Making the Case for Student Control of Devices

March 7, 2012 Sam Gliksman One comment

This post orig­i­nally appeared on the iPads in Edu­ca­tion web­site.  
The post is authored by Sam Gliks­man    
Email samgliksman@gmail.com ; Twit­ter: @samgliksman

How Much Con­trol Do Schools Really Need?

One of the ben­e­fits of get­ting older is that you can reflect back on a time when things were done dif­fer­ently. Sim­i­larly, you can also clearly see when other things are essen­tially the same. Although the world around our schools is dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent, many of the pil­lars of our edu­ca­tional sys­tems remain unchanged. Given the dra­matic and accel­er­at­ing trans­for­ma­tion in the world around us, it’s cer­tainly time to reflect upon how we con­duct the busi­ness of schooling.

Many have already started down this path. We acknowl­edge the clear need to move from “sage on the stage” teach­ing to stu­dent empow­ered learn­ing. We real­ize that our old con­tent deliv­ery mod­els of edu­ca­tion need to be replaced with more expe­ri­en­tial and dis­cov­ery based processes. We under­stand the lim­i­ta­tions of a text only approach and try to inte­grate dif­fer­ent forms of media. Now it’s time to revise another sacred cow that has been symp­to­matic of insti­tu­tional edu­ca­tion since its inception.

It’s time to let go of the notion that we need to con­trol stu­dent behav­ior. It’s time to real­ize that we can­not and should not dic­tate the man­ner in which stu­dents learn. One area where the desire for con­trol is clearly man­i­fested is our use of tech­nol­ogy in school.

Now before you fire up that impas­sioned response let me clar­ify that I’m not advo­cat­ing a com­plete hands-off pol­icy that gives stu­dents the free­dom to do what­ever they desire. There’s a clear dis­tinc­tion between “pro­tec­tion” and “con­trol”. Pro­tect­ing stu­dents from acci­den­tally get­ting a com­puter virus or being routed to a pornog­ra­phy web­site is important. Deciding what apps they use; pre­vent­ing them from man­ag­ing their devices; undue cen­sor­ship of inter­net activ­ity; using soft­ware to watch their screens dur­ing class — these are con­trol issues.

It’s ironic that we insist on cen­sor­ing and con­trol­ling tech­nol­ogy use. Out­side school tech­nol­ogy is char­ac­ter­ized by free­dom and empow­er­ment — the abil­ity for any­one to eas­ily access or pub­lish infor­ma­tion, con­nect with peo­ple across the world and uti­lize media for new forms of cre­ative expres­sion and knowl­edge expan­sion. Inno­va­tion leads to new tech­nolo­gies which in turn can nur­ture fur­ther inno­va­tion. How­ever that can only occur if we allow it…

  • Tech­nol­ogy empow­ers stu­dents to explore and cre­ate. In schools how­ever it’s often used in the pur­suit of effi­ciency where we require stu­dents to use tech­nol­ogy in the same man­ner and with the intent that they pro­duce sim­i­lar results.
  • We under­stand that they have vastly dif­fer­ent tal­ents and dis­tinc­tive learn­ing pref­er­ences. At home some use tech­nol­ogy in more struc­tured, log­i­cal ways while oth­ers grav­i­tate to more visual or cre­ative pursuits. Technology empow­ers them to find their own space as learners. In school we decide what appli­ca­tions they must use and we dic­tate exactly how they will use them — step by step — even in the face of our full under­stand­ing that stu­dents are far more expert at learn­ing and using tech­nol­ogy than teachers.
  • The inter­net has enabled the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion — pub­lish, dis­cover and learn any­thing. Any­one can pub­lish. Every­thing is avail­able. In schools we attempt to strictly con­trol what they can see and do (yes, I used the word “attempt” — try Googling “ways to get around school web fil­ters” and see what you get).

Tech­nol­ogy is a prod­uct of change how­ever we often design our imple­men­ta­tions in man­ners that latch onto the com­fort­able old struc­tures we’ve always used. Teach­ers con­trol the class and it’s always been hereti­cal to sug­gest oth­er­wise. We there­fore decide what tech­nol­ogy stu­dents use and more impor­tantly, how they will use it — even though they rep­re­sent the first gen­er­a­tions in his­tory that are mas­ter­ing many of the essen­tial tools of every­day life before the adults that came before them.

If we know any­thing about the world out­side school it’s that it requires an abil­ity to adapt to change. We insist that mod­ern life requires grad­u­ates that are expe­ri­enced, inde­pen­dent learn­ers. School is the time to start devel­op­ing those skills. When we enable the use of tech­nol­ogy in school we should also grant stu­dents the inde­pen­dence and free­dom to use it their own way.

  • We can and should allow stu­dents to man­age their own devices. Help them learn the rel­e­vant tech­ni­cal and orga­ni­za­tional skills, espe­cially as this has become a vital part of life out­side school.
  • Loosen the Parental Con­trols. Allow them the free­dom and respon­si­bil­ity to man­age their school apps, set up their school email and more. Have some­one instruct them on best practices.
  • Allow them the free­dom to find and use other apps as appro­pri­ate to their activ­i­ties in class.
  • You can pur­chase some apps cen­trally but oth­er­wise ask par­ents to pur­chase the apps. There is an abun­dance of inex­pen­sive choices.
  • A “Respon­si­ble Use” pol­icy should clearly state what is allowed and dis­al­lowed. The pol­icy should be signed by child and par­ent alike.
  • Free­dom and respon­si­bil­ity come with con­se­quence. Define a clear out­come for inap­pro­pri­ate use and act upon it as required.
  • Use a web fil­ter but set restric­tions loosely and only block cat­e­gories of sites that are poten­tially harm­ful. Ensure you have mon­i­tor­ing in place so you can track web usage if needed. The only skill strict fil­ter­ing devel­ops is the abil­ity to find ways to work around it … and they do. Rather than act­ing as “big brother”, set an expec­ta­tion of per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity and take action when the stan­dards aren’t met.

