Milobo’s Musings

You know the saying…. “Someday I’ll get around to documenting and collecting all the ideas and resources we’ve created at our school.”  Well, for Colleen (PCHS Technology Coordinator) and I, this was the week that we finally got around to it.

For the past several days, we’ve spent most of our waking hours organizing, collecting, uploading, and designing a website that gathers all the pieces and parts of our 1:1 program into one comprehensive location.  Our goal was not only to make it easy for us to document and find our 1:1 program components, but also to be able to share them with other schools so that we can learn from one another.

The site, located here, is divided into 3 sections:

• Considering a 1:1 (How did we go about preparing our school for a 1:1 rollout?)
• Conducting a 1:1 (How do we support the ongoing needs of students and staff?)
• Continuing a 1:1 (What are future plans and how will we adapt and reflect on our progress?).

It’s by no means a complete list, but we hope it will be of use to others who are just beginning the 1:1 journey.

What I’m hoping too, is that you’ll find a way to get around to doing the same – sharing what you, your students, or your fellow teachers have created.  Dean Shareski spoke about the power of sharing on his blog a while back, and that post along with a conversation we had afterward have both stuck with me since.  The best kind of leadership and excellence come not from holding on to what you have, but from sharing what you know.

What will you get around to sharing today?

Picture from  Denise Mattox, Flickr Creative Commons

I’m a believer in positive thinking and a great example of this philosophy comes straight from the Improv community in the form of Yes, and… thinking. I wrote about it a bit here in a page about collaboration, but basic premise is that by taking an idea and building on it, you’ll find lots of great outcomes as a result.

What can “Yes, and” thinking lead to? My newest adventure is a perfect example. When I emailed Katie Morrow to ask if she’d be interested in a dual-blogging venture to help classroom teachers who use laptops, she upped the ante by suggesting we start a podcast on learning with laptops instead.  I’ve helped students with our school podcasts, have given workshops on using GarageBand to create podcasts, but have never actually created my own. Sounds like it was about time, right?

So, here we are, two episodes into our new podcast, Always On. You can subscribe to the podcast via the iTunes store, or from your favorite podcatcher. We hope you’ll join us as we explore strategies and share ideas for using laptops both in and out of the classroom.  Leave us a message, or send your feedback and ideas – we look forward to hearing what you think!

42.

If it were the number of students in your class, it might seem like an impossibly large number.  If it were the amount of minutes you spent per subject each day, it might seem a bit rushed.  But what if you knew that 42 is the average number of people who respond and react to a student’s work from the time they enter Kindergarten until they graduate from High School? The following video created by Barry Bachenheimer really brought the point home for me:

So, after 13 years of schooling, a student’s perception of their ability as a writer, thinker and communicator has been influenced and shaped by an audience of fewer than 4 dozen people.

Makes you think doesn’t it?

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has defined Communication and Collaboration as one of the key elements students must master to be successful in the 21st century workplace. This includes:

• Articulating thoughts and ideas clearly and effectively through speaking and writing
• Demonstrating ability to work effectively with diverse teams
• Exercising flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to accomplish a common goal
• Assuming shared responsibility for collaborative work

Most importantly, students need to be able to accomplish these goals within a global community.  It’s not enough for students to be able to work effectively with the person who sits next to them.  Now, they’ve got to be able to work well with the person who sits around the globe from them.

We’re giving students the tools to take their learning out into the world through the CHS 1:1 laptop program.  Now we’ve got to take those tools and help students learn to use them to collaborate within our school community and within the global community.  How? How about starting small within your classroom and then going global when you’ve got the hang of it:

• Start Small: Create a classroom gallery of work that can be rated and commented on by student peers. Celeste Bell is doing this now with her students by creating a Studywiz Gallery of their “Jesus Moments” photographs.  While she’ll tell you that the students enjoyed taking the pictures before she created the gallery, she’ll also tell you that creating the gallery has motivated students to respond to and appreciate the work of their peers.
  

