Going 1:1 with iPads. Stage 4 Teacher Preparation

Going 1:1 with iPads part 4

In Parts 1, 2 and 3 we described the context and steps taken to choose a 1:1 iPad initiative at Rocky Hill School, a PK-12 day school in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.  Our direction decided, it was time to prepare faculty for the coming 1:1 teaching and learning environment. The teachers knew a bit about using iPads and apps, but as I saw it we had 3 things we needed to do.

1. Get the teachers access to iPads as soon as possible.

2. Train the teachers on how to use iPads to at least a proficient level.

3. Choose the apps that would be on the iPads.

The first one was straight forward.  We purchased  iPads for all Middle School teachers and administrators in late February 2012 and got them into teacher hands by early March.  Each teacher also got a $25 iTunes gift card to make app purchases.

The second and third steps were trickier.  How do you train and support teachers who are learning a new technology during* the school year?   Here’s where you should ask for what you really want from the people who can give it to you.  In all of this my primary ally was the Middle School Head.  Without his support, this initiative couldn’t happen.  However I knew I would be asking a lot of him because the way I saw this working was for Middle School faculty meeting time to be set aside for iPad training very regularly, preferably every week from March through June.  It was, as I saw it, a Professional Learning Community (PLC) tasked with learning about iPad pedagogy.

Time is the currency of change.

iPad pedagogy has several parts. One, obviously, is using the devices for teaching and learning. Another part is dealing with technical issues and varying levels of student technical comfort. In a 1:1 environment teachers need to be comfortable providing some level of tech support, or there will be an unevenness to technology use across subjects.  They don’t have to know a lot, but they are on the front lines and, for example, shaping their classroom rules to incentivize students to have a fully charged battery every morning is one step they must take. It’s mundane but fundamental. Teachers must also try to actively help students who are having a wide variety of technical issues. Again, they don’t need to go deep- they just need to engage enough to show a commitment to the use of the devices. Teachers need to be comfortable enough with technology themselves to engage this way, though they don’t need to actually fix much.  It’s a deceptively high bar, though, given the technology self-perceptions that some teachers cling to.

As the Technology Director with a training background, I knew that I could provide all of the training if necessary.  However, that wasn’t how we wanted this PLC to work. With the Middle School Head agreeing to making iPad training an integral part of every week’s faculty meeting, I proposed that the faculty take turns doing the training.  One week I would present on a topic such as moving content from one iPad app to another using the Camera Roll.  The next week the history teacher would train us on how to turn a web page into a PDF that could be opened in iBooks or another PDF reader. The week after that an English teacher would be our learning leader.  This again put ownership of the initiative into the teacher’s hands, allowing them to help steer it and shape it into something truly their own.

Younger people universally excel only at those technologies that are intertwined with their social lives.

This was an admittedly sneaky approach to achieving an under-articulated reality of technology integration; if your assignment requires students to use a technology tool you need to teach them how to use that tool.  Many adults believe that younger people are experts with all technology.  This isn’t the case. The only technologies younger people universally excel at are those that their social lives depend on.  For other technologies, say, presentation software, student ability levels vary widely.

The upshot for teachers is that they need to teach the software and services their students are using. Some groups may not need much, but a couple of students in any class will benefit from direct instruction.  What better way to have teachers prepare to deliver tech instruction to students, and further own this initiative, than having them deliver it to each other? 

With the question of how to prepare teachers answered, only one remains: What apps should student iPads have on them?  Stay tuned for part 5.

*Mired in the consideration of how professional development integrates with technology initiatives (or any initiative for that matter) is my professional conclusion that, whenever possible, PD should happen during the school day during the school year.  Don’t say it won’t work, that there is no time.  PD needs to be prioritized and never separated from the purchase or adoption of technology. If you want your initiative to truly flourish, make preparing for it part of the contracted day and year. This shows it the respect and gives it the priority it deserves.