Most impor­tantly, encour­age cre­ative, inde­pen­dent and inno­v­a­tive use of technology.

  • Allow stu­dents the lat­i­tude to express their knowl­edge in dif­fer­ent ways and with dif­fer­ent tools wher­ever pos­si­ble and sub­ject to your prior approval. The process of learn­ing should be more per­son­ally mean­ing­ful and motivational.
  • Let them find and bring tools that they are most com­fort­able using.
  • Give them the lat­i­tude to be teach­ers as well as learn­ers — when they invent, dis­cover or mas­ter some­thing new have them teach oth­ers and cre­ate tuto­ri­als that you post online.

Our desire for con­trol­ling the use of tech­nol­ogy is emblem­atic of a deeper prob­lem. Top-down insti­tu­tional con­trol isn’t a work­able model in an era where the mar­ket­place requires grad­u­ates to have skills for learn­ing any­thing, any­where and at any time. Fol­low­ing instruc­tion is impor­tant but there’s also an urgent need to develop per­sonal inno­va­tion — the sort of flex­i­ble, cre­ative thought and action that’s required to deal with a world of tumul­tuous change. Inno­va­tion requires that we open the metaphor­i­cal class­room win­dows and doors. Instead we still feel more com­fort­able keep­ing them closed. Is it about con­trol or are we more con­cerned with effi­ciency? Are we mak­ing deci­sions based on their needs or ours?

When­ever I dis­cuss iPad or BYOD imple­men­ta­tions in schools one of the first issues raised usu­ally revolves around prob­lems asso­ci­ated with man­age­ment and con­trol. iPads are dif­fi­cult to man­age on an insti­tu­tional level. That could be a bless­ing in dis­guise. Maybe it presents us with the right tim­ing and oppor­tu­nity to finally allow stu­dents to man­age their devices and develop their skills as inde­pen­dent and respon­si­ble learners.

Sam Gliks­man
samgliksman@gmail.com
Twit­ter: @samgliksman

Supplementing Textbooks with Student Constructed Knowledge Bases

February 28, 2012 Sam Gliksman 5 comments

Orig­i­nally posted on iPads in Edu­ca­tion Ning net­work site
Authored by Sam Gliksman, Twitter: @samgliksman

We’re just a few weeks removed from a major Apple announce­ment regard­ing the release of a new eText­books ini­tia­tive. I’m keenly aware of the sig­nif­i­cance of the move to eBooks, espe­cially as I have a 13 year old that car­ries 20 pounds in his back­pack to school every day. How­ever impor­tant the move from paper to dig­i­tal text­books, I’m still left with a taste for more.

I have been crit­i­cal of the ways most schools still rely on text as the pri­mary, almost soli­tary, medium for exchang­ing infor­ma­tion. The “real world” trades infor­ma­tion using an amal­gam of dif­fer­ent media that includes video, audio, images … and text. Of course, it’s also no secret that most stu­dents are way more com­fort­able watch­ing tuto­ri­als on YouTube than read­ing pages from a text­book. So what’s the prob­lem? Apple has given authors of all vari­eties a mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing inter­ac­tive, mul­ti­me­dia school con­tent … but it doesn’t feel like enough.

iBooks could have included aspects of social read­ing so “friends” could exchange ques­tions and notes right within the pages of the book. It may have included a sys­tem for imme­di­ate feed­back, for­ma­tive assess­ment and cor­rec­tive branch­ing — that would have added to its value. The abil­ity to gen­er­ate sum­mary usage reports for par­ents and teach­ers could have helped eval­u­ate the progress of stu­dents. All things con­sid­ered how­ever, Apple has man­aged to estab­lish a solid base and it’s sure to improve as addi­tional updates are released. It doesn’t how­ever solve the core prob­lem of textbooks.

One of the major com­plaints about “20th cen­tury edu­ca­tion” was that it cen­tered on con­tent deliv­ery. We acknowl­edge that stu­dents need inde­pen­dent learn­ing skills that enable them to enter soci­ety con­fi­dent in their abil­i­ties to adjust to chang­ing cir­cum­stances and equipped with skills to learn and relearn as new needs arise … yet many of our tech­nol­ogy appli­ca­tions keep draw­ing edu­ca­tion back into the model of con­tent delivery.

While the eText­Books ini­tia­tive is a won­der­ful stride for­ward from our old paper text­books it’s still essen­tially a re-constituted con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem that wasn’t designed or intended to change the one-way process of edu­ca­tional exchanges. Reliance on any type of course text­book – dig­i­tal, mul­ti­me­dia, inter­ac­tive or oth­er­wise – only fits as a more mar­ginal ele­ment in student-centered learn­ing mod­els. It’s not the nature of the text­book as much as its rev­er­ence in the class­room as “the” sin­gu­lar author­ity for learn­ing. Life­long learn­ers need to be skilled in find­ing, fil­ter­ing, col­lat­ing, eval­u­at­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing, edit­ing, ana­lyz­ing and uti­liz­ing infor­ma­tion from a mul­ti­tude of sources.

