Mosty recent post from teacherstalkingshop.blogspot.com

[Sean Wheeler]

Give a man a fish, etc. - 5 days into a 1:1

When I was student teaching, Dan Leary, a great Cleveland public school teacher, said to me, "When you teach something, you learn it twice." Since then, I've continued to find his statement to be true. I love the learning experience that I have when I teach. I find out so much from the questions of my students, and I am forced to confront new perspectives on the texts that we study.

In the last few days, I've stumbled on what I think is a pretty good new learning practice for my classroom. I shouldn't say that this is a new idea. I'm surround by teachers that have found this out a long time before I came along. Now, though, the questions come at a furious pace. With 25 students, each with the ability to access and create anything that is imaginable, the classroom atmosphere is one of equal parts discovery and frustration. The students are learning how to set up their Google Reader accounts, they are learning how to create and maintain a blog that displays their learning, and they are running into all kinds of obstacles on their paths to achieving our class goals. So I thought up this "new" thing...

When any student in my class has encountered some kind of barrier to their access or creative capabilities, they are not allowed to raise their hand. Instead, the student with the question has to ask everyone at their table for help. If the team cannot come up with a solution to the student's problem, the whole table has to raise their hands in unison. At this point, the class has to give the group its' attention, during which the questioning group solicits help from anyone in the room (including me, though as simply another member of the class). If nobody can solve the issue, I learn how to overcome the problem in front of the whole class, with their input along the way. I tried an early version of this today, and it was great to see a community develop around issues of learning. I didn't have to answer a single whole class question, therefore providing me with more time to circulate around the room and devote myself to individual guidance, support, and feedback. All the while, the room was buzzing with the sounds of students helping each other learn.

[Sean Wheeler]

And here's the first post on the same blog. Feel free to comment here or at teacherstalkingshop.blogspot.com

Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Two days into a 1:1
Our lhs2.0 group has just deployed 180 netbooks (hp mini) to our students. Here's what I've encountered so far...

- -> We can pull off a deadline!: - The entire extended team, from administration to instructional coaches, a dedicated IT department, and especially the teachers, worked hard to get this thing in on time. The word of the week was "patience" and I think we've all weathered it quite well.

--> Framing a shift to 1:1 education needed to be better: Though we are inevitably learning as we go at the moment, perhaps we could have handled things a bit better. If your district is thinking about switching to 1:1, be sure to take a good deal of time in discussion with parents, take the time to meet and anticipate as a cohort, and share your influences and discoveries a whole lot. If there's one thing that I wish we had done differently, it was to better share the vision and research that has led us to this point. This blog is the first step in trying to rectify that error.

--> I have more time: Wow. By having every student able to access anything that we want to know or create, and engaging them in learning about and setting up their new tools, I am finding that I have more valuable time freed up in the classroom. I have time to meet with students one on one, I can take a second to edit my instructions and repost them online, I can fix the broken hyperlink or confusing instructions. It's not like I've freed up time for grading or taking care of paperwork and emails, it's that I've shifted my use of the time towards more student-directed engagement.

--> The "Others": The classes that I teach that don't have access to the netbooks already feel antiquated and overly stifling. I teach the same "prep", or course curriculum, in two entirely different ways each day. My first and last classes of the day do not have access to netbooks, and most of the course is centered around some form of whole group instruction. Today I found myself really wishing that every kid had access to what my lhs2.0 kids are using in class. I don't think it will be too long before the inequity becomes a talking point in our district. I am hoping that this will push our community towards a discussion about the need for a major shift towards providing every student the opportunity to access and create digital information. The sooner that conversation starts, the better. And those of us who are in this right now, have to be ready to share what we are finding out as we move forward so that the conversation is informed by our experiences.

--> Prep time: When I take the time to set up a good experience for the students, they learn more. I am hoping to spend a bit more time carefully setting up the process by which the students engage information and develop skills. I'm not sure that I can "wing it" in the classroom at the moment. The planning is crucial right now.

--> Have a project leader that isn't teaching in the classroom: It has really helped to have instructional coaches to this point. While the classroom instructors and students work away in their separate classroom, the instructional coaches provide an important overview and support role that allows our cohort the ability to proceed. Shifting to a 1:1 initiative is a massive institutional upheaval and it helps to have instructional coaches as advocates and partners.

