I am fortunate to work in a school that has adequate resources to purchase technology and make it available to the staff and students. My classroom is fully equipped with computers, an ELMO document camera, a projector, and a Smartboard. I have my own laptop, access to a full computer labs during the school day, numerous laptop carts and, more recently, full IPAD carts for use in the classroom. In addition, our school has been chosen as a one to one tablet school and we are in the process of purchasing tablets for every student in our school to take home. Wow, with all this technology available you would think my classroom would be the most high tech classroom in the world! In reality my science classroom looks a lot like it did 10 years ago, so what is going on here? As I look at all of the computer technology that is available to me, all the programs, the apps, the games, and the simulations I always go back to the basic idea of what am I trying to accomplish in my middle school science classroom. One, I am trying to get kids excited about science. Middle school kids want to be out of their seat and talking with their friends, they want to be engaged with others around them and they want to be involved in conversations, not stuck staring at a computer screen. Two, I want my kids to have the skills they need to perform basic lab activities. They need to be using (and yes, breaking) lab equipment in order to learn how to measure volume and mass, how to calculate density and how to test for pH.  And three, I want my students to experience nature in real time. They need to be growing living duckweed in the lab and adding real chemicals to observe the effects, and they need to be outside in the stream to see the movement of the water and identify the organisms living there. As I look at the challenges of leveraging traditional technology in the middle school science classroom, I guess it always comes back to the basic question of does the technology enhance my student’s appreciation and love for science, and for me answer is usually probably not. I share the following photo, not as a jab at technology but as a thought provoking item. Technology is but one tool in our tool box, use it wisely!