Instead we could pri­or­i­tize “con­tent con­struc­tion”. Text­books are an impor­tant gate­way — a start­ing point from which stu­dents can learn and then begin their explo­ration of infor­ma­tion on any topic (although even on that point I feel we should encour­age the “crit­i­cal read­ing” of text­books). How­ever the days when stu­dents could respon­si­bly rely on any text­book as a sin­gu­lar infor­ma­tion source are gone. Also, the process of access­ing, syn­the­siz­ing and uti­liz­ing infor­ma­tion is often as impor­tant as the prod­uct. The skills devel­oped are an essen­tial com­po­nent of edu­ca­tion and life today.

We have access to an expo­nen­tially grow­ing amount of infor­ma­tion to process and apply. There are many excel­lent tools we can all use to help in con­struct­ing and orga­niz­ing that con­tent. Here’s a short selec­tion of some of the more pop­u­lar ones. They can be used by indi­vid­u­als and also by stu­dents or teach­ers col­lab­o­rat­ing in groups.

Orga­niz­ing Content

Con­tent con­struc­tion starts with col­lect­ing and col­lat­ing. Dig­i­tal solu­tions for col­lect­ing resources are mod­eled on the old shoe­box or file cab­i­net we used for stor­ing paper based resources.

Live­Binders, as the name sug­gests, is designed to work and look like the binders we use at school. You can store con­tent of all types in binders and then set the binder per­mis­sions to made pub­lic or keep them pri­vate within any class or group of members.

For younger stu­dents Muse­um­Box (requires Flash) allows stor­age of images, text snip­pets, web pages and more.

Ever­note is a very pop­u­lar resource that works across all plat­forms. It’s an invalu­able tool for col­lect­ing and shar­ing any type of con­tent — images, text, links or your own notes. Set up Note­books by topic and add infor­ma­tion by click­ing on an Ever­note icon or even email­ing it directly to your spe­cially des­ig­nated Ever­note email account. The Ever­note “Clip­per” is a tool that allows you to cut out any por­tion of your screen dis­play and saves it as image. I’ve used Ever­note effec­tively with classes that want to col­lect and share infor­ma­tion and it’s also an extremely valu­able tool for per­sonal use. You can also sign up for pre­mium school accounts now and then cre­ate and man­age stu­dent accounts.

Instapa­per is a sim­ple ser­vice for sav­ing web pages. It adds an icon to your tool­bar. Click on the Instapa­per icon and it saves a page for later read­ing. Instapa­per is a tool that’s used pri­mar­ily for sav­ing items to read later rather than for col­lat­ing and tag­ging items in libraries for research pur­poses. It is how­ever a very effec­tive tool for sim­ple archiv­ing. You can even down­load web pages for read­ing offline when you’re trav­el­ing or out of Inter­net range. Apple recently added a “Read­ing List” fea­ture to Safari in iOS 5 but Instapa­per still works across all devices and platforms.

Method­ol­ogy: Don’t for­get that the skills required in col­lect­ing resources require teach­ing and train­ing. Search­ing, assess­ing, fil­ter­ing, group­ing and/or tag­ging – these are all skills that require guid­ance and rep­e­ti­tion. It’s about process not just product.

Social Book­mark­ing

Social book­mark­ing is an extremely effec­tive method for col­lect­ing con­tent on the web. My tool of choice is Diigo. Social book­mark­ing works by hav­ing you tag web pages that can then be anno­tated and shared. You pro­gres­sively build a library of tagged links and there’s a sim­ple search and retrieval mech­a­nism when­ever you need to find a tagged arti­cle or note. The two pri­mary fac­tors that dis­tin­guish social book­mark­ing is that it uses tag­ging to orga­nize infor­ma­tion rather than a sim­ple lin­ear struc­ture and sec­ondly, it allows you to con­nect with other users and share tagged information.

Click the Diigo tool­bar icon to anno­tate and tag any web page

Open an account with Diigo and add a tool­bar icon within your browser. Diigo works across all plat­forms includ­ing mobile devices and iPads. When you find con­tent you want to archive sim­ply click on the Diigo icon. High­light any text, add notes to the page and then add some key­words that will allow you to find it eas­ily after­wards. Click to Save it to your Diigo account and when­ever you go to diigo.com (or use their iOS app) you’ll have access to the libraries of tags and links that you’ve col­lected and annotated.

There’s also a promi­nent “social” com­po­nent. Share your links by sav­ing them pub­li­cally. You can start or join a wide vari­ety of dif­fer­ent groups with like inter­ests and share con­tent within your group. When search­ing, you’re also able to search through tags that oth­ers in the group have added.

Sign up for an edu­ca­tor account and each stu­dent in your class can also get an account. Now you can use Diigo to find and share con­tent among mem­bers of your class. It’s an extremely effec­tive way of enabling stu­dents to build an infor­ma­tion library. They can share high­lights, notes and com­ments. Used in that way Diigo will become an invalu­able resource for your classroom.

Cura­tion

We’re exposed to so much infor­ma­tion that it gets a lit­tle over­whelm­ing at times. One of the newer cat­e­gories of tools for orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion on the web is “con­tent cura­tion”. Cura­tors gather infor­ma­tion from any web based resource (news sources, web pages, rss feeds, Twit­ter etc). They then fil­ter the con­tent and add selected web pages to the library of curated con­tent. Other users can then fol­low a curated library and get more select, pre­mium con­tent that has already been fil­tered. A pop­u­lar con­tent cura­tion tool is scoop.it .

