On April 20, CASTLE will be hold­ing the sec­ond Iowa 1:1 Insti­tute at the Polk County Con­ven­tion Com­plex in Des Moines.  Last year there were approx­i­mately 550 par­tic­i­pants, and this year we expect 1200 par­tic­i­pants.  The pur­poses for the day are:

• help Iowa’s 1:1 dis­tricts learn from each other about inno­v­a­tive teach­ing, learn­ing, and admin­is­tra­tive prac­tices that are occur­ring in their districts;
• build excite­ment and ‘buzz’ around 1:1 lap­top com­put­ing ini­tia­tives in the state; and
• help oth­ers who are inter­ested in 1:1 com­put­ing learn more about how to get started and be successful.

Although the day was planned to help meet the needs of Iowa’s one-to-one edu­ca­tors, any­one inter­ested in one-to-one or tech­nol­ogy inte­gra­tion are wel­come to attend.  Of the 130 ses­sions through­out the day, there should be some­thing of inter­est for everyone.

If you’d like to join our day of learn­ing, feel free to:

• Reg­is­ter to attend
• Reg­is­ter to present (Details on the page)
• Be a vendor

Check out our home­page for the event or con­tact me if you  any ques­tions (nck0208@gmail.com).  I’d also be happy to help with any travel ques­tions if you’re com­ing in from out of state.

Nick Sauers

Reminder:

We are cur­rently work­ing on inter­view­ing super­in­ten­dents that were iden­ti­fied as “tech savvy” by eSchool News.  Those inter­views can be heard by select­ing the inter­view from the  blog talk radio fea­ture on the side of the blog and sim­ply click­ing play.  By tomor­row after­noon there should be four inter­views that have been com­pleted, and we’re hope­ful to have many more in the future.  As you may imag­ine, it has been a bit of a chal­lenge locat­ing and con­tact­ing these indi­vid­u­als.  If you work with or know an eSchool tech savvy super­in­ten­dent, please have them con­tact me (nck0208@gmail.com)!

I’m also hop­ing to “host” a one-to-one blog talk inter­view in the near future with one-to-one “experts”.  Email me or leave a com­ment if you have any sug­ges­tions for topics.

Nick Sauers

This past year I have been gath­er­ing and review­ing the research that exists on one-to-one pro­grams in order to write a com­pre­hen­sive one-to-one research brief.  Last night as I was read­ing a 2004 report, I thought that much of the con­tent in the report would be help­ful for cur­rent and future one-to-one schools.  The Lap­tops for Learn­ing Report was writ­ten in 2004 by a task force for Florida as they con­sid­ered imple­ment­ing more one-to-one tech­nol­ogy for stu­dents.  The task force was charged with pro­duc­ing a final report that addressed the fol­low­ing issues:

1. Study­ing national and state lap­top ini­tia­tives to iden­tify best prac­tices as mea­sured by stu­dent achieve­ment or other mea­sures of success;
2. con­duct­ing a cost/benefit analy­sis of mobile tech­nol­ogy as defined by any­time, any­where authen­tic learn­ing; and
3. exam­in­ing the equity of edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties to ensure that stu­dents will have 21st cen­tury learn­ing skills.

The entire report is worth tak­ing the time to read, but it is also bro­ken up into var­i­ous sec­tions at this link.  The rec­om­men­da­tions sec­tion is a must read!  The task force cre­ated these rec­om­men­da­tions for Florida after a com­pre­hen­sive review of exist­ing lap­top ini­tia­tives, rel­e­vant research and lit­er­a­ture, and the per­sonal expe­ri­ence and pro­fes­sional exper­tise of indi­vid­ual members.

