Research & Highlights
Read the 2007 edition of Re:search - a journey of intellectual inquiry
UseIt Project - Using Squeak to Infuse Information Technology
The University of North Carolina, Wilmington in partnership with New Hanover, Pender, and Brunswick County Schools has designed, developed, and delivered programs to offer expanded IT experiences to students and their teachers. The USe-IT project is a three-year comprehensive project developed in response to NSF 05-621, Information Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST), Comprehensive Projects for Students and Teachers in grades 7-12. USe-IT offers 132 hours of high quality professional development to approximately 25 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers per year. The project directly targets 50 students in a week-long summer institute each year, with special recruiting emphasis on underserved and underrepresented groups, including female and minority students. As part of the project activities, teachers and students learn to use the Squeak media authoring tool to create virtual models that simulate actual science and math-related experiments. Squeak is exploited as a modeling environment to infuse IT skills into the core STEM curriculum. For example, teachers or students may choose to create a computer model to study the transmission of a disease, an activity that could be too dangerous to study in a public school laboratory or classroom.
Each project year the resources consist of recruitment of a group of participants beginning with grades 7-8th in year one, moving on to 9th- and 10th in year two, and 11th- and 12th during the last project year. The professional development activities each project year are comprised of a 30-hour summer workshop and 72-hours throughout the academic year, which enables participants to develop problem-based learning activities and lesson plans using Squeak that reflect state and national curriculum and teaching standards. Members of the USe-IT project team are currently providing year-round STEM support to the project teachers and their students as they engage in school-based activities and lessons using Squeak. In addition a summer institute for the teachers and their students will take place the following summer, and a graduate course in Information Technology will be offered to participating teachers. This plan allows project teachers to collaborate with other teachers and curriculum experts, which enriches their professional development experiences.
To learn more about the UseIt Project, visit their website at http://useitproject.org.
Archive Issues
2006 Re:search