Scoop.it:  When you open an account, you select a topic to curate (eg. iPads in Edu­ca­tion) and add any num­ber of con­tent resources such as web­sites, rss feeds, Twit­ter accounts or hash­tags and more. Scoop-it will serve up the con­tent daily and you then decide which articles/sites to add to your curated library. You can also add an icon to your tool­bar and add con­tent on the fly as you surf sites on the web. Typ­i­cally, oth­ers will fol­low a curated topic to get fil­tered con­tent on a par­tic­u­lar theme. Arti­cles can be tagged and searched. Typ­i­cally, this process is par­tic­u­larly effec­tive in a class set­ting when you’re research­ing any theme that has a lot of cur­rent, top­i­cal infor­ma­tion being released on a fre­quent basis. Your stu­dent cura­tors need to browse and read all related resources and only add those that pro­vide the most help­ful information.

Other Tools…

There are many addi­tional tools and meth­ods for build­ing infor­ma­tion libraries:

- Wikis have been a pop­u­lar method for cre­at­ing col­lab­o­ra­tively built con­tent and peer edit­ing. You assign each stu­dent a login and groups will cre­ate pages. Each user can add and/or edit exist­ing con­tent. The wiki admin­is­tra­tor can track all changes and roll back to prior ver­sions. One of the bet­ter resources for start­ing your own wiki iswik­i­spaces.

- YouTube is an under­rated source for video based con­tent. Open an account for your class and stu­dents can add videos to a class Favorites list. One way of using YouTube is to use your class account for col­lect­ing tuto­r­ial videos on any topic… and of course, stu­dents can and should add their own. Vimeo is another sim­i­lar resource.

Some schools are uncom­fort­able allow­ing stu­dents to browse YouTube at school. If that’s the case at your school, con­sider using SchoolTube instead.

Lastly, it’s not just the infor­ma­tion library you’re build­ing that has value for stu­dents. As opposed to hav­ing them access a slice of con­tent that some­one has selected for them, the process of search­ing, fil­ter­ing, orga­niz­ing, ana­lyz­ing and edit­ing exer­cises valu­able skills and helps develop their abil­ity to become the inde­pen­dent learn­ers we’re hop­ing to grad­u­ate from our schools.

Sam Gliks­man
samgliksman@gmail.com
Twit­ter: @samgliksman

No Laptop for You! (Until You Set Goals)

February 28, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

The fol­low­ing post was writ­ten by John Nash on big think. It is a great post, and John gra­ciously allowed me to cross-post it to this blog!

A teacher friend of mine wrote me recently. She said that her school was work­ing on bring­ing in iPads for grades six and seven next year and asked if I find that schools pre­fer lap­tops to iPads when mov­ing to a 1:1 device environment.

That’s a ques­tion our cen­ter gets quite a bit. In the end, our advice is: be sure your school defines clear goals for what it seeks to achieve by hav­ing com­put­ing devices in the hands of its students.

For instance, if writ­ing is an impor­tant goal, you prob­a­bly want a device with a phys­i­cal key­board — so lap­tops are a good choice.  Schools that are inte­grat­ing writ­ing across the cur­ricu­lum, for instance, would want to take this into account.

But if your goals are about enhanc­ing over­all stu­dent engage­ment with mate­r­ial, then tablets may be the way to go. iPads are excel­lent for giv­ing stu­dents access to infor­ma­tion.  If enhanc­ing cre­ative capa­bil­i­ties of stu­dents is crit­i­cal, then lap­tops may be the way to go because of the wider array of appli­ca­tions and the abil­ity save cre­ative work to disk and share it across plat­forms (print, web, etc).

Regard­less, it’s the set­ting of goals that’s impor­tant. It tran­scends most other school fac­tors in deter­min­ing 1:1 success. For instance, we’ve seen schools issue iPads to stu­dents but not do a good job of expec­ta­tion set­ting and train­ing only to have teach­ers leave the school because of it. Per­haps that’s a worst-case sce­nario, but it’s emblem­atic of the bad feel­ings that can creep in to the teacher ranks when changes are not well com­mu­ni­cated. Other schools that have aligned cur­ricu­lum, trained teach­ers, set clear expec­ta­tions, etc. have stu­dents doing amaz­ing things. The schools that are really good at this don’t call them­selves 1:1 schools, even if they tech­ni­cally are.  Take for instance the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy in Philadel­phia. They have five core val­ues in their school, none of which are about tech­nol­ogy. How­ever, they do use tech­nol­ogy to ful­fill those values:

  • Inquiry
  • Research
  • Col­lab­o­ra­tion
  • Pre­sen­ta­tion
  • Reflec­tion

They are now doing things that are unimag­in­able with­out the devices. And they got there because they had broad agree­ment across their school’s stake­hold­ers about what the goals should be. My col­league Nick Sauers talks about this in a post he wrote a while back. He notes:

“One to one learn­ing is one way to enhance what stu­dents learn and the ways that they learn.  It can turn teacher cen­tered class­rooms into stu­dent cen­tered class­rooms.  More impor­tantly, it can move stu­dents from the bot­tom of Bloom’s Tax­on­omy to the top level where stu­dents create…Unfor­tu­nately, one to one could also serve as a tool to pro­mote the ways things have always been done. (The key is to) truly iden­tify what stu­dents should learn and make those things the focus of every­thing the school does.”

Is your school think­ing about imple­ment­ing a 1:1 lap­top pol­icy? Some things to be aware of might include:

  • Think­ing about how to get devices in teach­ers hands the year before stu­dents receive them.
  • Ensur­ing every­one feels the urgency that teach­ing and learn­ing must change to pro­duce suc­cess­ful stu­dents in today’s world. This “urgency build­ing”, as we call it, helps teach­ers under­stand why a school is embark­ing on an ambi­tious move such as 1:1. Not all teach­ers nat­u­rally feel the urgency that can drive a deci­sion to go to 1:1. Kot­ter talks about the 8 stages of cre­at­ing change, and many schools skip step 1 and 3 (urgency and vision) in lieu of just get­ting mov­ing. They just jump in but don’t know the why they really want to do it.
  • Inte­grat­ing stu­dent voice into the plan­ning and imple­men­ta­tion process.  Increas­ing stu­dent voice in a 1:1 plan­ning not only uncov­ers new ideas that a plan­ning team will never think of, it pro­vides stu­dents with a stronger sense of own­er­ship in their school. Stu­dents highly value hav­ing their voices heard and hon­ored.  

