year ahead of us. Two of us at UMS received a Museum in the Classroom Grant for ISBE which gave us the software
and hardware necessary to do some advanced multimedia projects. A team of sixth grade students who won fourth
place in ThinkQuest Junior won, in addition to cash prizes, a Cisco Web Server for our building. A team of
teachers in collaboration with the Department of Education at the University of Illinois just received a
national Apple Grant. Technology access at UMS is finally giving us the necessary tools to pursue our vision.
Improving My Classroom Technology
As Technology Coordinator/Integrationist for Urbana Middle School, part of my job is to work with other
teachers as they integrate technology into their existing curriculum and to manage the computer lab. For
the first time next year, the computer lab will be available all nine periods of the day for teachers to
sign up to bring their classes to the lab. In May of last year, the district upgraded the computer lab,
replacing old LC Macintosh computers with PowerMac 5500/225 machines. This means that we will have a full
classroom of computers that can run up-to-date Web browsers, that all have CD ROM drives so teachers with
classroom sets of CD's such as the foreign language teachers will be able to use the lab. (Last year we had
only ten machines that could run browsers above Netscape 2.0. and only two computers with CD ROM drives.)
Next year I plan to work with individual teams
to plan appropriate technology enhancements and to help teachers work with students when they participate in
activities in the lab.
Our school also obtained 20 new PowerMacs for classrooms, and of course the old computers also went to
classrooms. This means that for the first time, the majority of classrooms in our building will have a computer that
at minimum can be used for word processing and e-mail. I plan to do a considerable amount of "short" staff
development sessions early in the year during teacher planning and/or team planning time as well as before
and after school to ensure that all staff can take advantage of e-mail and at least know the basics of word
processing and printing on our LAN.
For teachers who are advanced in their technology skills and in technology integration, I plan to provide
training in the more advanced features of ClarisWorks 5.0 (a recent upgrade), and multimedia tools available
in our building.
I plan to train teachers as they bring students into the lab to solve common problems relating to the
use of the LAN, especially printing, memory problems and file saving, as well as use and access of particular
curriculum related software.
One of the access issues we faced in the past was the amount of time necessary to download WWW sites with
the ISDN line for our LAN. This problem should be resolved with our upgrade to a T1 line for Urbana High School
and Urbana Middle School this summer.
My Dream Classroom
This is a proposal for technology which I think is realistic for UMS over the next few years.
If I could have any technology resources for my "classroom" I would first meet the goal of a computer to
student ratio of 1 to 6. This would mean a minimum of 4 networked computers in each UMS classroom with enough
networked laser printers to support the increased number of stations. I would have at least one color laser
printer on the network.
I would have
a technician/lab supervisor to supervise the lab(s) and do troubleshooting and minor repairs, freeing me from that
responsibility. I would have a PC mini lab so we could do projects which require access to PC's such as the MapIT!
project Kevin Erlinger and I are working on with NCSA.
I would have several classroom sets of word processors such as
AlphaSmarts which could be used for word processing, typing instruction, and student checkout. I would have a second
full lab of iMacs and a server with enough hard drive space so that all students and staff could have accounts for storage
and ensure that the server was accessible outside of the building.
I would have a presentation room with a projection unit so
classes could gather and present projects and portfolios to large groups (we currently use Focus boxes and TV.)
I would have a multimedia studio in my classroom complete with a high end PowerMac G3 tower, high end vido board
and video editing equipment,scanner, high end digital and video cameras, and areas to photograph QTVR objects and to record audio
and to continue to photograph and produce our claymation and other video projects.
I would have appropriate staff to keep the computer labs open evenings and weekends for students and their parents
to use the technology resources in our building.
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