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?