What else should a school embark­ing on a 1:1 jour­ney keep in mind?

Photo Credit: (cc) Flickr user flickingerbrad

Tags: 1:1, BYOD, change, goal set­ting, goals, iPads, Lap­tops, one-to-one, stu­dent voice, urgency

Rethinking exams

February 16, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

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?
These ques­tions could eas­ily be altered to address K-12 edu­ca­tors.  Assess­ment is always an impor­tant topic for edu­ca­tors. Those one-to-one schools that have focused on truly chang­ing teach­ing and learn­ing also need to think about address­ing assess­ment dif­fer­ently. When stu­dents have access to unlim­ited infor­ma­tion with the click of the but­ton, edu­ca­tors are forced to con­sider new ways to address assessment.

Nick Sauers

 

 

 

3rd Annual Iowa 1:1 Institute

February 6, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

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:

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

 

Everything I Need To Know — About Education — I Learned In Kindergarten

February 2, 2012 Sam Gliksman 3 comments

Orig­i­nally posted on iPads in Edu­ca­tion net­work web­site - http://ipadeducators.ning.com/profiles/blogs/kindergarten

Authored by Sam Gliksman, Twitter: @samgliksman

I had some­what of an epiphany while doing a work­shop at a local ele­men­tary school recently. Walk­ing around and speak­ing to teach­ers and chil­dren it sud­denly dawned on me that many of the “rev­o­lu­tion­ary” edu­ca­tional changes that many of us have been call­ing for have already been around for quite a while — just talk a stroll down to the Kinder­garten classes.

If only the rest of school looked a lit­tle more like those class­rooms. In fact, eight impor­tant pil­lars of a 21st cen­tury edu­ca­tion can be found in most Kinder­garten class­rooms every day of the week:

1. PLAY

The first rule of Kinder­garten is to have fun. Our youngest stu­dents love com­ing to school, and if any child doesn’t seem happy then we make it a high pri­or­ity to find and rem­edy the prob­lem. Play is a highly effec­tive method of infor­mal learn­ing that requires imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­ity. Happy, play­ful chil­dren are not day­dream­ing and clock watch­ing — they are engaged and absorbed in their activ­i­ties. As chil­dren get older how­ever, play starts tak­ing a back seat to “aca­d­e­mics” … which are usu­ally pri­or­i­ties deter­mined by peo­ple in offices far away from the stu­dents’ actual class­room environment.

2. CREATE

Cre­ativ­ity is becom­ing lost in the shuf­fle of the cur­rent “back to basics” school move­ment. While cer­tainly required in any artis­tic endeavor, cre­ativ­ity is also a highly essen­tial cop­ing skill for our rapidly chang­ing lives in the 21st cen­tury. Our tod­dlers are con­stantly being encour­aged to think and play cre­atively. We even struc­ture the class­room phys­i­cally in an attempt to stim­u­late cre­ativ­ity — using bright col­ors, infor­mal seat­ing and allow­ing chil­dren ample room to move. Con­trast that to the staid col­ors and fixed rows of desks found in most upper school classes where “fol­low the norm” has replaced “think out of the box”.

A cou­ple of years ago I attended a lec­ture by Amer­i­can artist, Erik Wahl. As part of his pre­sen­ta­tion he splashed paint around a can­vas while cre­at­ing a por­trait on stage. After­wards he turned to the audi­ence and asked, “How many of you con­sider your­selves artists?”. Out of an audi­ence of sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple only a cou­ple of hands were raised. He then related how he often goes into pre-school classes and asks the very same ques­tion. The dif­fer­ence is that almost every hand in the room imme­di­ately shoots up. The sad fact is that school squashes our inner sense of cre­ativ­ity as we get older. Instead of inspir­ing our stu­dents to be imag­i­na­tive and cre­ate we tell them to fol­low the rules — “Do what I tell you to do … and make sure do it exactly the way I asked you to do it”.

3. SOCIALIZE

We under­stand that young chil­dren are social by nature and encour­age them to min­gle. We don’t seat them alone in fixed desks fac­ing the front of the room. Instead we allow them appro­pri­ate time to roam and social­ize. Impor­tantly, we rec­og­nize the value of get­ting them to work together in small groups. When they get older and try to work together we often label the activ­ity “cheat­ing”. They’re usu­ally told to sit alone, face the front and work qui­etly on their own. Social­iz­ing is con­sid­ered an extra-curricular activ­ity that has no place in seri­ous aca­d­e­mics … well, not until you get out into the workplace!

4. DISCOVER

Chil­dren are curi­ous and love to explore the world around them. They nat­u­rally observe, ask ques­tions and demand answers. Kinder­garten class might be spent explor­ing a bug brought in from the play­ground or lis­ten­ing to a story from a par­ent with an inter­est­ing pro­fes­sion. Their world is a play­ground that they con­stantly explore.

As they get older we tell them that their world is divided into nicely delin­eated courses with pre­de­ter­mined content. Important ques­tions and issues that would nor­mally require dis­cus­sion and expla­na­tion are shelved because they don’t fit into some arbi­trary course cur­ricu­lum. How many times do you hear “we don’t have time for that today”? If course­work is com­pleted then there might pos­si­bly be some time left to explore a topic of inter­est. In the mean­time, explo­ration is put on hold.

