Last week I shared the students’ perceptions regarding the first year of our 1:1 Tablet PC learning initiative, and now it’s time to pass along what the faculty and I have gleaned over the last 10 months.  It’s always challenging to summarize the opinions of educators, but there were a few major points of consistency among our team and several valuable lessons learned.

It All Starts With Deployment

Tablet deployment, otherwise known as Out of the Box Day, is a critical first step and sets the stage for the entire year.  Our approach last August was to address the parents in a large-group setting while the 130 students were broken into three groups and given a 90 minute hands-on introduction to their new Tablet.  Although effective from a logistics perspective, our “divide and conquer” method created inconsistencies in the message/information provided.  To improve, this year we are keeping the adults and students together for the entire deployment.  Everyone will gather together for a few brief remarks regarding the program and then be divided into small groups, parents accompanying their children, to receive the computers.  Our goal is to ensure that everyone is invested in the initiative and on the same page regarding rights and responsibilities, policies and procedures.

Digital Literacy is Effective

The trimester-long Digital Literacy course proved an effective foundation for the 1:1  initiative.  Students enjoyed learning alongside their teachers, OneNote, iFolder, and Interact improved organization, and while not every youth is a digital native, by the end of the year all had achieved some degree of technology fluency.

Although some of the topics were more popular than others (e.g. nearly everyone enjoyed Photoshop but few were enthusiastic about citing sources), all found their way into the seventh grade curriculum at some point during the year:

• OneNote: An Electronic Notebook
• Website Evaluation: Be a Critical Consumer
• Delicious: Social Bookmarking
• Effective Search Strategies: Keywords are Key
• Effective Search Strategies: Alternative Search Engines
• Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons: Rights and Responsibilities
• Photoshop Elements: Basic Image Editing
• Flickr: Photo Sharing Made Easy

The course will be offered again in seventh grade this fall, new teachers and the eighth grade faculty will be invited to attend, and the curriculum will expand to be more inclusive of emerging 21st Century Literacies.  Hopefully at some point in the not too distant future we’ll have outgrown the need for a Digital Literacy course because it will become part of the fabric of our academic program.  Until that time, though, it will continue to exist and evolve to meet the needs of students and teachers alike.

Digital Citizenship is Essential

Our Digital Citizenship program was one of the more challenging aspects of the Tablet PC initiative.  It began with the best of intentions but as the year wore on and the pace of school quickened, it became increasingly more difficult to find time to engage students, teachers, and parents on this vitally important topic.   At present we have an advisory-based foundation  and over the summer the Academic Deans, my Upper School counterpart, and I will develop a spiraled approach for grades 7-9.  The key to success is in engaging all the stakeholders and that is no small task.  Appropriate, responsible behavior is essential, however, and we have an obligation to guide our students down the path of ethical and informed technology use.

Rethinking Curriculum

There have been innumerable articles, essays, blog posts and the like regarding technology integration.  And while there is nothing wrong with integrating technology into the curriculum, a truly contemporary learning environment is only achieved when technology has become integral to the curriculum.  This progression from “adding on” to “embedding” to “integral” requires rethinking the knowledge and skills our students need and leveraging the full potential of a 1:1 environment.  A shift of this magnitude takes considerable time and careful planning, and I hope that in the coming year we can have richer and more frequent conversations regarding teaching and learning.

Moving Forward

The road map for the second year of our program is still being shaped, but it will surely include connecting parents and students during deployment, refining the Digital Literacy course, reviving and expanding Digital Citizenship, and rethinking our approach to curriculum.  The recently completed Academic Technology Plan can guide us in our efforts and I’ll address the importance and potential of that document at a later date.  In the meantime, everyone connected with the program should be congratulated for a job well done; the first year is behind us and we have good things to look forward to this fall.

Posted: 06|1|09 at 1:20 pm. Filed under: 1:1.
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