Technology and Computer Usage in Middle School Classrooms: How VCL Approaches Can Address Educational Needs in K-12 Education
Eric Wiebe, Bethany Hudnutt · 2007
This presentation will focus on work carried out over this past year by researchers at the Friday Institute in conjunction with middle schools in Wake County, Roanoke Rapids, Granville County, and Northampton County school systems. The Friday Institute funded outreach initiative, 21 st Century Teaching and Learning, has partnered with five North Carolina rural school systems and our partner middle school in Wake County to investigate how communication and information technologies can best be used in middle school science and math classrooms to address issues of 21 st century workforce readiness. Embedded in this project is an IBM faculty development grant to the author Wiebe, specifically looking at how VCL and related technologies can be used to help further 21 st century teaching and learning goals in K-12 education. A subset of these schools were used to investigate in more depth how computer software and related science and math instructional technologies were being used in the classroom. This information was integrated with how the VCL system is currently implemented at North Carolina State University to support research and undergraduate instruction. Together, this information led to recommendations as to how to best support a productive and efficient user experience for students and teachers in the K-12 classroom. Usability testing of early interface prototypes is ongoing and will continue as part of a larger scale prototype development initiative next year.