5. EXPERIENCE

Effec­tive learn­ing occurs when chil­dren build new under­stand­ings based on expe­ri­ences that help them con­struct new knowl­edge. Kinder­garten teach­ers help pro­vide a myr­iad of expe­ri­ences for their stu­dents. We don’t read about ham­sters — we keep a pet in class and observe how they eat. We might even allow each child to take the pet home for an evening. We encour­age chil­dren to bring things into class so that oth­ers can feel, taste, expe­ri­ence and learn from them. Their expe­ri­ences pro­vide a scaf­fold­ing for the chil­dren to build upon and extend what they already know. We under­stand that chil­dren learn most deeply and effec­tively through experience.

How­ever, con­tent is king when they get to the older grades. It seems that the only valid expe­ri­ence for learn­ing is read­ing from a text book or lis­ten­ing to a teacher.

6. EXPRESS

Mix­ing dif­fer­ent forms of media and com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an essen­tial com­po­nent of Kinder­garten class. Chil­dren look at pho­tos, lis­ten to music, watch video, tell sto­ries and of course, read books. We under­stand that peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate in a vari­ety of man­ners and we bring them into play in our classrooms.

In upper grades our entire world is expressed through text. For what­ever rea­son, it seems that the only valid form of express­ing knowl­edge is through text. Out of class they con­stantly inter­act and cre­ate video, music and more. In class, we have stu­dents read from text­books and almost exclu­sively require them to respond in writing.

7. MOVE

Chil­dren need to move. We all need to move. It’s healthy for both body and mind. We under­stand that in Kinder­garten. The fur­ni­ture is arranged to facil­i­tate move­ment and we often have chil­dren move around to dif­fer­ent parts of the room depend­ing on the activ­ity. Out­doors, it’s essen­tial to pro­vide time and equip­ment for play.

The mantra of upper school is to sit still and face the front. Classes are designed for quiet, motion­less, obe­di­ent activ­i­ties. That can be excru­ci­at­ingly dif­fi­cult for many students.

8. RELATE

Finally, in Kinder­garten we strive to make learn­ing as mean­ing­ful as pos­si­ble. Learn­ing has mean­ing as defined by its rel­e­vance to the lives of stu­dents. If chil­dren can’t relate to it then it won’t hold their interest.

On the other hand, the vast amount of bleary eyed, day­dream­ing stu­dents in upper grades is tes­ta­ment to the fact that they don’t relate to much of what passes for learn­ing in class. It’s usu­ally a pre­de­fined pack­age of con­tent defined by an “author­ity” sit­ting far from the lives of our stu­dents — phys­i­cally and emo­tion­ally. Just as impor­tantly, this pre­de­fined con­tent pack­age is becom­ing increas­ingly inad­e­quate in prepar­ing our stu­dents for their lives after school.

So if you have a few moments I’d strongly encour­age you to take a stroll down to the lower grades in your school. In fact, the lower the bet­ter. Spend a few min­utes observ­ing the dynam­ics in class. Note the energy, laugh­ter and enthu­si­asm … the gen­uine thirst for learn­ing. Then ask your­self why it can’t be that way through­out school.

Sam Gliks­man
samgliksman@gmail.com
Twit­ter: @samgliksman
http:\\ipadeducators.ning.com

What if or yeah but?

February 1, 2012 Nick Sauers No comments

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.
I would be the first to admit that I cer­tainly can be a “yeah, but” type of per­son. I am very prac­ti­cal at times, and I some­times quickly dis­miss ideas that don’t seem prac­ti­cal. Unfor­tu­nately, that atti­tude isn’t one that always har­nesses cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive ideas. As schools look for ways to change and trans­form, they should cer­tainly take the time to have some con­ver­sa­tions about the what ifs.
  • What if we involved stu­dents in impor­tant school decisions?
  • What if stu­dents were chal­lenged with work that was relavent to them?
  • What if teach­ers rou­tinely observed each oth­ers classrooms?
I have had the oppor­tu­nity to learn from design thinkers Chris­t­ian Long and John Nash, who is a col­league. Their work is extremely relavent to schools try­ing to redesign them­selves. One major con­cept that I heard cen­ters around the devel­op­ment of ideas. In that stage it is crit­i­cal to focus on gen­er­at­ing ideas, and not eval­u­at­ing ideas (What ifs vs. yeah buts). A sec­ond idea is that we have to be will­ing to fail. This doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that you gam­ble on one huge change for an entire dis­trict at the same time. It may involve pilots or phased imple­men­ta­tion of an initiative.
If you work at a one-to-one school, some­one at some point cer­tainly dreamed of inno­va­tion and change. Beyond imple­ment­ing one-to-one, has your school con­tin­ued to have real con­ver­sa­tions about the “what ifs” for your school? If not, it may cer­tainly be time to have those conversations!
Nick Sauers

Keeping Students Engaged in a 1:1 Project-Based Classroom [guest post]

January 29, 2012 Scott McLeod 7 comments

Image approved for copy by Cre­ative Commons.

Source: http://bit.ly/vYUkXB

 

When lap­tops first arrived in my class­room, I wor­ried about class­room man­age­ment. How could I cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where stu­dents used their com­put­ers as tools rather than toys?

I was wor­ried for noth­ing. The fol­low­ing are sug­ges­tions for keep­ing stu­dents engaged in a project and account­able for their time with computers:

Stu­dents make a plan.

Stu­dents are most tempted to open wid­gets, games, and social chats when they are faced with a blank screen and have no plan.

