I have worked the past cou­ple of weeks on get­ting pre­pared to dis­trib­ute a sur­vey to teach­ers through­out the state of Iowa. Part of that work included vis­it­ing school web­sites and col­lect­ing teacher emails. With the help of a friend, I ended up col­lect­ing approx­i­mately 4,000 emails from 140 dif­fer­ent schools.  As you can imag­ine, the look and feel of those school web­sites var­ied greatly. My expe­ri­ence vis­it­ing those web­sites brought for­ward the fol­low­ing issues.

When I vis­ited web­sites, I often won­dered what the pur­pose of the web­site was.  I would guess that the pur­pose each school had for its web­site would explain some of the dif­fer­ences between web­sites. Most of the web­sites seemed to fit into one of two categories.

Sta­tic repos­i­tory of information-These web­sites were obvi­ously updated or changed very infre­quently. They con­tained forms and var­i­ous resources about the school. This would by far be the larger category.

Fluid infor­ma­tion source-These web­sites were updated fre­quently, and they con­tained cur­rent news about the school. Some included videos, pic­tures, and even twit­ter feeds.

This post isn’t intended as a crit­i­cism of schools, but rather as a con­ver­sa­tion starter. As a school, you need to decided where to spend your time and resources. Keep­ing an up to date web­site cer­tainly takes time. With that in mind, I’m going to end with a list of poten­tial rea­sons to invest in updat­ing your web­site and a list of the com­mon prob­lems I found on websites.

Why invest time to keep an up to date website?

• Your web­site is the first place out­siders see when they look for infor­ma­tion about your school. This includes poten­tial employ­ees, new fam­i­lies, and com­mu­nity partners.
• Your web­site can serve as a great way to share all of the pos­i­tive things hap­pen­ing in your school with com­mu­nity members.
• The school can con­trol the infor­ma­tion on their web­site, and it can be a great way to address chal­leng­ing issues.
• Mem­bers of the school com­mu­nity do want to be able to visit your web­site as a one stop infor­ma­tion warehouse.

This is my first blog of the New Year, and first post for some time. I’d like to say that my depar­ture from blog­ging has been due to a trip to warm Phoenix to see my Hawkeyes play in the Insight Bowl, but unfor­tu­nately that isn’t the case. I’ve instead been work­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion, which will attempt to ana­lyze the impact of one-to-one schools across the state of Iowa. Some of my ini­tial find­ings have been very inter­est­ing, but I share them with a dis­claimer. These are very pre­lim­i­nary find­ings, and I may be over­sim­pli­fy­ing them a bit. I am still work­ing to clean-up the data, but I thought these very crude results may be of inter­est to some of you. If you’d like to find out more, feel free to send me an email so we can chat (nck0208@gmail.com).

The ini­tial part of my study attempted to ana­lyze the char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools. The goal was to iden­tify char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools that were very dif­fer­ent (sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant) from non-one-to-one schools. Because I didn’t want the char­ac­ter­is­tics to be impacted as a result of a school going one-to-one, I used data from a year that schools were not one-to-one (2007). Here are some of those char­ac­ter­is­tics that were very dif­fer­ent between one-to-one and non-one-to-one schools.

It is impor­tant to stress a cou­ple of points with these data.

1. I didn’t report items above sim­ply if one group had a higher median. They were only reported if there was a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. I actu­ally com­pared schools on nearly 100 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics, most of which didn’t show dif­fer­ences between the two groups.
2. These results are NOT  results of 1:1! These data were col­lected prior to one to-one imple­men­ta­tion in an effort to describe the “type” of schools that were the first in Iowa to tran­si­tion to one-to-one (41 schools).
3. I have over­sim­pli­fied these results a bit, and they aren’t yet finalized!