The Task Force rec­om­mends that any lap­top ini­tia­tive con­form to the fol­low­ing nine guid­ing principles:

1. All stu­dents must have access to appro­pri­ate tools and to chal­leng­ing cur­ricu­lum in order to bridge the dig­i­tal divide by mov­ing beyond basics and towards 21st cen­tury skills.
2. 21st cen­tury cur­ricu­lum must be infused with skills nec­es­sary for liv­ing and work­ing in an ever-changing soci­ety. Rel­e­vant, real world edu­ca­tion should include:
   1. infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills
   2. think­ing and problem-solving skills
   3. inter­per­sonal and self-directional skills
3. Teach­ers must cre­ate instruc­tional envi­ron­ments in which stu­dents use higher order cog­ni­tive skills to con­struct mean­ing or knowl­edge, engage in dis­ci­plined inquiry, and work on prod­ucts that have value beyond school.
4. Suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sional development:
   1. must be held on a con­tin­u­ous basis
   2. pro­vides men­tors, coaches, or peer team­mates to model appro­pri­ate inte­gra­tion strate­gies in actual classrooms
   3. gives teach­ers feed­back on their own performance
   4. holds teach­ers account­able for imple­ment­ing instruc­tional strate­gies and stu­dent learning
5. Pre­ser­vice teach­ers must:
   1. expe­ri­ence good mod­els of tech­nol­ogy inte­gra­tion in all their pre­ser­vice classes
   2. have access to a lap­top com­puter to sup­port their course­work and field experiences
   3. have field expe­ri­ences that include an oppor­tu­nity to teach in a 1:1 environment
6. Stu­dents and teach­ers must have access to rich mul­ti­me­dia resources to:
   1. extend their world and life experiences
   2. engage their senses
   3. incor­po­rate into their own mul­ti­me­dia projects
   4. pro­vide build­ing blocks of instruction
7. Lap­top hard­ware and soft­ware must be suf­fi­cient to allow stu­dents to be cre­ators of con­tent, not merely pas­sive receivers of con­tent. The lap­top must be avail­able to use as a cog­ni­tive tool wher­ever and when­ever the stu­dent is working.
8. Tech sup­port pro­ce­dures and plan­ning must be ade­quate to pre­vent dis­rup­tions in lap­top avail­abil­ity. Sup­port should be han­dled at the low­est level practical.
   1. The end-user (teacher or stu­dent) should be taught to exer­cise problem-solving skills in han­dling rou­tine maintenance.
   2. A school-based sup­port staff should be able to han­dle the major­ity of tech­ni­cal issues on a timely basis and pro­vide a loaner lap­top while the repair is being made.
   3. Dis­trict sup­port or other out­sourc­ing should be avail­able to han­dle major repairs.
9. In addi­tion to the test­ing of basic skills, stu­dents should be given the oppor­tu­nity to demon­strate 21st cen­tury skills through the use of technology-infused, authen­tic assess­ments. Assess­ment should become more inte­grated with instruction.

Although this report is nearly seven years old, it still con­tains some very rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion.  Schools that try to recre­ate this type of infor­ma­tion will cer­tainly have a tough time con­sid­er­ing the task force had more time and resources than are typ­i­cally avail­able to school’s task force.

Nick Sauers

I am cur­rently work­ing on some research about super­in­ten­dents that have been iden­ti­fied by eSchool News as “Tech Savvy Super­in­ten­dents.”  With that research we hope to be able to iden­tify some com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics that those lead­ers pos­sess.  That research, along with the fol­low­ing tweet,  have me won­der­ing what are the traits of those teach­ers who truly embrace technology.

I think a lot of time teach­ers use tech­nol­ogy to mask their inabil­ity to really teach.

My response was that I totally dis­agree with this state­ment, and believe the oppo­site may actu­ally be true.  Here are a cou­ple beliefs I have about those tech savvy teachers.

• They must embrace change!  Most teach­ers who use tech­nol­ogy are com­fort­able with change.  If they are using tech­nol­ogy, it is pretty dif­fi­cult to do the same thing they have done for the past 10 or 20 years.
• They must be life­long learn­ers and model that. Indi­vid­u­als using tech­nol­ogy are almost forced to be life­long learn­ers because tech­nol­ogy is con­stantly chang­ing.  Age isn’t as impor­tant as many peo­ple think. Young teach­ers aren’t nat­u­rally good at using tech­nol­ogy in the class­room sim­ply because they use Face­book or a smart phone.  Some of the most tech savvy teach­ers who I worked with were vet­eran teach­ers who were con­tin­u­ally look­ing for ways to improve their teaching.

