The Translating Information Technology into Classrooms: Teacher-Students Research on Lake Erie Ecosystem project proposes to study science, technology, environmental and societal issues associated with the Lake Erie ecosystem using Information Technology (IT) applications. The focus of this project will be multi-disciplinary, to include science teachers and their students as well as teachers and students from other related disciplines such as mathematics and technology.
Forty five teachers and 225 students, each receiving at least 120 contact hours, will study the issues surrounding Lake Erie. The project aims to educate and train secondary school teachers to utilize IT in their classrooms, by engaging them in specially designed summer institutes and through study of the Lake Erie ecosystem with their students. The project attempts to meet the educational needs for developing teacher awareness of the potentialities and possibilities of IT for teaching and learning, developing teacher competency in IT, developing student literacy (knowledge, skill, application) in IT and associated career paths, identifying best practices and transferable methods of IT and creating a community of learners among participating teachers and their students.
These goals are achieved by having secondary school teachers collaboratively work with their students in research projects that deal with issues within the context of Lake Erie, helping teachers to link Information Technolgy with the Michigan Curriculum Frameworks and Science Benchmarks and teach with IT in the content areas in which they would normally teach, and having students conduct real research and ecological-based life and physical science activities that would contribute to the body of data available on the health of the Lake Erie ecosystem.