 
• Go Global: Create a project that is published and posted on the web. Marilyn Stefani is doing that now with her student’s Earth’s Composition Wiki and Google Map.  Marilyn paired her students across two classes and asked them to collaborate to create one page with background information on an assigned topic.  She then challenged the students to identify current environmental issues related to their topic and create a collaborative map that gives a brief overview of the issue and links to more information on their wiki. It’s been a challenge to teach the students to work asynchronously on a common goal, but the payoff has been that students are learning how their actions (or inactions) affect others while appreciating the knowledge and talents of their fellow students.



 

 

 

Do people really pay attention to these efforts?  The answer is yes, and sometimes in a big way.  Last year, Nancy Collin’s class created a wiki project on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I wrote about it in a Scholastic article along with Christine Day’s Google Doc project.  It’s still out there for others to see and on a whim, we decided to use Google Analytics to keep track of how many visitors we have there.  In the last 6 months, there have been visits from exactly 42 locations. Not 42 visitors, or 42 cities, or 42 states, but 42 different countries sent over 1600 visitors to the site. How’s that for a global audience?

So, we can close the doors to our classrooms and give our students an audience of 1, or we can find strategies to give our students a global audience.  Their future will include the challenge of living and working in a connected world.

Are we preparing them for this challenge?

I’d like to say we’re giving it a good try.

Technology is Hard. That’s the mantra that keeps many teachers from reaching out and really exploring technology tools in their classroom.  It’s hard to manage 30 students when they all have a laptop in hand. It’s hard to integrate it meaningfully because the activities need to have structure and guidance to be successful. It’s hard to step aside and hope that your goals are met when you no longer are on center stage in the front of the room.

This week, Mathew Needleman’s post entitled “Five Reasons Why We Aren’t Integrating Technology in School” listed the reasons technology often isn’t incorporated into the learning cycle. It’s a good list and one that will resonate with many technology coaches, teachers, and administrators.  But like any list of reasons, it could quickly become a list of excuses that lead down the road to inaction.  Matthew asked for solutions to his reasons and I know there are great ones out there, but I’m going to take a different turn.  I’d like to turn the tables and use his list to rationalize why we should stop using textbooks in the classroom.  I’ve already argued previously about the dangers of allowing students unfiltered access to paper.  This seemed like a natural follow-up…

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The following is an email I sent to our faculty as we begin our 1:1 journey this year.

Enjoy.

To: CHS Faculty

From: Michelle

For those of you who are teachers of freshmen, the day is fast approaching when a class full of students will walk into your classroom with a laptop in their hand.  The first laptops will go home with the students in D period Computer Applications on Tuesday and the remainder of the students will receive their laptops on Wednesday.

That means that as soon as Thursday, every student who walks through your door will have at their fingertips a machine that can be the most powerful learning tool they’ll ever own.

24 hours a day.
7 days a week.
All year long.

But remember, it’s only a machine.  It can’t think, plan, organize, create, or inspire on its own.  All of those things require a good teacher–that’s where you come into the mix.

This summer, we spent a busy week trying to prepare ourselves for this change.  I know that many of you did even more preparation in the time between our Digital Learning Summer Institute and the first day of school.  Now, the time to put all that planning into play is here.  If you’re still wondering how you’re going to make it work, don’t worry.

We’re all in this together.

I’ve spent a lot of time myself this summer talking to teachers in 1:1 schools, asking them what advice they’d give you on your first days.  Here are the words they selected just for you:

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When we began preparing for our laptop program rollout, teachers were excited but a bit nervous.  One thing we’ve tried to do is give them a chance to communicate with us and with one another about the challenges they see in the year ahead.  We began a Google Doc for them to use to share their questions, fears, and frustrations as they thought about how their classroom would change after our 1:1 rollout.

One topic where lots of questions arose was how to manage a classroom in which every student had their own laptop.  What would happen, they asked, when students weren’t paying attention, were using laptops to cheat on tests, were too busy chatting online to contribute to classroom discussions?  What about students who forgot their laptop, didn’t charge them before class, or had a problem serious enough to render their laptop inoperable?

During our Digital Learning Summer Institute, teachers got a chance to think more about these questions and how their own teaching style would mesh with managing a 1:1 classroom.  Here’s how we got the conversations started…

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