These traits don’t really have any­thing to do with tech­nol­ogy.  How­ever, those teach­ers who really embrace tech­nol­ogy seem to by neces­sity pos­sess these traits.  If I talk to a teacher who is using twit­ter, face­book, wiki’s, blogs, Skype, etc. in their class­room, I would make the assump­tion that they cer­tainly pos­sess these traits.  When I was respon­si­ble for hir­ing teach­ers, I was impressed any time I believed the can­di­date demon­strated a will­ing­ness to con­tin­u­ally change, improve, and con­tinue learning!

After a sec­ond twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion I had last night, I want to make my point here extremely clear.  I’m not claim­ing that tech­nol­ogy mag­i­cally changes a teacher.  My point is sim­ply that a teacher who uses tech­nol­ogy is almost forced to change and con­tinue learn­ing.  Very few teacher prep pro­grams are doing a good job prepar­ing teach­ers to use tech­nol­ogy in the class­room.  Most schools are also fail­ing to fill that void.  By default, those teach­ers who use tech­nol­ogy must first decide they want to change, and then they must have the ini­tia­tive to do much of the learn­ing on their own.

I’d like to know what some of you think.  Do your tech savvy teach­ers demon­strate some of these traits?  Are there other traits that they pos­sess?  Do they use tech­nol­ogy to mask their inabil­ity to really teach?

Nick Sauers

I have pre­vi­ously posted about the Project Red research that was con­ducted with the help of the One-to-One Insti­tute.  Although parts of their research were released ear­lier, the full report is now avail­able.  One major find­ing was iden­ti­fy­ing nine fac­tors that most strongly link tech­nol­ogy to edu­ca­tional success.

1. Tech­nol­ogy is inte­grated into all inter­ven­tion classes;
2. Prin­ci­pals and school lead­ers set aside time for pro­fes­sional learn­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion for teach­ers;
3. Stu­dents use tech­nol­ogy to col­lab­o­rate;
4. Tech­nol­ogy is inte­grated into core cur­ric­ula at least once a week or more;
5. Online for­ma­tive assess­ments are admin­is­tered at least weekly;
6. The lower the student-to-computer ratio, the bet­ter;
7. Vir­tual field trips are used monthly;
8. Stu­dents use search engines every day; and
9. Prin­ci­pals receive train­ing on how to encour­age teacher buy-in, best prac­tices for tech­nol­ogy imple­men­ta­tion, and learn­ing trans­for­ma­tions as a result of technology.

Inter­est­ingly, only one per­cent of the sur­veyed schools imple­mented all nine fac­tors. That find­ing along with 6 other major find­ings can be found on their full report, or you can get a free pre­view.   (FYI-The full report is very expensive!)

Nick Sauers

A recent report from PBS and the research firm Grun­wald Asso­ciates of 1,401 preK-12 teach­ers from around the coun­try sheds some light on teacher per­cep­tions about tech­nol­ogy in schools.  The report, “Deepening Com­mit­ment: Teach­ers Increas­ingly Rely on Media and Tech­nol­ogy”, is a fairly easy read with some inter­est­ing statistics.

The Jour­nal also does a nice job sum­ma­riz­ing the major find­ings from the research, which includes the two pri­mary con­clu­sions below.

• Teach­ers are, owing to both inter­est and cir­cum­stance, increas­ing their use and knowl­edge of tech­nol­ogy in the class­room; and
• U.S. schools pro­vide an insuf­fi­cient capac­ity of com­put­ing devices and tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture to sup­port teach­ers’ Internet-based instruc­tion needs.

