In the next cou­ple of weeks, most schools and stu­dent learn­ing will have con­cluded for the year.  When I say con­cluded, I mean it in the strictest sense of the word.  Many stu­dents will do vir­tu­ally noth­ing edu­ca­tional for the next 2–3 months.  Unfor­tu­nately, the stu­dents who will do the least are often the ones who are already the fur­thest behind.  The term “sum­mer slump” or “sum­mer slide” is used to describe the learn­ing that stu­dents lose when they are not actively involved in edu­ca­tional activ­i­ties.  Researchers claim that stu­dents lose between 1–3 months of learn­ing over the sum­mer period.  Other researchers claim that the major­ity of per­for­mance dif­fer­ences between rich and poor stu­dents are due to the sum­mer slump.

Schools have tried var­i­ous approaches to deal with the sum­mer slump.  I was involved with a sum­mer school pro­gram that lasted for approx­i­mately two weeks, and stu­dents attended a half day each day.  As I reflect on that expe­ri­ence, I ques­tions if that was the most valu­able use of time and resources.  A two week sum­mer school ses­sion hardly con­sti­tutes con­tin­ued learn­ing.  My argu­ment isn’t that that type of sum­mer school doesn’t work,  but I ques­tion if it is the best “bang for the buck” for schools.  I’m also not entirely sure what that ideal model would look like, but I do believe that tech­nol­ogy opens up lots of pos­si­bil­i­ties for schools.

Here are a cou­ple of ideas that may be effec­tive for schools that can pro­vide their stu­dents with lap­tops through­out the sum­mer.  Because most schools focus on the areas of read­ing, writ­ing, and math in sum­mer school, my sug­ges­tions focus on those three areas.

Assign stu­dents high inter­est read­ing books, and have them reflect on the books using online tools.  Set-up places for stu­dents to have syn­chro­nous and asyn­chro­nous con­ver­sa­tions with one another.

Allow stu­dents to choose top­ics that they find very inter­est­ing to research.  Cre­ate ways for them to share their find­ings with oth­ers.  Encour­age and guide stu­dents through­out the process.

Math is an inter­est­ing topic.  Much of what stu­dents do in tra­di­tional sum­mer school pro­grams is drill, drill, and drill!  If that is your school’s approach, tech­nol­ogy cer­tainly pro­vides a cheaper and more effec­tive way to do that.  Online pro­grams pro­vide imme­di­ate feed­back as well as media that stu­dents find much more attrac­tive.  Edu­ca­tors can also find sites that chal­lenge stu­dents with higher level math prob­lems.  Set-up online ways for stu­dents to com­mu­ni­cate about their solu­tions to chal­leng­ing prob­lems.  Encour­age them to see how many ways they can solve the same problem.

All of those sug­ges­tions were intended to have a cou­ple of com­mon themes.

1. Stu­dents were con­stantly writing!
2. Although stu­dents weren’t work­ing together phys­i­cally, there was a great deal of col­lab­o­ra­tion between stu­dents and the teacher.
3. Top­ics and con­tent were rel­e­vant to stu­dents, and they were given choices when­ever possible.

I also am not call­ing for the end of face-to-face sum­mer ses­sions.  Many of our stu­dents need those pos­i­tive social inter­ac­tions through­out the sum­mer.  My rec­om­men­da­tion would be to sim­ply reduce the num­ber of those meet­ings and spread them through­out the sum­mer.  All of these ideas are com­mon sense things that I thought up fairly quickly.  Schools that truly want to take on the sum­mer slump should think cre­atively about how to pro­vide stu­dents with ongo­ing sup­port and learn­ing for the entire sum­mer.  Tech­nol­ogy is a tool they may dras­ti­cally alter the way that learn­ing takes place.

Nick Sauers

The National Asso­ci­a­tion of Sec­ondary School Prin­ci­pals (NASSP) recently released a report focused on the use of mobile devices and social media in schools.  My response to their report, in the words of leg­endary Hawk­eye radio announcer Jim Zabel, is “I love it, I love it, I love it”!  The posi­tion paper strongly encour­ages schools to embrace the use of both social media and mobile learn­ing devices.  There are lots of pow­er­ful state­ments in the paper, but here are some things I found very com­pelling along with some of my thoughts.

an edu­ca­tion that fails to account for the use of social media tools pre­pares stu­dents well for the past, but not for their future.

This state­ment is so true!  I get tired of hear­ing  edu­ca­tors and espe­cially pol­icy mak­ers talk about how schools need to get back to the basics.  We can’t turn back the clock on soci­ety, and edu­ca­tion needs to progress with society.