Much of the time, stu­dents think they have a plan. If you ask them What are you going to do?, the answer is usu­ally I’m gonna make a Power Point about… or I want to make a movie about… Those answers indi­cate that stu­dents are think­ing of tech­nol­ogy before content.

Instead, ask What are you try­ing to learn? or What are you try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate? or What are you work­ing on as a writer? Those ques­tions get answers like I want to know more about the horses that Civil War gen­er­als rode or I want to con­vince peo­ple that Justin Bieber is the best singer ever or I’m try­ing to describe the character’s actions.

When you ask about learn­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion, you are sig­nal­ing that the con­tent is more impor­tant than the tech­nol­ogy. Pull aside those who are strug­gling with plans. Let them talk together and encour­age them to sketch their ideas with dia­grams or bul­let points and return to the com­puter later. Stu­dents with a plan tend to stay on task.

Stu­dents set time-bound goals.

Once stu­dents have a plan, they break the project into smaller tasks that can be fin­ished in 10– to 15-minute chunks of time. Have stu­dents write the spe­cific tasks on Post-it notes. Post-its are set beside the com­puter. On their Post-its, stu­dents fin­ish the sen­tence, “In the next [x-amount of] min­utes, I plan to…” They gen­er­ally write things like…

  • Cre­ate an out­line for my essay
  • Write my introduction
  • Find three pic­tures about…
  • Do my voice recording
  • Fin­ish four slides of my Power Point/Keynote
  • Find at least three data­base arti­cles on…
  • Draft at least three paragraphs
  • Use Google docs to peer-edit so-and-so’s essay
  • Upload my story to Voicethread

Tasks should be spe­cific. I’m gonna work on my project is not spe­cific enough. At the end of class, Post-its become “exit slips”. Stu­dents tick off the tasks they have com­pleted and hand the Post-its to the teacher so the teacher can see the progress.

Lap­top screens are “fisted” or “put at half mast”. 

Teach­ers don’t lec­ture much in a project-based learn­ing envi­ron­ment. How­ever, some­times stu­dent work time is inter­rupted so the teacher can give reminders or clar­ify directions.

Ask stu­dents to “fist” their com­puter (or “put the screen at half mast”). Screens should be gen­tly low­ered so that stu­dents’ fists fit between the edge of the track pad and the screen.

When screens are fisted, stu­dents are not dis­tracted by items on their screen nor can they type. At the same time, stu­dents do not lower their screens to the point that the com­put­ers go to sleep. In an iPad envi­ron­ment, stu­dents might care­fully face their screens down on the desk.

Fin­gers indi­cate the amount of time stu­dents need to com­plete a shorter task.

Some tasks are shorter and need to be com­pleted within a few min­utes of class. After stu­dents have worked for a rea­son­able amount of time, ask stu­dents to show fin­gers for how many addi­tional min­utes they need. Fisted com­put­ers sig­nal completion.

If a stu­dent is far behind the rest of the class, try to deter­mine whether the stu­dent got dis­tracted or if the stu­dent needs reteach­ing. Have the stu­dent take a screen­shot of his or her progress. Screen­shots are help­ful to guide future conversations.

Cir­cu­late the room, con­fer­enc­ing with students.

Walk­ing and talk­ing with stu­dents is impor­tant with or with­out com­put­ers. In her arti­cle 10 Ways to be a Ter­ri­ble Teacher, Vicki Davis describes the ter­ri­ble teacher as one who is work­ing on his or her own com­puter and not pay­ing atten­tion to students.

Stu­dents wel­come teacher con­ver­sa­tion. They are eager to share their progress and request advice when they’re stuck. You build rela­tion­ships with stu­dents when you talk to them about their work.

Rather than ban­ning chat, teach stu­dents how to use it for collaboration.

Chat fea­tures are pro­grammed into Gmail and Google prod­ucts. The first year, I banned chats. Then, I real­ized that chats can be used for stu­dent collaboration.

I glance at the chat win­dows as I cir­cu­late the room. Since stu­dents have spe­cific, time-bound goals, most chats are used to ask peers to look over a para­graph or help with another aspect of the project.

Don’t be afraid to have tough con­ver­sa­tions with indi­vid­ual students.

Each year, I have to pull aside one or two stu­dents to talk about time man­age­ment. It’s not a puni­tive con­ver­sa­tion. The con­ver­sa­tion goes some­thing like this:

I’ve noticed you haven’t made much progress on…I need to know what’s get­ting in the way of your progress. I’m not ask­ing because I want to get you in trou­ble. I’m ask­ing because you’re now x-years old and I’m wor­ried that, if you get in the habit of…,then school will be really hard for you in the future.

Many of the sug­ges­tions above apply to project-based learn­ing envi­ron­ments both with and with­out com­put­ers. The trick in a 1:1 envi­ron­ment is to main­tain focus on learn­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Then let tech­nol­ogy nat­u­rally enhance those outcomes.

What tricks do you use to keep stu­dents engaged?

Janet Moeller-Abercrombie is the author of Expat Edu­ca­tor. She has 16 years of teach­ing expe­ri­ence and cur­rently works full time at Hong Kong Inter­na­tional School. Janet is a doc­toral can­di­date with the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota and has begun cur­ricu­lum con­sult­ing with admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers. She is cer­ti­fied by the National Board for Pro­fes­sional Teach­ing Stan­dards. @jabbacrombie

 

Creating a welcoming web presence

January 23, 2012 Nick Sauers 4 comments

I have worked the past cou­ple of weeks on get­ting pre­pared to dis­trib­ute a sur­vey to teach­ers through­out the state of Iowa. Part of that work included vis­it­ing school web­sites and col­lect­ing teacher emails. With the help of a friend, I ended up col­lect­ing approx­i­mately 4,000 emails from 140 dif­fer­ent schools.  As you can imag­ine, the look and feel of those school web­sites var­ied greatly. My expe­ri­ence vis­it­ing those web­sites brought for­ward the fol­low­ing issues.

