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