Going 1:1 with iPads part 5- Which apps?

In parts 1-4 we’ve detailed the steps taken to decide upon and prepare for a 1:1 iPad initiative at Rocky Hill School, a PreK-12 private school in East Greenwich, RI.  In Part 5 we’re looking at what apps we wanted students to have on the iPads.

Angry Birds was our greatest fear

Angry Birds was my greatest fear. We were putting iPads into the hands of every Middle School student at Rocky Hill then sending them off to classrooms that had never been 1:1 before. Wanting this initiative to succeed, we had to think about what we didn’t want to insert into the teaching environment along with these devices. At that time, Angry Birds was enemy number 1.

The uber-addictive bird slingshotting game, perfectly suited to the wonderful touchscreen of an iPad, can hold sway over almost anybody and trump the efforts of anything or anyone else for attention.  We didn’t want it (or games like it) in the classrooms while teachers acclimated to a room full of iPad wielding students.

Needing to keep Angry Birds at bay meant that Rocky Hill needed to own and control the iPads.  If students brought their own iPads or were issued a school-owned iPad that didn’t have profiles controlling what went on it, then any app could come into our classrooms. Better for us to be control freaks for a few years while the initiative got rolling.  Then we could loosen the reins later and let students have more or even complete control because, by then, we’d really know what we were doing pedagogically.

The Core Apps

So, which apps did we want? You’ve probably used an iPad that’s got too many apps on it.  It’s overwhelming for an experienced, enthusiastic technology user, let-alone a neophyte. The apps that came on every iPad in 2012- Notes, Calendar, Mail, etc.- weren’t going to cut it either.  They were too few in number and too limited in capability.  We were going to have to choose more apps for our iPads, and we would need to choose wisely.

Keeping the focus on teaching and learning makes some of these decisions easier.  As students go through their school days, what are the main activities they will use their iPads for? These won’t be brand-new activities, not at first anyway.  They’ll be the usuals: note-taking, presentations, writing, reading, research and focused skill-building in areas such as math and reading. Recently coding has joined this list of the basics.

For some of these purposes choosing a single app makes sense.  For other purposes, such as presenting, students will need a variety of apps. What began to emerge in our minds was the Core Apps concept. Every iPad in all three grades would have the same subset of apps that were central, or at least applicable, to every subject.

Note-taking, for example, is something many students learn for the first time in middle school.  It is often part of the middle-grades curriculum, or (in my view) it should be.  The faculty needed to decide on a good app for note-taking and use it across the board.  As we taught note-taking we would teach it within the context of the Core App we had chosen and were all using.   So, the teachers would all need to know that app pretty well, and the all in that statement presented real professional development challenges. However, having collaborated to choose a notetaking app from among several contenders, it would essentially be learning the faculty had chosen for themselves. We had to set a goal for learning to use these apps, then put professional development structures in place to meet that goal. In the end, the app the Rocky Hill Middle School faculty chose was Notability.

Presentation apps were another category. The iPad is most powerful in the way that it ties different apps together via (what was then called) the Camera Roll and other incorporated account connections.  The app/iPad ecosystem, when working in harmony, is an incredibly effective presentation creation tool.   However, getting to the highest levels of what’s possible in that ecosystem requires looking beyond PowerPoint.  In 2012, many in education had not done that. Some industries still haven’t.

There were several contenders for presentation apps, and in the end a couple different ones were chosen. Explain Everything, however, proved to be the most powerful. There was very little, if anything, our students might want to do that couldn’t be done with the app, especially when it was combined with the movie-specific power of iMovie and the results published to Youtube. Here’s an example of what it can do: https://youtu.be/Hb_3LAVIw3k

Other apps didn’t take much time or collaboration to choose.  When a science teacher came forward not just with the desire for a scientific calculator but also with a specific calculator app in mind, that’s the app we went with.  Our librarian had in mind both Easybib, a citation app, and a catalog app produced by our library software company which were easy additions to make.  

On an iPad properly setup for education you can see all of your apps on one screen.