The first point is a bit of a “no-brainer”.  Teach­ers are using tech­nol­ogy more, and their knowl­edge of tech­nol­ogy is increas­ing.  Most of us see that on a daily basis.  Point two really aligns with some com­ments that I made on my blog last week. Many of our schools are doing a very poor job of pro­vid­ing teach­ers with the tech­nol­ogy resources that they need in their class­room.  With­out the resources, teach­ers are a bit hand­cuffed with what they can do in their classrooms.

The fol­low­ing points were also high­lighted in the Jour­nal arti­cle.  I have included some of my reflec­tions under each of the points.  These data from this sur­vey may also pro­vide you an oppor­tu­nity to reflect on your prac­tices.  Unfor­tu­nately, I don’t think the bar is set extremely high when it comes to tech­nol­ogy use in our schools.

The num­ber of teach­ers that report using dig­i­tal media in their class­room on a daily basis strikes me as very low (24%).  That num­ber may very well be a reflec­tion on the resources that are avail­able to teachers.

A very high per­cent­age of these teach­ers do believe that dig­i­tal resources impact their stu­dents by help­ing dif­fer­en­ti­ate learn­ing and moti­vate stu­dents!  It cer­tainly isn’t all about the tech­nol­ogy, but tech­nol­ogy can cer­tainly help change things!

This sta­tis­tic both­ers me.  As I’ve writ­ten before, I don’t believe that inter­ac­tive white­boards are a game changer.  It also seems that most of the peo­ple who I talk with on a reg­u­lar basis agree with me.  With that in mind, I ques­tion why so many pro­fes­sion­als see the inter­ac­tive white­board as such a desired piece of tech­nol­ogy.  Is it that the com­pa­nies do that great of job with mar­ket­ing, or do edu­ca­tors want them because the class­room next door has them?  I would much rather put mul­ti­ple devices in the hands of stu­dents as opposed to putting one device in the hands of a teacher.

Oh, how far we have come!  This video is a great exam­ple of how much more con­nected to tech­nol­ogy we have become in the past 15 years.

Last week I responsed to another post cen­tered on whether one-to-one was the right kind of reform. I often think about the long term future of edu­ca­tion and that post, along with the video from above, really have me won­der­ing where schools will be in 10 or 15 years.

Obvi­ously, there is no easy answer to that ques­tion. Not only do we not know what schools will look like, we also are unsure of what jobs we are prepar­ing our stu­dents for (This is noth­ing new). Although we can­not eas­ily answer those two ques­tions, we have a pretty good idea what skills our stu­dents will need.

Cur­rently, one-to-one has the poten­tial to help stu­dents learn many of those skills, but what is the future of one-to-one? Again, I don’t know that we can eas­ily answer this. As tech­nol­ogy evolves, it is pos­si­ble that all stu­dents will carry a device in their pocket that is as pow­er­ful as any com­puter. One-to-one may fall out of our vocab­u­lary because it becomes as com­mon as today’s textbook.

Unfor­tu­nately, some schools are hes­i­tant to move to one-to-one because they fear they may pur­chase some­thing that will soon be out­dated. Instead they do noth­ing and wait for the per­fect piece of equip­ment. Although the device will have an impact on what stu­dents can do, it is really a minor part of the shift to one-to-one. A much larger shift hap­pens when every stu­dent is empow­ered by hav­ing an amaz­ing resource at their fin­ger­tips. Another major shift occurs when schools insist on chang­ing the tra­di­tional model of teach­ing and learn­ing as they move to one-to-one.

I cer­tainly get impa­tient when we wait and wait to make change, even when we know change is nec­es­sary. I get frus­trated when stu­dents miss out because we sit around tak­ing our time mak­ing deci­sions. Some­times a less than per­fect solu­tion is much bet­ter than no solu­tion at all.  Of course, we need to be thought­ful in our deci­sions, but that also means we need to be thought­ful about the con­se­quences of inac­tion.  Schools sit­ting around mak­ing min­i­mal changes while wait­ing for that per­fect reform take oppor­tu­ni­ties away from many of their students.