--> A leap: This whole initiative is based on the solid belief that teachers want to help students learn, and that students want to learn. I am sold on the notion that education is more different, and more exciting, than it ever was before. We have an unprecedented ability to access, share, and create information. Our students are entering a world that we could not have imagined when most of us learned to teach. And it is through the vision, caring, and dedication of teachers that recognize this unique opportunity to aid in transforming education to match the tremendous shift that has occurred in this digital age, that we will have any hope of meeting the needs of this most unique generation of students.

[Jill Jusko]

Sean,

I've read your blog posts and I've read what you have posted here on the Deck. Still, I'm unclear about the aim of the 1:1 initiative and what it entails other than providing students with netbooks. Can you provide a little more information about that, or maybe provide some links that articulate the 1:1 initiative?

[Sean Wheeler]

Hey Jill,

I'm heading out the door to go to Columbus, but wanted to let you know that I'll post some explanation and resources asap. Thanks for your question.

[Sean Wheeler]

I'm unclear about the aim of the 1:1 initiative and what it entails other than providing students with netbooks. Can you provide a little more information about that, or maybe provide some links that articulate the 1:1 initiative?

Thanks for your patience, Jill. I just got back from a few heady and exciting days in Columbus as our grant team attended and presented at the annual eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference. http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/

I'd say that we want to increase both the level of engagement and the level of relevance in our classrooms via our grant team's 1:1 initiative. The netbooks, while fantastic tools, are more a means to an end than an end in themselves. The goal of our work is to prepare our students for the world that surrounds them every time they leave the doors of our school by more closely matching the skills needed in the real world with the skills that we teach in the classroom. To be more clear, I'd like to break this down into how going to a 1 student:1 computer model will increase both relevance and engagement, and then follow that up with a few links to help further inform this discussion.

Relevance

Our students live in a world that is vastly different from the one we encountered in high school. The shift towards digital information, communication, and creative collaboration has had an impact on every level of our daily lives. As our participation in this forum suggests, many ideas have moved from static statements printed on dead trees to dynamic conversations held online. Our audience has widened as the cost of publishing our ideas has dropped to nearly zero. As a Language Arts teacher, I have to reckon with the fact that my students will work in an environment in which everything they say online has the potential to reach literally millions of people. I need to teach students what it means to have such an audience, what responsibilities are entailed in having such an audience, and ways in which they can share their ideas with a high premium on quality writing and clarity of thought. I also need to work with them as they learn to seek out information from others, addressing issues of validity, authorship, ownership, and privacy. The move towards a 1:1 education allows our students to learn on the very same platform that they will use to communicate for the rest of their academic, employment, and personal lives. The same can be said for the other subject areas as well. No history textbook on earth has anything to say about this week's protests in Egypt, but I can go online and find news reports, first person accounts, and a variety of perspectives on this issue within seconds. Our science classrooms can use the internet to communicate and collaborate on a whole host of projects that are underway right now. Our Math curriculum can move from simple computation to actual application using digital models and unlimited access to data sets that matter to our everyday lives. And though our LHS2.0 program does not have a foreign language component, I envision that our students will soon be using these tools to Skype with native speakers of a language and to engage current events in a foreign language via Google Translate. The netbooks give us a window into not only the educational content that is being produced now, but also access to all of the content that has ever been produced in the past.

Engagement

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I really believe that students want to be engaged in school. The students want to learn, but they want to learn in a way that is meaningful to them. Every day we ask students to power down at school, to turn off devices that give them access to everything in the world, and to stop using the creative tools that they use at home to create YouTube videos, audio mash-ups, and yes, even lolcats. We have a generation that is more used to a keyboard and mouse than a pen and paper. As I sit here at The Root Cafe, every table that I can see has someone with a laptop at it. I see a guy creating some sort of a microphone prototype using CorelDraw, an artist sketching on a digital tablet, and another woman checking Yahoo news. There are two high school students that appear to be working on a project using Google Docs. Everyone here seems pretty engaged, and none of these people would be allowed to be doing any of this in most of our classrooms. This issue is not unique to Lakewood, it is a global phenomenon that is being encountered at every level of human interaction. Our district, however, is beginning to recognize the power of letting students use the tools that they find the most useful and interesting. The hard part, and I'm speaking from personal experience, is that we have to learn to use this inclination for digital engagement as a way to engage the students in their learning. I have to learn not only how to work all of this stuff myself, but also how to guide students towards learning the valuable skills on which education has always, rightly, focussed.

The work that has come out of this grant isn't about the nouns of our modern world (laptops, iPods/iPads, cell phones, skype, facebook, google, etc.), but the verbs (collaborating, publishing, evaluating resources, analyzing data, etc.). I apologize for not having made that clear in the first place. I was just excited to finally see this equipment in the hands of my students.