How we did it-Going 1:1 with iPads: Stage 3, Teacher Buy-in

Going 1:1- Stage 3- Faculty buy- in.

Stages 1 and 2 revealed that middle school students at Rocky Hill School, a private PreK-12 (previous posts left off the PreKs- How could I forget the cutest students of all?) day school of around 300 students in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, didn’t have much access to technology, at least compared to the students in the lower and upper schools.  The germane questions emerging from the Recon and Device Landscape stages were: what ratio of technology did the middle school need, what device made the most sense and finally, who should decide the answers to these questions?

Jumping straight to the third question, any education initiative, if it is to succeed, needs teacher buy-in and ownership.  There is no better way to impart those things than to let the teachers make as many of the decisions as possible.  A technology director’s role, as a choice is being made, is to facilitate by providing information and working out the approval and financial details with the rest of the administration.  After that my responsibilities would be to support the two tines of the fork any Ed Tech initiative has.  One tine is the technology itself. The other is the people- teachers, students and administrators- who are carrying it out.   

In October or November of 2011 I attended a middle school faculty meeting and brought the first question to them.  What ratio of technology did they want?  I wasn’t sure what to expect since I didn’t know them very well.  I saw their technology-deficit standing in relation to the other divisions, but did they?  Two of the most veteran and respected teachers chimed in, indicating that they perceived the same deficit I had and had been suffering from it. They felt it was their division’s turn to be the center of attention.

Making a Bold Move

One of the veteran teachers also speculated that carts filled with shared devices- whatever they were- would not work well in the Rocky Hill Middle School context.  How would a math teacher use iPads that were only temporarily available to the class before another class needed to use them?  How would an English teacher use a set of Kindle Fires to study a novel if the Fires had to be in someone else’s classroom the next day? It could be done, but it didn’t sound like a large improvement over current circumstances. As she spoke, and afterward when there were no objections from others, it became clear that for this middle school a cart or two of devices would be a half step or partial gesture. If they were going to be the center of attention, why not make a bold move?

Which device was right for us?

As part of that meeting I held up and talked about the Kindle Fire. We passed it around.  I told them why we needed to consider it, starting with the potential health benefits.  (For those of you who haven’t been in a middle school for a while, you should know that student backpacks can get enormously heavy and large, at least in relation to the students. The sight at the end of a school day of a 4’6” student swinging a 20+ lb. backpack around would be comical if it weren’t such a worry. If all or most of our textbooks could be electronic, it would help alleviate that situation.) I encouraged the teachers to each take the Fire home for a few nights, to read a magazine on it, browse the web and  try to picture students in their classes all having one.  

A few weeks later I attended another Middle School meeting and we debriefed about the Fire.  Several of them had taken it home. Nobody had fallen in love with it.  The screen was small, highly reflective and the user interface was a little clunky. There was no camera either. The consensus was that we were going to choose a device, but this probably wasn’t the one. It was then that I offered up the possibility of them taking  Lower School iPads (we had a cart of 20 or so) home with them for the Christmas break.  They’d have two weeks of unfettered access to familiarize themselves with the device. The only requirement was that they use it, preferably daily, to get used to the interface and the apps ecosystem. There being little to object to, they agreed and each of them left for break with an iPad and charger

So what's it going to be?

By now I knew the iPad was the right device for Rocky Hill.  Based on the apps I had discovered and the battery life I had been experiencing with the one I carried around, I knew that going 1:1 with iPads  was the right move for Rocky Hill.  How would I convince the faculty of that if the Christmas break trial didn’t?

It turned out I didn’t need to worry. In mid January when the Middle School met I had a spot on their agenda and a Google Slides deck ready to make the case for choosing the iPad.  When we got to my agenda item, however, the conversation jumped quickly to the question of how we could go 1:1 iPads effectively, not whether we should.  The faculty had gotten familiar with the device and made up their minds.  Nobody spoke out against it. I never showed a single slide of that deck.  

In Part 4- How do you effectively prepare for a 1:1 technology initiative?

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.