If there is no strug­gle, there is no progress.
Fred­er­ick Douglass

Ear­lier this week, I read a blog post from Jer­rid Kruse that began with the fol­low­ing intro­duc­tion and title:

Are 1:1 tech ini­tia­tives the wrong kind of reform?

Short Answer: I believe any reform focused on tech­nol­ogy rather than teach­ing & learn­ing will end in the sta­tus quo, but I believe 1:1 ini­tia­tives may be uniquely problematic.

Fol­low­ing is the com­ment that I left on Jerrid’s blog:

Jer­rid,

I began read­ing your post with a bit of appre­hen­sion.  Just as there are those who hail one-to-one as a great fix for our edu­ca­tional sys­tem, there are also those who con­sider it a hor­ri­ble plan.  Some  sim­ply seem to fail to see any good with one-to-one.  This response gets a bit long, but I can sum it up in one sentence.

“Even if teach­ing doesn’t change in our one-to-one schools, our stu­dents and schools are still bet­ter off!”

Your post cen­tered on how we need to focus on teach­ing as opposed to tech­nol­ogy.  I don’t dis­agree with that, nor do I think any­one else would.  When I talk about one-to-one, I focus on how schools need to really con­cen­trate on major changes in teach­ing and even the struc­ture of the sys­tem.  My belief is that access to tech­nol­ogy enables teach­ers to change in ways that are oth­er­wise very dif­fi­cult.  Tony Wagner’s list of the seven sur­vival skills in 21st Cen­tury Skills high­light some of the ways I believe that tech­nol­ogy can enhance teach­ing and learning.

1. Crit­i­cal Think­ing and Prob­lem Solving
2. Col­lab­o­ra­tion across Net­works and Lead­ing by Influence
3. Agility and Adaptability
4. Ini­tia­tive and Entrepreneurialism
5. Effec­tive Oral and Writ­ten Communication
6. Access­ing and Ana­lyz­ing Information
7. Curios­ity and Imagination

When I look at each of these skills, I think how using tech­nol­ogy could enhance teach­ing and learn­ing in each area.  If I wanted to take the time, it would be easy to think of exam­ples in each area.  One exam­ple focus­ing on “curios­ity and imag­i­na­tion” comes from my expe­ri­ence as a sixth grade teacher when stu­dents were devel­op­ing projects about Ancient Egypt.  In prepa­ra­tion, I hit the local libraries and brought three milk crates of books into the class­room.  I was also for­tu­nate to have a com­puter lab next to my room which I hoarded.  My rubric required stu­dents to use resources from var­i­ous medi­ums, but I’m sure you can guess what most stu­dents pre­ferred.  The inter­net didn’t have a limit to the infor­ma­tion avail­able, and my books did.  Stu­dents were able to ask and answer ques­tions on their own.  Unfor­tu­nately, stu­dents quite fre­quently are even much more lim­ited than that, and they must use their out­dated text­book as a resource.  This exam­ple in some ways may actu­ally seem like a bad exam­ple because you could argue that the book is sim­ply being replaced by the device.  I would argue that true inquiry based learn­ing shouldn’t be lim­ited to the type, time, and place of resources.  One-to-one changes that.

Thus far I think we have one point we can agree on and a sec­ond point that may be up for more debate.

1. Teach­ing and learn­ing needs to be the focus!
2. Pro­vid­ing teach­ers with tech­nol­ogy along with train­ing bet­ter enables them to change their practices.

Now I start the part where I really dis­agree with you, and this is some­thing I don’t write about very fre­quently for fear of sound­ing like a true techie.  You say that we need to stop talk­ing about the technology.

You and I both real­ize there are schools that have rushed into one-to-one with lit­tle focus on chang­ing teach­ing prac­tices.  I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, but.……

I would argue that those schools and stu­dents are still bet­ter off than they were.  For a cost of two to four hun­dred dol­lars each year, I cer­tainly think it is worth the invest­ment.  If our job as edu­ca­tors is to pre­pare cit­i­zens, can we really do that with­out  teach­ing them about tech­nol­ogy?  Do we really believe that suc­cess­ful cit­i­zens won’t need to nav­i­gate tech­nol­ogy in both their per­sonal and pro­fes­sional lives.  I’m sorry, but I don’t con­sider one or two lab peri­ods each week suf­fi­cient.  We shouldn’t won­der why our stu­dents go away to col­lege and make extremely poor deci­sions with their com­put­ing devices.  Did we really think that one dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship unit that they were taught in eighth grade would do the job?