Yet as mobile and social tech­nolo­gies become ubiq­ui­tous, attempts to block them are increas­ingly inef­fec­tive. For exam­ple, in schools that pro­hibit cell phones, 54% of stu­dents still report send­ing texts dur­ing the school day (Lenhart, 2010). And it’s the rare stu­dent who can’t do an end run around Inter­net fil­ters with a sim­ple proxy server.

As a stu­dent, teacher, and prin­ci­pal, I was always dis­gusted with rules and poli­cies that were in place that weren’t or couldn’t be enforced.  Rather than ban­ning tech­nolo­gies, we need to teach respon­si­ble use!

The report also included rec­om­men­da­tions for leaders:

School lead­ers should:

• Encour­age and model the appro­pri­ate and respon­si­ble use of mobile and social tech­nolo­gies to max­i­mize stu­dents’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to cre­ate and share content..
• Lead the con­ver­sa­tion around con­nec­tiv­ity and involve stu­dents in the cre­ation of policies.
• Incor­po­rate the respon­si­ble use of mobile and social tech­nolo­gies into acceptable-use policies.
• Pro­mote one-to-one access to con­nectible devices, includ­ing stu­dents’ own devices, to allow for anytime-anywhere learning.
• Incor­po­rate cyber­bul­ly­ing and sex­ting pre­ven­tion guide­lines into the stu­dent code of conduct.
• Par­tic­i­pate in and pro­vide teach­ers pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment on the effec­tive use of mobile devices and net­work­ing in schools.

Dis­trict lead­ers should:

• Artic­u­late clear tech­nol­ogy poli­cies that have suf­fi­cient lat­i­tude for schools to con­nect elec­tron­i­cally with­out fear of ret­ri­bu­tion or undue consequences.
• Pro­vide tech­ni­cal and finan­cial sup­port to schools that aspire to con­nect stu­dents and adopt one-to-one programs.
• Reduce Inter­net fil­ter­ing to max­i­mize stu­dent access to online learn­ing tools and to pro­vide oppor­tu­ni­ties to exer­cise judg­ment in the selec­tion of those tools.

Pol­i­cy­mak­ers should:

• Pro­vide a fund­ing stream to ensure broad­band infra­struc­ture and mobile learn­ing devices for all students.
• Enact rea­son­able, enforce­able poli­cies on cyber­bul­ly­ing, sex­ting, and other forms of elec­tronic harass­ment that clar­ify the legal lia­bil­ity of school officials.
• Engage school lead­ers in the con­ver­sa­tions that inform poli­cies that are designed to cur­tail and pun­ish online harassment.

If you are a teacher, I strongly encour­age you to get this report in front of your admin­is­tra­tors!  Admin­is­tra­tors can use this report as a guide for improve­ment, but also as a tool to share with appre­hen­sive board mem­bers or even parents.

I cer­tainly tip my hat to NASSP for actively join­ing in on this conversation!

Nick

This morn­ing I will be tak­ing another step towards com­plet­ing my PhD.  I will be pre­sent­ing plans for my cap­stone project to fac­ulty mem­bers on my dis­ser­ta­tion com­mit­tee.  The cap­stone is a ser­vice project which I will com­plete with a school dis­trict.  Along with that project, I’ll also be spend­ing a great deal of time this sum­mer work­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion.  I hope to gen­er­ate a prod­uct that is of inter­est to cur­rent and future 1:1 schools!

Here is my attempt at being brief and concise.….

My dis­ser­ta­tion will focus on dif­fer­ences in class­room teach­ing prac­tices between vet­eran 1:1 schools and non-1:1 schools.  The chal­lenge with this project is find­ing schools to com­pare to one another.  If I ran­domly choose schools to com­pare to my 1:1 schools, the prob­lem is that those schools may be a lot dif­fer­ent than my 1:1 schools in mul­ti­ple ways other than 1:1.  In order to elim­i­nate some of that vari­a­tion, I’ll use some­thing called propen­sity score match­ing to help ensure I am com­par­ing “apples to apples”.  This tool will help me account for demo­graphic and other eas­ily reported dif­fer­ences.  It can also account for other dif­fer­ences in schools if I can iden­tify them through a survey.

My chal­lenge with this tool, and call for your help, is to iden­tify char­ac­ter­is­tics that may be unique to 1:1 school lead­ers.  Put sim­ply, I want to know if you believe there are traits that are unique to lead­ers who decide to move their school to 1:1.  i.e. Are they big­ger risk tak­ers?  Do they have dif­fer­ent edu­ca­tional backgrounds?