In the summer of 2012, just a few weeks before the 1:1 program went live, we had an outside trainer come in to wow us with a day of structured training.  We were fortunate enough to get one of the founders of EdTechTeacher to our campus for a day.  It was great. While there he said that an iPad properly setup for teaching would have no more apps than could fit on one screen of an iPad.  If you have to swipe across multiple screens to see all your apps, he contended, you had too many.  We did not meet that minimalist threshold, but we almost did.  I was proud of the work we had done getting ready for the iPad 1:1 program.

The year ahead held many successes and challenges for us which I may detail in a future post.  I’ve now laid out the steps we took to get ready for this initiative to rectify the technology deficit that the Rocky Hill Middle School faced in 2011 when I began there.  As we did it I felt at times as though I was simply putting what I’d learned in graduate school at Johns Hopkins and, later, at UCONN, to work. One handout I’d been given details the big-picture fundamentals of the change process. Using it as a template was quite helpful. I’m linking to it here.

Teachers need to be shotcallers

As you plan and approach the go-live date of your initiative, bring teachers into the decision making process at every possible step.  You’ll instill in them a sense of ownership of the initiative and this is the single most powerful indicator of success. Separating professional development from the technology is the biggest mistake you can make.  It can’t be done without hamstringing the effort.

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 with iPads: Stage 2, the device landscape

Stage 2- The Device Landscape

Stage 1 revealed that middle school students at Rocky Hill School, a private K-12 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.  From a curricular perspective this was a real problem. Continuity of access across grades is a minimum requirement. What you want is a progression of access that includes new tools, both hardware and software, appropriate to student (and grade) levels. The integration into instruction and the curriculum can then expand appropriately.

It wasn’t that the middle school had been totally neglected. Two brand new Smartboards had been installed in the Rocky Hill middle school in my first week on the job.  I had seen great things happen in Smartboard classrooms, but only very rarely.  For the most part I had come to agree with Lisa Nielsen  about them; they were not a promising strategic direction for educational technology. In this case, Smartboards wouldn’t increase student access to technology in a meaningful, individualized way. We weren’t going to go farther down that path under my watch.

Furthermore, given the 1:1 program already present in the high school, it made more sense to consider extending the 1:1 level of access down into the middle school.  Alternatively, the middle division could follow the lead of the elementary grades and get a couple of carts worth of mobile devices for student use.  That question- 1:1 or a lower ratio- was just one that needed to be answered.  Another question was which device to go with. Should the middle school fall in line with the high school and use laptops,  model itself after the  lower school and choose iPads or go another direction entirely?

The iPad 2 and the Kindle Fire- rivals in academic settings?

It wasn’t very long ago, but in September 2011 the iPad 2 was a new-ish device. (Strange how a device that’s 6 months old is no longer new in this era)  It’s efficacy as a teaching and learning device was far from fully explored, let alone proven.  The fall of 2011 was when the Kindle Fire came out.  I remember being excited at the possibility of a Kindle with web access that could handle video, since it seemed like a real competitor for the iPad.  Specifically it was Amazon being the company developing it that seemed to hold promise because they are such a strong company and, unlike Apple, focused on keeping prices low. Amazon was also so closely tied to book publishing that it made sense for them to have leverage with textbook companies that other companies wouldn’t. Here again, prices might come down. The thought of a very portable, web enabled device that could easily contain every textbook a student would ever buy was immensely appealing.

There were other tablets out there, though. Dell and Samsung tablets, often running Android, were also options. The problem with these and other Android tablets was that the education software developers had not rallied around the Android platform. What had won me over to the iPad as a possibly strong teaching and learning device was watching a hands-on session at ISTE in June 2011 in which a science educator led other science educators through the lessons he had designed to incorporate the iPad and probes that could be attached to it. These were non-Apple probes transmitting data into a non-Apple app on an iPad. The development community had spoken. The iPad had become one of the mainstay hardware/software platforms, making it a device well worth our consideration.

Those were the questions, but whose answers mattered the most? 

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.