Yes­ter­day was Teacher Appre­ci­a­tion Day and if you’re an admin­is­tra­tor, hope­fully you have already taken the time to thank your teach­ers for all of the hard work that they do for stu­dents.  I’d also hope that you don’t save those thank-yous for Teacher’s Appre­ci­a­tion Day only.  In the past three years, I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to meet out­stand­ing teach­ers from around the coun­try.  Prior to that, I was for­tu­nate to learn with many for­ward think­ing col­leagues.   A good ques­tion to con­sider is how to sup­port our best teach­ers with more than a thank-you or cheap trin­ket once a year.  The ideas that I’ve listed below are bor­rowed from schools and edu­ca­tors across the coun­try.  Feel free to leave a com­ment with addi­tional ideas.  I’ve split my list into two cat­e­gories.  The first group of sug­ges­tions is for admin­is­tra­tors, and the sec­ond cat­e­gory is for those of you who are teach­ers look­ing for bet­ter sup­port systems.

Admin­is­tra­tors:

• Pro­vide your best teach­ers with RESOURCES because they can serve as mod­els for other teach­ers.  Resources include not only things, but also time!
• Find ways to help those teach­ers con­tinue to grow.  Send them to con­fer­ences and let them visit other schools.
• Be cre­ative and reward them for their hard work.

Teach­ers:

• Try to develop net­works that will help you con­tinue to grow.  Your net­work may include other teach­ers in the school, but should also include other exem­plary edu­ca­tors from around the globe.  Use social media to con­nect with others.
• If your admin­is­tra­tion isn’t pro­vid­ing you with resources, think cre­atively.  Apply for grants, or go to your PTO if pos­si­ble.  Try to make part­ner­ships with local busi­nesses that are friends of edu­ca­tion. Even a non-supportive admin­is­tra­tion is unlikely to turn down free money or tools.
• Toot your own horn!  Gen­er­ally, most edu­ca­tors are not good at this.  How­ever, if you want your com­mu­nity to sup­port your work, you should show them all of the great things you are doing.

I hope that yes­ter­day was a great day for all of you. More impor­tantly, I hope that each of you have the sup­port sys­tems that allow you to be suc­cess­ful in your school each and every day.

Nick Sauers

I spent the day on Tues­day at the kick­off of Emi­nence, Kentucky’s Frame­work of Inno­va­tion for Rein­vent­ing Edu­ca­tion (F.I.R.E.) ini­tia­tive.  School com­mu­ni­ties often unite behind ath­letic or other extra-curricular activ­i­ties, but are less enthu­si­as­tic about sup­port­ing learn­ing ini­tia­tives. It was awe­some to see the excite­ment gen­er­ated for Emi­nences School on F.I.R.E. ini­tia­tive.  Not only were stu­dents, board mem­bers, and school staff mem­bers at the kick­off event, but also many other indi­vid­u­als who had been involved with the launch of their pro­gram.  Many things from the day were inspir­ing, but the mes­sage from Terry Hol­i­day, who is the Ken­tucky Com­mis­sioner of Edu­ca­tion, was very pow­er­ful.  Com­mis­sioner Hol­i­day may have bor­rowed a line from a pop­u­lar speech with his “Yes we can” theme, and it was enthu­si­as­ti­cally received by the crowd. He noted how many schools said that that they were unable to go 1:1 dur­ing such a dif­fi­cult bud­get time, but Emi­nence said, “yes we can”.  He noted how many schools banned cell phones and social media, but Emi­nence embraced it.  For me, his mes­sage was rel­e­vant to a vast range of top­ics or issues.  In schools, and in life, we often let rules or obsta­cles get in our way of chang­ing our behav­iors or reach­ing a goal.  In schools those obsta­cles may be 45-minute peri­ods, stan­dard­ized test­ing, the bud­get, facil­i­ties, or a host of other things.  Those chal­lenges, how­ever real they are, often become excuses to not make major changes.  I say excuses because in most cases there are exam­ples of schools that have over­come those obsta­cles to improve their learn­ing envi­ron­ment for stu­dents.  One exam­ple of this would be the bud­get chal­lenges that most schools are fac­ing.  I’ve worked with numer­ous schools in Iowa who have gone 1:1, and many oth­ers who have said that they just can’t afford to do it.  Those schools that have gone 1:1 in Iowa don’t have any unique resources that other schools do not have.  In fact, most of them have declin­ing enroll­ments, which is an essen­tial part of bud­gets that are cre­ated on a per pupil basis.  They were able to go 1:1 because they thought it was impor­tant for their stu­dents and they were com­mit­ted to mak­ing it hap­pen.  On Tues­day, there were many exam­ples of how Emi­nence was over­com­ing numer­ous obsta­cles to improve stu­dent learn­ing.  Some exam­ples include:

• They have embraced a “sur­prise and delight” approach to school, and even have included that as some­thing they look for in their walk-throughs. For more infor­ma­tion about sur­prise and delight, con­tact John Nash or visit his dLab web­site.
• Build­ing on the last point, they have thought of cre­ative ways to have pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. A 9-year old led one train­ing!  On another day, they had their train­ing at a local shop­ping mall.  Another was held at a Starbucks.
• They worked closely with an archi­tect to cre­ate a great envi­ron­ment for stu­dents. In the ele­men­tary, the hall­ways were designed to look like a road and the out­side of each class­room looked like a busi­ness or other com­mu­nity build­ing.  I can imag­ine that the ele­men­tary stu­dents were pretty excited about their school! (This was done at min­i­mal costs.)
• They are imple­ment­ing a 1:1 pro­gram in the high school called ACES.
• One of their school buses has been equipped with Wi-Fi!
• Their class sched­ule includes an amaz­ing list of elec­tives that should be extremely rel­e­vant to stu­dents.  I’m excited to learn more about their syl­labi for each course and will likely post about them in the future.  One of those courses involves stu­dents help­ing to solve prob­lems their com­mu­nity is fac­ing.  Another course, the one that I’m most excited about, will have stu­dents try­ing to cre­ate a large dig­i­tal foot­print around a char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion.  They will use social media to spread their mes­sage around the world.
• Stu­dents will col­lab­o­rate with stu­dents from a promi­nent high school in the UK.

These are just some exam­ples of the excit­ing things that they have done.  They also high­light how schools CAN rein­vent them­selves if they truly want to do so!  I hope to fol­low their school closely and write about some of the chal­lenges and suc­cesses that they encounter on their jour­ney.  It is extremely excit­ing to be involved with a school that is very aggres­sively think­ing of cre­ative ways to improve their schools. Emi­nence closed their cel­e­bra­tion with a rap from stu­dent Bran­don Mitchell, and part of his wrap is below.  If you’d like to see the entire set of lyrics, you can find them here.

You know I love those ACES
I ain’t talkin bout the card
But with all these Apple prod­ucts
Got me feel­ing like Steve Jobs

With all these advances
a new era is now enter­ing
Schools are mak­ing progress
time to move into this century

B. E. Ready, B. E. Ready
B. E. Ready… For fire
B. E. Ready, B. E. Ready
B. E. Ready… For fire

Accom­plish the impos­si­ble
Were liv­ing by this code
No bet­ter way to start it
Then with Mac­Book Pros

Assign­ing them to stu­dents
Each and every indi­vid­ual
We take the school and flip it
You can call it the reciprocal