Please leave com­ments or email me responses that focus on the fol­low­ing ques­tions which were sum­ma­rized above.

Are their traits that are unique to many 1:1 lead­ers who make the deci­sion to move to 1:1?  What are those traits?

I apol­o­gize to those of you who would like to have more details about the project.  I did sim­plify things in an attempt to get greater par­tic­i­pa­tion.  Feel free to con­tact me (nck0208@gmail.com), if you’d like to dis­cuss this project further.

Nick Sauers

This week I attended a “lunch and learn” at North High School in Des Moines, Iowa.  Next year North will be the largest one-to-one school in the state of Iowa.  The lunch and learn that I attended was one of many such ses­sions hosted by the school in order to inform var­i­ous stake­hold­ers about their lap­top ini­tia­tive.  Approx­i­mately nine months ago I wrote about the kick­off cel­e­bra­tion that Spirit Lake, Iowa had.  North’s lunch and learns cer­tainly looked dif­fer­ent than what Spirit Lake did, but they both served sim­i­lar pur­poses.  They both were ways to rally sup­port for their one-to-one ini­tia­tive.  North’s lunch approach was unique in that nearly the entire ses­sion was led by stu­dents.  I’m still wait­ing to get access to one of the stu­dent videos, but it had a very pow­er­ful mes­sage about equity (I intend to post the short video if/when it becomes available.)

Gath­er­ing com­mu­nity sup­port and inform­ing com­mu­nity mem­bers cer­tainly isn’t some­thing that is or should be unique to one-to-one.  Any major ini­tia­tive deserves the same atten­tion.  Unfor­tu­nately, many schools don’t give one-to-one the “red car­pet” treat­ment that it deserves.  If lead­ers truly believe that one-to-one is going to change things dras­ti­cally, we should act like it is a BIG deal!

Nick Sauers

Project Tomor­row recently released the sec­ond part of their Speak Up 2010 report.  The 20-page report ana­lyzes data from over 350,000 sur­veys that were given in the fall of 2010.  Because of the numer­ous visu­als, a quick skim of the report will pro­vide you with a fairly clear under­stand­ing of the report.

I am some­what dis­heart­ened with some of the results from the sec­ond report.  The teacher and admin­is­tra­tor per­cep­tions, beliefs, and uses of tech­nol­ogy really con­cern me.  Maybe my view of real­ity is skewed because of the type of edu­ca­tors that I work with on a reg­u­lar basis.  It would be extremely inter­est­ing to see how results from one-to-one schools would com­pare with the national aver­age.  The table and the graph below dis­play how teach­ers are cur­rently using tech­nol­ogy, and their per­cep­tions about using mobile devices with instruction.

Project Tomor­row:  Speak Up 2010-http://bit.ly/iObuWP

Project Tomor­row:  Speak Up 2010-http://bit.ly/iObuWP

Nick Sauers

Photo credit smemon87 on Flickr: http://bit.ly/lLwNb5

Opin­ions on  how and why to use, or not use, face­book in edu­ca­tion are widely var­ied.  My thoughts about teach­ers using face­book are pretty straight for­ward.  Face­book is sim­ply another medium of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and we don’t need sep­a­rate poli­cies to deal with it.  It should also be a per­sonal deci­sion whether or not teach­ers use face­book and how they use it.  Teach­ing is about build­ing rela­tion­ships and trust with stu­dents, and face­book may be one way to strengthen those relationships.

Another big issue sur­round­ing face­book is whether or not schools should develop their own face­book page.  I find this to be an inter­est­ing debate, and I often have this con­ver­sa­tion with edu­ca­tors.  Typ­i­cally, my first com­ment to those edu­ca­tors is that they should check to see if some­one else has already cre­ated a face­book page for their school.  To the sur­prise of those edu­ca­tors, most times there is a page that has been cre­ated.  Unlike face­book use by teach­ers, which I believe should be a per­sonal deci­sion, I believe all schools should have a face­book page.

1. If you don’t set-up a page, some­one else will.  You should choose to be in charge of that infor­ma­tion rather than some­one with no real con­nec­tion to the school.
2. Face­book is where your con­stituents are!  Face­book has become much less gen­er­a­tional.  Of course your stu­dents are using it, but so are many grandparents.
3. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and more com­mu­ni­ca­tion!  This form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion may reach many peo­ple who don’t embrace other medi­ums (i.e. stu­dent away at col­lege or other alumni of the school).
4. Face­book can serve as a place for com­mu­nity feed­back.  Sure this can be neg­a­tive or pos­i­tive feed­back, but at least you are informed about what is being said.  It also allows you to address some of those con­cerns with facts!
5. Because of the design of face­book, you can com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion in mul­ti­ple ways such as pic­tures, video, and audio clips.