• School and dis­trict enrollment-One-to-one schools were smaller.
• Pupils per computer-Even prior to going one-to-one, one-to-one schools had more computers.
• 11th grade pro­fi­ciency scores-One-to-one schools outscored non-one-to-one schools.
• Stu­dent to teacher ratio-They were higher at one-to-one schools.
• Teacher salaries-Salaries were lower at one-to-one schools.
• Rev­enue from local sources-One-to-one schools received a greater per­cent­age of their rev­enue from local sources. (This may be a bit con­fus­ing to those of you not famil­iar with Iowa’s fund­ing formula.)
• Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers with a col­lege degree-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties was lower.
• Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers in the labor force-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties is less than their counterparts.
• Median fam­ily income-Family income was lower in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties. (Hous­ing val­ues were also less.)
• Age of principal-One-to-one prin­ci­pals were younger.
• Super­in­ten­dent expe­ri­ence in the district-One-to-one super­in­ten­dents had less dis­trict expe­ri­ence, BUT no sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in over­all experience.
• Diversity-One-to-one schools were less racially diverse.

Even with those dis­claimers above, I have found these results EXTREMELY inter­est­ing. There are some I cer­tainly would have expected, and oth­ers that were more surprising.

Edu­ca­tion Week recently reported on a study that looked at the preva­lence of sex­ting among youth ages 10–17. That report cited two dis­tinct stud­ies that indi­cated a sur­pris­ingly small per­cent­age of stu­dents were involved in sex­ting as they defined it. My point in high­light­ing their arti­cle isn’t to weigh-in on the issue of sex­ting.  Rather, my objec­tive is to stress how impor­tant it should be for schools to use REAL num­bers and data when address­ing some very tough issues. If you spend much time watch­ing tra­di­tional news venues, you quickly observe the neg­a­tive por­trayal of tech­nol­ogy use on chil­dren. I don’t want to belit­tle seri­ous issues such as cyber-bullying, sex­ting, and online preda­tors, but I think it is impor­tant to gen­uinely address those issues using facts. Many par­ents and schools have made anti-technology deci­sions because of those fears. Unfor­tu­nately, their stu­dents suf­fer because they miss out on many of the affor­dances pro­vided through tech­nol­ogy. That approach could be com­pared to an over­pro­tec­tive par­ent who never lets their child leave their side. Schools need to instead address these very real and seri­ous issues with num­bers and reports which do exist and are avail­able. Stu­dents should be taught about RESPONSIBLE use rather than sim­ply block­ing tech­nol­ogy. Real issues around tech­nol­ogy should be addressed and become part of the cul­ture rather than a thirty minute lec­ture about dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship. Schools also need to work to help their stu­dents cre­ate a POSITIVE dig­i­tal foot­print. As a school admin­is­tra­tor, one of the first things I did with can­di­dates who made the first cut was do an inter­net search of their name. It wasn’t done with the pur­pose of find­ing neg­a­tive things about can­di­dates, but rather in an effort to find infor­ma­tion about the great things can­di­dates had done. If can­di­dates aren’t “googleable” in 2011, I won­der what in the heck have they been doing!

Nick Sauers

I was recently emailed the fol­low­ing ques­tion from an edu­ca­tor con­sid­er­ing the move to one to one.

 What have you seen as an appropriate/adequate/effective amount of PD for schools that have imple­mented 1–1?  (Before the stu­dents received the com­put­ers and thereafter.)

Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is cer­tainly one of the key fac­tors for suc­cess or fail­ure for one-to-one schools. My thoughts on this ques­tion are pre­sented below.

There doesn’t really seem to be an easy answer to this ques­tion. The best way to address this is really through a shift in mind­set. All PD should really strive to address ways to find the best tools than can enhance what­ever the PD focus is. It is pretty easy to argue that tech­nol­ogy is one of the very most pow­er­ful tools to do this.  For example…

• If your staff is focus­ing on project based learn­ing, think of all of the ways that can be enhanced with tech­nol­ogy tools. The abil­ity to cre­ate grows expo­nen­tially with technology.
• If your staff is focus­ing on rigor and rel­e­vance, tech­nol­ogy can also serve as a tool to pro­vide a much richer expe­ri­ence for students.
• If your staff is focus­ing on stu­dent engage­ment, there are all kinds of tech­nol­ogy tools that can help engage stu­dents. (If you don’t know what they are, ask your stu­dents to help find them!)