Nick Sauers

I spent April 19 and 20 in Yoko­hama, Japan at the #beyond­lap­tops con­fer­ence. Inter­na­tional 1:1 edu­ca­tors from across Asia par­tic­i­pated in the con­fer­ence.  The con­fer­ence was very unique because it didn’t take the tra­di­tional con­fer­ence or work­shop for­mat with keynote speak­ers. Instead, par­tic­i­pants spent the two days con­vers­ing with one another and dri­ving the con­ver­sa­tion in what­ever direc­tion was most ben­e­fi­cial for the atten­dees.  There was an agenda, but it was made clear that the sched­ule was flex­i­ble and that proved to be true.
 At the con­fer­ence kick­off, Yoko­hama Inter­na­tional Schools  Head­mas­ter James Mac­Don­ald explained the think­ing behind the con­fer­ence. He stressed how the knowl­edge in a room full of edu­ca­tors is much greater than any one indi­vid­ual could bring to the room.  I think that such a phi­los­o­phy could help edu­ca­tors work through many chal­leng­ing issues. How­ever, it seems that pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment in this for­mat is rather unusual. We instead often cre­ate rigid sched­ules and stick to them at all costs. I have cer­tainly done so both as a teacher and prin­ci­pal. Those plan­ning pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment may care­fully want to con­sider some ways to take this more unstruc­tured approach to pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment.  It was well worth it for me, and the other par­tic­i­pants who spoke with me about the conference.

I hope to post resources from the con­fer­ence on this blog in the near future.  I’d also like to rec­og­nize Kim Cofino and the entire YIS staff for all of their work mak­ing the con­fer­ence happen!

Nick Sauers

I recently read an arti­cle in Edu­ca­tional Researcher that ana­lyzed the use of Wikis in schools. The find­ings were very inter­est­ing and they may serve as a cat­a­lyst for every­one to ana­lyze their use of Web 2.0 tools. In their exten­sive analy­sis researchers in the study iden­ti­fied four types of ways that wikis were being used. Those rea­sons are listed below along with the per­cent­age rate each are being used for.

• Trial wikis and teacher research-sharing sites (40%)
• Teacher content-delivery sites (34%)
• Indi­vid­ual stu­dent assign­ment and port­fo­lios (25%)
• Col­lab­o­ra­tive stu­dent pre­sen­ta­tions and work­spaces (1%)

These find­ings indi­cate that this Web 2.0 tool is often times not being used to its fullest poten­tial. It is often sim­ply being used as a place to store resources. This post isn’t intended as a crit­i­cism of those basic uses. In fact, that is how I often use wikis. Hope­fully this arti­cle and post will push all of us to care­fully con­sider how we are using technology. I REALLY like Berna­jean Porter’s tech­nol­ogy and learn­ing spec­trum.  In that spec­trum, she writes about the three ways most peo­ple use tech­nol­ogy in their class­rooms.  She describes lit­er­acy uses as sim­ply teach­ing about tech­nol­ogy. Her next cat­e­gory is adapt­ing uses such as edu­ca­tors using tech­nol­ogy in their classes just to use it. The final cat­e­gory is the trans­form­ing uses and she describes that as using tech­nol­ogy to meet learn­ing con­tent standards.

I think that it can be very easy to learn about a new tech­nol­ogy tool and then be dri­ven to use it sim­ply to use it. I would chal­lenge each of you to truly ana­lyze how you are using the tech­nolo­gies that you are using.  My goal wouldn’t be that all of the tech­nol­ogy you use would fall into Porter’s trans­form­ing uses cat­e­gory. Much of my own use of tech­nol­ogy is sim­ply about effi­ciency. More impor­tantly, I think we all need to become extremely cog­nizant of all of the things that we are doing in the class­room.  I’d like to push you to clearly iden­tify the rea­sons you are using tech­nol­ogy X in your school or classroom.

• Why are you using X in your classroom?
• Does it improve stu­dent learning?
• Are stu­dents more engaged?
• Are stu­dents col­lab­o­rat­ing more frequently?
• Does it increase effi­ciency and allow you to spend more time on more impor­tant things?