I also have a HUGE prob­lem with the fact that some of our most dis­ad­van­taged stu­dents have lim­ited access to tech­nol­ogy.  Our priv­i­leged stu­dents can go home and learn what they want to learn and more dis­ad­van­taged stu­dents are left out.  They can learn about some pretty awe­some things that may help shape their futures.   I get upset just writ­ing about this.  You say we should “stop talk­ing about technology”.  That may be fine for kids who have tech­nol­ogy, but what about the oth­ers?  What about the issue of equity in schools?  I just talked with a teacher from here in Iowa who has one com­puter in their class for stu­dents and no com­puter lab.  The lab, which con­sisted of com­put­ers with floppy dri­ves, was recently removed.  Can we really “stop talk­ing about technology”?

I know that you aren’t against tech­nol­ogy Jarred, but I strongly dis­agree that we shouldn’t talk about tech­nol­ogy.  Tech­nol­ogy means oppor­tu­nity for many of our stu­dents.  Tech­nol­ogy plus a change in teach­ing is of course our goal.  I could care less about the device, and think that is a school deci­sion.  I agree with you about cloud com­put­ing, and that is what I teach if I am teach­ing tools to schools.  We shouldn’t kid our­selves though about the level of tech­nol­ogy in our schools.  Our stu­dents deserve bet­ter.  I guess that I’m not going to stop talk­ing about the tech­nol­ogy, and I’ll also keep talk­ing about using that tech­nol­ogy to change teaching.

When we refuse to talk about the tech­nol­ogy, we remove it from the con­ver­sa­tions of edu­ca­tional lead­ers and school boards.  We are essen­tially hold­ing stu­dents hostage to the prac­tices and tra­di­tions of the adults while wait­ing for “reform”.  Unfor­tu­nately, our sys­tem has proven extremely resis­tant to change.  Admin­is­tra­tors, teach­ers, and prepa­ra­tion pro­grams have in many cases failed to be reformed.  You wrote that “True reform only hap­pens if the under­ly­ing beliefs that guide instruc­tion are changed.”  Must our stu­dents wait until that hap­pens before we give them access to a tool that will almost cer­tainly be rel­e­vant to their every­day life?

Nick Sauers

• Define the problem
• Research the problem’s con­text and pre­vi­ous efforts
• Ideate/Brainstorm with­out dis­re­gard­ing ideas
• (Rapid) Pro­to­type con­cepts and models
• Choose a par­tic­u­lar solu­tion to develop
• Imple­ment the solution
• Test/Learn by get­ting user feed­back and col­lect­ing data

As I reflected on the activ­ity, I real­ized how often schools don’t fol­low a sim­i­lar process when solv­ing prob­lems.  Many times prob­lems aren’t clearly iden­ti­fied, and we treat symp­toms as opposed to the real prob­lem.  Schools also often fail to truly brain­storm solu­tions to prob­lems.  As a prin­ci­pal, at times I wouldn’t truly brain­storm pos­si­ble solu­tions to a prob­lem.  Instead, I would quickly elim­i­nate ideas that “couldn’t work”, and accept those that aligned with com­mon beliefs.  That thought process cer­tainly doesn’t allow for cre­ative out­side the box thinking.

As schools imple­ment one-to-one or other ini­tia­tives, this process may be a very healthy way to work through their prob­lems.  It may also enable them to solve prob­lems in deeper ways.

Through­out the ses­sion, the group also talked about learn­ing from fail­ure.  The quote below is a great way to think about  failure.

“Life’s real fail­ure is when you do not real­ize how close you were to suc­cess when you gave up.”