This was a bit long for a forum, but English majors tend towards the polemic.

This 2010 Literature Review from New South Wales, entitled, "Digital Education Revolution - One-to-One Computers in Schools" is a good piece of research on the topic. I would also suggest that the links in the bibliography are another great way to find out more researched-based information about the successes and needed improvements in 1:1 education initiatives.

https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/detresources/lit_review10_TrMbcLRPRT.pdf

Please keep the questions coming and the conversation going,

Sean

[Jill Jusko]

Thanks for the explanation. I can see the potential pluses and minuses of such a program. I hope your optimism is rewarded and the students are not only more engaged but also better prepared.

Now, as long as you are up for more discussion, you mention in a post that some classes have netbooks and others do not, and those that do not already seem "stifling" and "antiquated." And you discuss the need for a greater shift to employ the tools needed to create digital information. That prompts a question from me: Are there any means by which the school is going to measure the success of this 1:1 effort? And by that I mean to determine whether the initiative is actually more beneficial to students than the more traditional method of teaching. New tools are always fun in and of themselves.

[Sean Wheeler]

As part of the grant requirements we have hired an outside evaluator from the University of Akron who will be evaluating our implementation of the grant and the effect on student achievement. We are also going to be looking at our student's success on the Ohio Graduation Tests and assessing student growth over the course of the year.

As for the comparison between the "traditional" approach and the move to a more "modern" approach, I am not sure that this comparison can be made without a consideration of the context of each approach. The "traditional" model, in which case I imagine you mean without computers, was created in a world without computers, and therefore was relevant to that world. However, I can't see a way in which learning without computers is relevant to the world that we live in now. Of course, this is not to say that the content that we have always taught is suddenly irrelevant. Shakespeare still matters, American history still matters, Algebra is still important, and the scientific process is probably more relevant than ever. But when we consider the methods by which most of the modern world accesses these materials, we invariably have to confront the fact that most information is digital these days. I didn't head to the library to hit the card catalogue to find research on 1:1 initiative efficacy, I went to Google. Our university classes, over half of which have an online component, require students to participate in forum discussions, collaborate with other students online, and consider texts in digital form. This isn't an issue of an old method versus the new method. It's more an issue of preparing our students for a world that has undeniably shifted to an increased use of digital technology.

This, of course, brings some to think that we are loosing the beauty of such things as the hand-written letter, the face-to-face conversation, and the visceral experience of being awake and alive. I don't think we are loosing those things to the degree that some might fear, and I would never advocate for an education system that goes robotic and automated. Nothing can replace live human interaction and the incalculable value of lived experience, nothing can replace the need for teachers to work with and challenge our children, and nothing can replace the amazing level of nuance and sophistication that comes from having meaningful conversations with one another across a table or desk.

New tools are always fun in and of themselves.

I agree, and yes, we are having fun. However, this has little to do with pizzaz or novelty. The sober fact of the matter is that these new tools are the same tools that our students will need to compete at school and at work for the rest of their lives. Electricity, the automobile, airplanes, and even supermarkets were all once fun and exciting novelties indicative of "the modern world". Now we view these tools as integral parts of life as we know it. Can we do without them? Sure. Can we do without them and still participate in the mainstream world? Not really. (I,for one, can't hunt for my dinner OR start a serviceable fire. -10 on manliness for me, I'm sure )

Like I said earlier, I'm still learning all of this stuff and definitely share some of the same fears and apprehensions as everyone else. Increasingly though, I'm not sure that i have much of a choice. The world has changed, and our education system has to match the new challenges that are now before us.

I appreciate your input on this. I brought this to the deck because I want to learn from your questions, hear your ideas, and work together to make my classroom worthy of this great community that I am proud to serve. I'm also a parent with kids in the district, so I have a vested interest in this conversation from that point-of-view as well.

I will try my best to keep everyone aware of both our successes and failures as we move forward into this relatively uncharted territory. The key is going to be learning from our failures while we work to repeat our successes.

[Stan Austin]

Sean and Jill---
You bring up the need for an evaluation of this project. One thing that you broached, Sean, that I think has to be looked at more closely is how college students right now use technology and whether or not our high school graduates are competent in that realm.
Specifically, is it a seamless transition? Is there a digital divide based on income? Is this 1.1 going to be as essential as basic grammar?
Maybe at this Saturday get together we could snag a current college student to help answer those questions.
Stan