Nick Sauers

In a lit­tle over a week, we will be host­ing the third annual Iowa 1:1 Insti­tute. This year’s event will be held at the newly ren­o­vated Com­mu­nity Choice Credit Union at Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial Audi­to­rium.  As in pre­vi­ous years, we have once again had such great enthu­si­asm that we had to close reg­is­tra­tion within a month of offi­cially announc­ing the conference. The 1100 plus par­tic­i­pants and over 40 ven­dors should make this year’s con­fer­ence a great event! The con­fer­ence includes edu­ca­tors from over 150 dif­fer­ent schools and 6 uni­ver­si­ties. Since our first year we have strived  to make the con­fer­ence dri­ven by our par­tic­i­pants. For­tu­nately, our 1:1 schools and tech­nol­ogy savvy teach­ers have will­ingly par­tic­i­pated and pre­sented. This year we had a record num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tion sub­mis­sions which allowed us to be very selec­tive about the con­fer­ence ses­sions. A team of Iowa edu­ca­tors selected the 80 ses­sions, and those ses­sions can be viewed at this link. We are also work­ing out details to live stream over 16 ses­sions through­out the day. We have part­nered with Edu­Vi­sion who will stream and record the video. I will post links to the live stream­ing videos once they are avail­able. If you aren’t join­ing us phys­i­cally, we hope you will join the con­ver­sa­tion on twit­ter (#i11i) or view the stream­ing videos!

Nick Sauers

Photo credit ecastro on flickr

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecastro/6786705424/in/pool-858082@N25/)

I recently had a con­ver­sa­tion with a col­league about what I see as some of the most com­mon pit­falls as schools move to 1:1. In my work with CASTLE, I have had the oppor­tu­nity to work with a large num­ber of schools as they have tran­si­tioned to 1:1. For some schools, that work has sim­ply been a con­fer­ence call with a lead­er­ship team. In other sit­u­a­tions, I’ve been much more involved. Through that work, I rou­tinely see two issues as the major prob­lems with 1:1 imple­men­ta­tion. Those two issues are a lack of clear goals, and a lack of a sense of urgency. How­ever, those don’t seem to be issues most edu­ca­tors want to dis­cuss. I rou­tinely have edu­ca­tors tell me that “every­one is on board” with mov­ing to 1:1. They instead want to dis­cuss issues such as:

• Train­ing teach­ers how to use tech­nol­ogy to trans­form teach­ing and learning
• Build­ing a solid infrastructure
• Financ­ing the ini­tia­tive long-term
• Select­ing the cor­rect device
• Devel­op­ing appro­pri­ate accept­able use plans

I would be the first to admit, that all of these issues are EXTREMELY impor­tant. How­ever, with clear goals and a sense of urgency, it is tough to get a team to put in all of the hard work to address each one of those issues. Like me, most edu­ca­tors are very prac­ti­cal. They don’t want to spend their time dis­cussing things like vision and goals. They are action ori­en­tated and want to solve those impor­tant prob­lems I men­tioned pre­vi­ously. How­ever, it becomes clear to me quickly when I visit those schools that have failed to put seri­ous time and con­ver­sa­tion into truly get­ting every­one on board. When prob­lems such as band­width arise, the whis­pers of dis­sen­sion are very evi­dent with the staff. Rather than work­ing together for solu­tions, those staffs seem to look for rea­sons for 1:1 to fail. Rea­sons such as the block­ing of cer­tain sites, a poor infra­struc­ture, or prob­lems with a piece of soft­ware are rea­sons for edu­ca­tors to jump off the 1:1 train!

My expe­ri­ences, good and bad, have shaped these beliefs. I have been happy to work with those schools where the lead­er­ship team has said staff only needs train­ing on how to effec­tively use tech­nol­ogy in the class­room. That type of train­ing is fairly easy for me, and I eagerly com­ply. In hind­sight though, I often regret tak­ing that approach.

If you’re cur­rently a 1:1 school, I don’t believe it is too late to revisit your goals and vision. I also don’t think it is too late to light a fire and cre­ate a sense of urgency! If you aren’t yet a 1:1 school, don’t over­look these issues! Time spent doing so will pay huge div­i­dends when you face the tough prob­lems you are sure to encounter as you imple­ment 1:1.