When I vis­ited web­sites, I often won­dered what the pur­pose of the web­site was.  I would guess that the pur­pose each school had for its web­site would explain some of the dif­fer­ences between web­sites. Most of the web­sites seemed to fit into one of two categories.

Sta­tic repos­i­tory of information-These web­sites were obvi­ously updated or changed very infre­quently. They con­tained forms and var­i­ous resources about the school. This would by far be the larger category.

Fluid infor­ma­tion source-These web­sites were updated fre­quently, and they con­tained cur­rent news about the school. Some included videos, pic­tures, and even twit­ter feeds.

This post isn’t intended as a crit­i­cism of schools, but rather as a con­ver­sa­tion starter. As a school, you need to decided where to spend your time and resources. Keep­ing an up to date web­site cer­tainly takes time. With that in mind, I’m going to end with a list of poten­tial rea­sons to invest in updat­ing your web­site and a list of the com­mon prob­lems I found on websites.

Why invest time to keep an up to date website?

  • Your web­site is the first place out­siders see when they look for infor­ma­tion about your school. This includes poten­tial employ­ees, new fam­i­lies, and com­mu­nity partners.
  • Your web­site can serve as a great way to share all of the pos­i­tive things hap­pen­ing in your school with com­mu­nity members.
  • The school can con­trol the infor­ma­tion on their web­site, and it can be a great way to address chal­leng­ing issues.
  • Mem­bers of the school com­mu­nity do want to be able to visit your web­site as a one stop infor­ma­tion warehouse.
Com­mon prob­lems and frus­tra­tions with school websites:
  • Out­dated infor­ma­tion! This was extremely common.
  • Bro­ken links were also quite common.
  • Lack of information-It was dif­fi­cult to find infor­ma­tion and con­tact emails for staff members.
  • Infor­ma­tion that was chal­leng­ing to access-Most com­mu­nity mem­bers will be frus­trated if a click doesn’t get them to the infor­ma­tion they need.

Visit your own web­site and click around on var­i­ous resources. What mes­sage does your school web­site send?

Characteristics of 1:1 Schools and Communities

January 6, 2012 Nick Sauers 13 comments

This is my first blog of the New Year, and first post for some time. I’d like to say that my depar­ture from blog­ging has been due to a trip to warm Phoenix to see my Hawkeyes play in the Insight Bowl, but unfor­tu­nately that isn’t the case. I’ve instead been work­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion, which will attempt to ana­lyze the impact of one-to-one schools across the state of Iowa. Some of my ini­tial find­ings have been very inter­est­ing, but I share them with a dis­claimer. These are very pre­lim­i­nary find­ings, and I may be over­sim­pli­fy­ing them a bit. I am still work­ing to clean-up the data, but I thought these very crude results may be of inter­est to some of you. If you’d like to find out more, feel free to send me an email so we can chat (nck0208@gmail.com).

The ini­tial part of my study attempted to ana­lyze the char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools. The goal was to iden­tify char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools that were very dif­fer­ent (sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant) from non-one-to-one schools. Because I didn’t want the char­ac­ter­is­tics to be impacted as a result of a school going one-to-one, I used data from a year that schools were not one-to-one (2007). Here are some of those char­ac­ter­is­tics that were very dif­fer­ent between one-to-one and non-one-to-one schools.

It is impor­tant to stress a cou­ple of points with these data.

  1. I didn’t report items above sim­ply if one group had a higher median. They were only reported if there was a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. I actu­ally com­pared schools on nearly 100 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics, most of which didn’t show dif­fer­ences between the two groups.
  2. These results are NOT  results of 1:1! These data were col­lected prior to one to-one imple­men­ta­tion in an effort to describe the “type” of schools that were the first in Iowa to tran­si­tion to one-to-one (41 schools).
  3. I have over­sim­pli­fied these results a bit, and they aren’t yet finalized!
Char­ac­ter­is­tics of 1:1 Schools/Communities in Iowa
  • School and dis­trict enrollment-One-to-one schools were smaller.
  • Pupils per computer-Even prior to going one-to-one, one-to-one schools had more computers.
  • 11th grade pro­fi­ciency scores-One-to-one schools outscored non-one-to-one schools.
  • Stu­dent to teacher ratio-They were higher at one-to-one schools.
  • Teacher salaries-Salaries were lower at one-to-one schools.
  • Rev­enue from local sources-One-to-one schools received a greater per­cent­age of their rev­enue from local sources. (This may be a bit con­fus­ing to those of you not famil­iar with Iowa’s fund­ing formula.)
  • Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers with a col­lege degree-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties was lower.
  • Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers in the labor force-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties is less than their counterparts.
  • Median fam­ily income-Family income was lower in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties. (Hous­ing val­ues were also less.)
  • Age of principal-One-to-one prin­ci­pals were younger.
  • Super­in­ten­dent expe­ri­ence in the district-One-to-one super­in­ten­dents had less dis­trict expe­ri­ence, BUT no sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in over­all experience.
  • Diversity-One-to-one schools were less racially diverse.

Even with those dis­claimers above, I have found these results EXTREMELY inter­est­ing. There are some I cer­tainly would have expected, and oth­ers that were more surprising.

Nick Sauers
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