Photo by Benton Smith
Cross Posted on Creative Tension
We have been planning for our 1:1 rollout for the past year and a half and the event finally took place last week. Graded is fully 1:1 in the middle and high schools. During this time it has become clear to all of us that all of our talk about 1:1 was just a head fake. Randy Pausch described the “head fake” in , “Last Lecture: Achieving your Childhood Dreams”. Dr. Pausch talks about the indirect learning that happens when you’re involved in an activity. One example that he offers is from parents wanting their children to play football.
“We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. … we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, et cetera, et cetera.”
For all of our talk about becoming a 1:1 school, we didn’t just want teachers and students walking around campus with machines. We learned quickly that what we wanted was so much more. This is where the commonly heard expression “it’s not about the technology” fits. Sure, we planned for electricity, software, bandwidth, polices and procedures, but the real learning came with those bigger questions that we are still tackling.
Finding the answers to these questions is where the real learning occurs and this is why our journey will continue.
- What skills and knowledge do our students need to learn for now? Future?
- Is the culture of learning different today?
- “How do I help teachers bring authentic assessment and real world problem solving to the classrooms?”
- With the technology in hand, what new resources will help with learning?
- “How can we balance the teaching-learning process both on-line and face to face mode in a 1:1 program?”
- “The relationship between new learning and old learning — is it a paradigm shift or a continuum?”
- “How do we manage student learning as we encourage more outside/digital interaction/play?”
- “What is the best way to change structures at Graded to support learning outside of traditional classes…and should we?”
We know that we have just begun the journey and that it’s going to be an exciting one for our entire community. If was really just about moving to a 1:1 environment we’d be done and we could check that task off our list.
