The community of Hobart is located in the suburban area of northwest Indiana.
The local population is one that contains a wide diversification of races
and nationalities and an economy that has been in decline over the past
several years.
Despite local economic hardships, our community has been very supportive
of efforts to provide an education that will prepare our young people for
a modern society. This support includes a commitment to developing, funding,
implementing, and evaluating an effective educational technology program.
This commitment is shared by the School Board, administration, teachers,
students, parents, and community.
We believe that educational technology provides us the opportunity to prepare
young people with the skills to seek out, analyze, and synthesize information
to help ensure success in an information age. We further believe that technology
allows our staff to become facilitators of learning in a student centered
environment.
Our world is a place where knowledge is constantly changing. As we look
into the classroom of tomorrow, we see new means of instructional delivery
systems. We can envision students with unlimited access to on-line database
services, others sharing experimental work with students in foreign students
in real-time, another group of students viewing a video disk and analyzing
the visual data to form theories of problems and possible solutions. We
also see students having a holographic teleconference with a group of scientists,
while other students are actively experiencing history through virtual reality.
Most importantly, every student will have his own laptop computer to use
whether it be at school or home.
Teacher-centered, textbook-oriented education was a great invention in its
era, but it served us when the world's body of knowledge seemed relatively
fixed and the pace was measured with predictable cadence. The world recedes
further and faster into an almost quaint past. Our education system cannot
fail us now!
Technology is transforming our schools. In large part, how we incorporate
technology into the education of our children will ultimately determine
how competitive we remain in the global, technologically driven economy.
Currently our student computers utilize a wide-assortment of DOS, Windows
95 and Macintosh applications from grades K-12 helping to ensure that our
students will obtain the skills necessary to succeed in the 21st Century.
Thus, our students have numerous opportunities to experience major platforms
during the course of their education.
We also make effective use of technology by managing student records as
well as providing a variety of library resources for our students and staff.
In preparation of this plan many resources were utilized including site
visitations, workshops, conferences, surveys, interviews, and many meetings.
This five year planning status report has been prepared through the efforts
and unselfish devotion of countless hours by the Technology Committee composed
of teachers, administrators, board of education members as well as representatives
from the community. A summary profile of the committee members can be found
in the appendix.
What follows is the culmination of those efforts.