These are just a few of the many ways that tech­nol­ogy can con­nect to pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. There are other fea­tures that are impor­tant to con­sider when design­ing PD. I would rec­om­mend dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing PD. This should be dif­fer­en­ti­ated by skill level, but there also needs to be a time for con­tent alike teach­ers to con­verse with one another. The Tech­nol­ogy, Ped­a­gogy, and Con­tent Knowl­edge (TPACK) frame­work describes the over­lap of those three areas to achieve truly high lev­els of tech­nol­ogy inte­gra­tion. With­out those con­tent alike con­ver­sa­tions, some teach­ers may have a dif­fi­cult time bring­ing new tools into their spe­cific class­rooms. Although dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is key, it is also impor­tant to develop a set of tools that are applic­a­ble to all edu­ca­tors. One way to think of this is as build­ing a com­mon foun­da­tion or knowl­edge for all teach­ers. In What School Lead­ers Need to Know About Dig­i­tal Tech­nolo­gies and Social Media, Pamela Liv­ingston and Chris Lehman posed a ques­tion with that theme in their one-to-one chapter.

 What are the essen­tial tech­no­log­i­cal tools that all teach­ers should know how to use?

A final focus I would stress for PD is to develop lead­ers within your build­ing who have the capac­ity to help lead PD and prob­lem solve with other teach­ers. Send those teach­ers to a con­fer­ence or two each year to stay ahead of the curve. Give them some time, maybe a half-day each month, to explore and play with new tech­nolo­gies. Although there is a time and place for “out­siders” to come in and help,  your dis­trict will be money ahead by devel­op­ing their own experts.

Schools fail­ure to invest in PD once they have moved to one-to-one is one of the most com­mon mis­takes I have wit­nessed at one-to-one schools. That lack of invest­ment can cer­tainly make the tran­si­tion to one-to-one a poor invest­ment as well.

Nick Sauers

As I was fly­ing back to Ken­tucky from my Thanks­giv­ing break in Iowa, as well as a side trip to an ugly Hawk­eye foot­ball game, I had the oppor­tu­nity to read parts of Scott McLeod and Chris Lehmann’s new edited book. The book, enti­tled What School Lead­ers Need to Know About Dig­i­tal Tech­nolo­gies and Social Media includes a chap­ter about one-to-one com­put­ing writ­ten by Pamela Liv­ingston and Chris Lehmann, who are both cer­tainly lead­ers in the one-to-one com­mu­nity. The chap­ter is packed full of infor­ma­tion for cur­rent one-to-one edu­ca­tors as well as those con­sid­er­ing the tran­si­tion. One sec­tion in par­tic­u­lar struck me as extremely impor­tant for teach­ers and school lead­ers to pon­der. That sec­tion focused on how teach­ers will need to inves­ti­gate how their teach­ing will change. The fol­low­ing ques­tions are pre­sented in the text.

How should teach­ing and learn­ing change to reflect the new shared vision of school?

What assump­tions and behav­iors will teach­ers release in terms of their instruc­tional roles in order to achieve a more student-centered model?

What are the new struc­tures of teach­ing that should be imple­mented to achieve the vision?

How will teach­ers col­lab­o­rate to enable inno­va­tion to spread from class to class?

What are the essen­tial tech­no­log­i­cal tools that all teach­ers should know how to use?

What are the cur­ric­u­lar tools (unit plan­ning devices, rubrics for grad­ing, and so on) that can help teach­ers reach their goals?

How will teach­ers assess the new arti­facts of learn­ing that stu­dents can create?

How can teach­ers use the 1:1 lap­top expe­ri­ence as a way to cre­ate a shared lan­guage of teach­ing and learn­ing across the entire school?

These ques­tions are great con­ver­sa­tion starters for any­one involved with one-to-one. Along with this set of ques­tions, there are other ques­tions focus­ing on var­i­ous aspects of 1:1 programs.

Nick Sauers