It doesn’t take much time to think of the ben­e­fits and con­cerns asso­ci­ated with devel­op­ing a face­book page for your school.  A blog post that I recently read got me think­ing about the impact face­book can have, and pos­si­ble ways for us to use it.  The post from The Pur­suit of Tech­nol­ogy Inte­gra­tion Hap­pi­ness is very prac­ti­cal, and cer­tainly worth tak­ing a look at.

Nick Sauers

As I was dri­ving to lunch on Thurs­day, I heard a state­ment that REALLY both­ered me.  While lis­ten­ing to Kiss 107.5,  the fol­low­ing adver­tise­ment from a local Fox news sta­tion described a story they were going to air that evening.

.…gone are the days of bul­ly­ing when kids are pushed into lock­ers or tripped on the play­ground, it has now moved to cyberbullying.

I’m not here to say that cyber­bul­ly­ing isn’t an issue.  It cer­tainly is, and it is some­thing that we need to address.  My frus­tra­tion is when the media, or other indi­vid­u­als, place blame on tech­nol­ogy for things that truly aren’t new or unique situations.

This type of think­ing is often a road­block schools face as they become one-to-one, and even causes con­cern for schools already there.  The pub­lic often times attrib­utes so many evils to tech­nol­ogy, and the media cer­tainly doesn’t help this sit­u­a­tion.  Some con­cerns may cer­tainly be valid, but many oth­ers are way off base.  The chal­lenge that schools face is to actu­ally edu­cate oth­ers about the real­i­ties and facts of tech­nol­ogy use.

Nick Sauers

As schools tran­si­tion to 1:1, there are cer­tainly many chal­leng­ing issues that they will face.  Those issues include things such as:

• How do we fil­ter appro­pri­ately with­out restrict­ing our stu­dents from numer­ous learn­ing opportunities?
• How do we get our stu­dents more engaged?
• How do we trans­form learn­ing at our school?
• How do we move from tra­di­tional text­books to a com­bi­na­tion of resources in order to use more rel­e­vant mate­ri­als?  Should we stop using tra­di­tional textbooks altogether?

Yes­ter­day I spent the day with Scott McLeod and a group of edu­ca­tors in North­west Iowa address­ing some of these issues.  Although we did dis­cuss many issues fac­ing tech­nol­ogy rich schools, the intent of the day was to help schools with the process of address­ing prob­lems and iden­ti­fy­ing poten­tial pit­falls before they occur.  In essence, the day was all about build­ing inter­nal capac­ity.  It was amaz­ing to see how many solu­tions our small group came up with even in the short amount of time we had to work together.  If schools would use the same types of processes, the results could be amaz­ing.  Experts don’t need to be strangers who come to your school from far away.  We need to embrace the fact that our schools are full of experts with an abun­dance of solu­tions to the prob­lems that we face!

The wiki from our day together has exam­ples of some of the tools used to ini­ti­ate the process.  Feel free to copy those google docs and use them.  Take a look at the tools and some of the brain­storm­ing that we par­tic­i­pated in through­out the day.

Nick Sauers

I recently came across a web­site with a col­lec­tion of arti­cles about iPads in edu­ca­tion.  The site, which is hosted by John Evans, is a great resource for those of you inter­ested in using the iPad in schools.

The focus of this post isn’t too look at all of the pros and cons with the iPad, but rather to high­light how eas­ily our con­ver­sa­tion can become about a device.  I find it extremely inter­est­ing how much press iPads in edu­ca­tion have received recently.  The press cer­tainly seems obsessed with the idea of using iPads for edu­ca­tion.  Although many more schools have gone 1:1 with lap­tops than iPads, that isn’t reflected in the media.  This phe­nom­e­non seems to have occurred because peo­ple have become so focused on this new gad­get. Rather than focus­ing on how to trans­form our schools, many peo­ple have become obsessed with this new “cool” device.

The spot­light that has been given to the iPad can serve as a warn­ing sign for schools.  It demon­strates how quickly our con­ver­sa­tion can move from being edu­ca­tion focused to tech­nol­ogy or gad­get focused.  As edu­ca­tors, we need to be cer­tain to first iden­tify edu­ca­tion goals and then decide what device and/or ini­tia­tive will best help us achieve those goals.

Nick Sauers