Going 1:1
Part 1: Reconnaissance
In the Fall of 2012 grades 6-8 at Rocky Hill School, a private K-12 day school of around 300 students in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, began a 1:1 ipad initiative. Each student was issued a school owned and controlled iPad at the beginning of the year. The effort to make this happen was not haphazard or forced by external factors, though of course those existed, but instead a result of internal circumstances, sound planning and good timing. It didn’t always feel that way as we were going through it, but in retrospect we got a lot more right than we got wrong. Here’s what we did.
Stage 1- Reconnaissance
It was easy to see the deficit. Rocky Hill’s high school had, by the time I arrived in 2011 as a first-time Technology Director, a 10 year old 1:1 laptop program. That program was atypical in that it originated as a combined implementation of tablet laptops with Harkness tables. Tablet laptops were chosen so that the devices could be laid flat on the Harkness tables for note taking during a discussion. By the time I arrived, obviously, that program was part of the institutional fabric, though it had evolved into a BYOL program where students could bring either a Mac or a Windows laptop for use throughout the day.
The Elementary grades at Rocky Hill had just received a set of 30 or so iPad 2s to supplement its aging computer lab. That initiative was barely underway when I joined the community in the summer of 2011, but it was a direction that had been chosen and the faculty wasn’t resisting it as far as I could tell. The middle school, however, had only its own aging computer lab and 3 Smartboards with no plans or vision to go beyond that. To an outsider or a new person, the deficit was glaring.
How were we going to fill that gap? I imagined a Rocky Hill student coming into Kindergarten and progressing through to their Senior year. What sort of access to technology would they have? K-5 they’d have a lab and iPads. A lot of possibilities there. For grades 9-12 they’d have a laptop. In the middle? Well, with special permission they could bring a laptop, but there was no programmatic incentive to do so and the teachers made no lesson plans that leveraged the power of those devices since not everybody had one. What would that hypothetical student have to say about technology in the middle school? Not much!
The situation was ripe for change.