Cross posted on Cre­ative Tension

In Decem­ber 2009, I used this photo in my Lead­er­ship and 1:1 Bus post and last year I used it with the Graded fac­ulty to describe our jour­ney to pro­vide stu­dents with a rel­e­vant edu­ca­tion for today and the future. This jour­ney includes going 1:1 in August 2012. For me the photo con­jures up excite­ment and fear. And while some peo­ple are adven­tur­ous enough to sit on top or hang on the side, oth­ers feel more com­fort­able inside. It doesn’t mat­ter where one sits, the impor­tant thing is that we’re all together on the journey.

When is it excit­ing and often mag­i­cal?  When our stu­dents are using tech­nol­ogy for learn­ing, cre­ative and orig­i­nal think­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion, research and infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solving.

When is it a bit scary?  When we are uncer­tain of what is com­ing next or when we have to step out­side our com­fort zone to try some­thing new.

We have so much to be proud because we have trav­eled so far in such a short amount of time. This year we have done the fol­low­ing to pre­pare for a full 1:1 roll­out in August.

• Sup­port pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment at con­fer­ences by pro­vid­ing fac­ulty with the oppor­tu­nity to attend the Lap­top Insti­tute at Lau­sanne Col­le­giate and Unplugged at the Amer­i­can School of Bom­bay.
• Pro­vided all of our teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors with lap­tops so that we all get used to work­ing any­time, anywhere.
• Using dig­i­tal tools to help us with our work and our learn­ing. The idea is that we will exper­i­ment and fig­ure out what works as we do the same in our classrooms.
• Cre­ated PLCs around assess­ment in today’s dig­i­tal environment.
• Reviewed and redesigned our cur­ricu­lum in sci­ence and Eng­lish with a 21st cen­tury lens.
• Encour­aged stu­dents to bring in lap­tops to ease the tran­si­tion for August.
• Defined our Infor­ma­tion Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Tech­nol­ogy stan­dards that will be inte­grated school­wide next year.
• Pro­vided teach­ers with a full-time aca­d­e­mic tech­nol­ogy coor­di­na­tor to sup­port them with inte­grat­ing tech­nol­ogy and pro­fes­sional development.
• Devel­oped our accept­able use pol­icy and LARK guide­lines so that our com­mu­nity mem­bers can be respon­si­ble dig­i­tal citizens.
• Devel­oped a dig­i­tal toolkit that will pro­vide us with some soft­ware stan­dard­iza­tion in our bring your own lap­top environment.
• Upgraded facil­i­ties so that we have elec­tri­cal power through­out the campus.

We real­ize that the jour­ney is not over yet. In real­ity, we’ve really only trav­eled a short dis­tance. The key is that we are well on our way to trans­form­ing the learn­ing expe­ri­ences for our students.