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