Nick Sauers

A cou­ple of weeks ago CNN aired a story that focused on how cheat­ing had become com­mon among der­ma­tol­ogy and radi­ol­ogy stu­dents tak­ing their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exams. In the story they noted that next year the board will be rolling out a new exam for the first time in more than 10 years. I’m not going to pre­tend to be an expert on cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to be an MD, and quite frankly I don’t care about the process as much as I should. This story does how­ever does gen­er­ate some ques­tions that could have impli­ca­tions for those of us in K-12 education.

• Why would you not change your exam in 10 years? Even if, big IF, infor­ma­tion doesn’t change in that time, shouldn’t your knowl­edge about your assess­ment tool change?
• Why is the infor­ma­tion on the test some­thing that can be eas­ily shared with oth­ers? Shouldn’t it be infor­ma­tion that can only be under­stood from eight years of med school?
• How impor­tant is it that stu­dents can mem­o­rize facts? Is that more impor­tant than demon­strat­ing competence?
• Why is it a secret what is on the test? Shouldn’t stu­dents know from the begin­ning of their courses the impor­tant things that are con­sid­ered essen­tial to their learning?
• Should one exam at the end of an eight year degree be the most impor­tant assess­ment for candidates?

Nick Sauers

I’m extremely excited to offi­cially announce that the 3rd Annual Iowa 1:1 Insti­tute will be held on April 11 at the Events Cen­ter in Des Moines. The con­fer­ence was launched two years ago, and it was made pos­si­ble through the help of the one-to-one schools in Iowa. Iowa’s one-to-one schools con­tributed to the con­fer­ence by pro­vid­ing pre­sen­ters who had suc­cess­fully imple­mented one-to-one. Those pre­sen­ters along with the excite­ment around one-to-one have helped the con­fer­ence grow from approx­i­mately 600 atten­dees in year one to 1300 last year. Although the con­fer­ence con­sists of pre­dom­i­nantly Iowa edu­ca­tors, we have had atten­dees from all of the sur­round­ing states and even the east coast.

With CASTLE’s move to the Uni­ver­sity of Ken­tucky, we did make some changes to the con­fer­ence. How­ever, our pur­poses have remained the same.

• Help Iowa’s 1:1 dis­tricts learn from each other about inno­v­a­tive teach­ing, learn­ing, and admin­is­tra­tive prac­tices that are occur­ring in their districts;
• Build excite­ment and ‘buzz’ around 1:1 lap­top com­put­ing ini­tia­tives in the state; and
• Help oth­ers who are inter­ested in 1:1 com­put­ing learn more about how to get started and be successful.

On Tues­day of last week Iowa one-to-one schools were invited to sign up for the con­fer­ence. That prelaunch has already led to nearly 300 reg­is­trants. If you are inter­ested in learn­ing more or par­tic­i­pat­ing, click on one of the links below:

• Gen­eral details
• Reg­is­ter
• Present
• Be a vendor

We hope you will be part of what has become the biggest, and we hope best, one-to-one con­fer­ence in the world!

Nick Sauers

I spent the day on Fri­day work­ing with a school in Ken­tucky that is actively seek­ing ways to enrich the learn­ing expe­ri­ences for their stu­dents. The super­in­ten­dent kicked-off the meet­ing with other school lead­ers with a clear direc­tive for the meet­ing. He wanted the group to think and talk about “what if” state­ments. The group dis­cussed some pos­si­ble “what if” state­ments, but more impor­tantly they planned to do the same with their staffs.

As I sat in on the meet­ing, a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent thoughts came to mind. The first was that every school has staff mem­bers with ideas about how to change their school. My sec­ond thought was that schools all too often fail to “dream” about the pos­si­bil­i­ties for the school. All too often schools get in the habit of talk­ing about ideas in “yeah, but” terms instead of “what if” terms.

• Yeah, but the par­ents at our school won’t sup­port that.
• Yeah, but our stu­dents won’t do that.
• Yeah, but our bud­get doesn’t allow for that.