Dock Your Fear of Change, Love or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love 1:1

Tweet

For my COETAIL course, I have been asked to reflect on the use of laptops in my classroom. I know that I'm lucky to be at a school that has a 1:1 laptop program (each student has their own laptop to use in class and at home) and a great IT support department that deals with problems efficiently and effectively. I also know that there are a lot of teachers out there that can't even imagine what it would be like to have a classroom in which every student had their own laptop. However, as an ICT teacher, I've never really had to teach classes that didn't have computers. Though this is the first school that I've worked at that has had a 1:1 program, I've always had a computer lab as my classroom. So for me, I find it hard to imagine my students not having access to computers.

For those that might just be entering a 1:1 environment or for those still not at ease with managing this in their classrooms, I will try to talk about a few of the challenges I've had and strategies that I've used with students having laptops in the classroom.

Probably my biggest annoyance of a 1:1 program is that most modern laptops are not designed to keep their charge through a full day of tetherless working. This means that there are typically cords running around the classroom so, strangely enough, I tend to manage more safety issues than you would likely think necessary in a regular classroom. It's not a huge problem but I recommend you have an adequate number of power points available to prevent the number of taut cords around the room just waiting to trip students (or teachers).

A challenge that most teachers face with a 1:1 program is maintaining students' attention when those glowing screens are just so enticing for students to looks at. Why should they listen to their teacher when they have access to the whole world right at their fingertips? I have a few different ways that I deal with this. Firstly, make sure that you give clear instructions. If you don't want the students to have their screens active, tell them so.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Photo from Flickr - Some rights reserved by Jenser (Clasix-Design)"][/caption]

It's gotten to the point for me that as I'm giving the instructions, some students will finish the instruction for me. "Everybody, let's take a break. Close your screens..." I say, with the students then taking over, "right down to the keys." It seems childish but if there is even a centimetre of space between the screen and the keyboard, I'll see students slowly pry open their laptops without realizing it, like a junkie looking for a fix. Once you've got their screens off, say what you need to say then shut up. Despite my opinions to the contrary, I do not spew forth with endlessly entertaining things to say. Laptops or not, say what you need to say and then either let the students do the talking or get them back to their work. This leads me to another point about laptop management: organization and resources.

I find it essential to have all relevant information available in one central location. In my case, our school's portal (Microsoft Sharepoint) is the hub that binds all the information for my courses together. Whether the content is hosted on the portal, as a Google Doc, or some other external website, my students know that they can get to all the information from that main wiki page. Also, just as you would in a classroom sans laptops, having expected outcomes for the lesson can help keep your students on track. For example, if students know that they need to have two designs for their project finished by the end of the lesson, then they're less likely to be off task with other websites or Skype, etc. until they've completed the goal. This isn't 100% effective but, be honest with yourself, when you're doing your own work, do you completely ignore email or Facebook or Twitter? Yes, there are programs, like DyKnow, that can block access to sites like these but personally, I think it's best to teach students how to deal with these distraction effectively rather than trying to pretend like they don't even exist.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Don't Accept That Digital Dogs Ate Their Digital Homework (Photo from Flickr - Some rights reserved by zoomar)"][/caption]

Another challenge with laptop use, and the subsequent increased dependence on digitally produced assignments, is the range of different excuses that have replaced, "The dog ate my homework." This may be tough for some teachers to do but it's OK to have a zero tolerance policy with students about losing their work or not being able to find their file. Every program has a save option that, if not automatic, can easily be used in less than two seconds. And every file can be backed up. Get your students using cloud storage solutions like Dropbox or Google Docs. I remind my students at the end of every lesson to back up their work; especially when deadlines are fast approaching. Expect students to take care of their digital work just as you'd expect them to take care of their tangible (paper, etc.) work.

Finally, some teachers may be threatened by the fact that their students have access to a whole world of information and could, at any time, prove the teacher wrong. If you consider a student showing enough initiative, inquisitiveness and ability to prove you wrong, then it's time for you to choose another career because you obviously don't understand the point of being a teacher. There could be no greater experience in a classroom than having students use their inquiry skills to seek out information and challenge an opinion rather than simply regurgitating facts.

I'm sure that this doesn't even cover a fraction of the questions and concerns teachers might have about managing a 1:1 laptop program in their classroom but hopefully it helps you understand that its not as unmanageable as it may seem. When it comes down to it, having laptops in the classroom doesn't really change classroom management strategies. If a teacher already has difficulty with classroom management, then the presence of laptops in the classroom may magnify any holes that previously existed but if a teacher is well planned and has a good relationship with their students then laptops can take learning outside of the classroom and open it up to the rest of the world.

 

The Forecast Calls for Customization

Tweet

In a recent article by Meris Stansbury, she quotes, Julie Mathiesen, with tongue planted firmly in cheek,  as saying, “The current Industrial Age system of education is working perfectly if you’re looking for 25 percent skilled and 75 percent unskilled students." As we move away from being an industrial society and the focus shifts to information management, we as educators need to prepare students for the uncertain and rapidly-changing world that lies ahead.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="500" caption="Terminator Glasses Are a Reality (Photo from Flickr - Some rights reserved by Dunechaser)"][/caption]

With one time Hollywood dreams becoming a reality, the idea that anything is possible is looking more and more like a reality. So what will education look like in five, ten, fifteen years time? If I were a betting man, I would probably say that the safe bet would be that education systems won't be tremendously different than they are now. Sure, textbooks may be accessed through tablets and maybe students will be posting more of their work online to share it in blogs or videos or Voicethreads but ultimately, these are just fancier ways of doing the same thing that's been done for as long as anyone can remember. Education can be transformed, can be changed and can evolve with technologies that already exist. Some likely obstacles that may be preventing this include tight budgets or poorly managed boards of education. Ultimately though, the biggest roadblock probably comes down to six simple words: "It's always been done this way."

As a grand oversimplification, people do not like change. Every time Facebook makes a change, there seems to be an endless stream of statuses deriding it and websites devoted to ways of 'getting the old Facebook back.' There are just so many people involved in the various education systems around the world that it's difficult to actually implement any change. It's the same reason Kodak filed for bankruptcy. It's not as if they couldn't see that film was on the way out and digital was the way forward. Unfortunately, they were just too heavily invested in their existing model and turning around a lumbering dinosaur is no mean feat. The education system is in a similar position. The current system is not going to be effective for supporting learning with the obvious digital shift that is happening in the world. Rather than dwell on the fact that I don't actually think the education system will change much in the next fifteen years or so, I'll take this opportunity to talk about customized learning and how it could be key to successful learning in the future.

For the most part, many schools and teachers still use a one size fits all model of education. The other day, my wife, who teachers year 4 (ages 8-9ish), said to me, "Before NIST, I never differentiated Math for my students based on their 'where they're at' with their understanding. Now, I write at least five different Math lessons each day for a range of students' abilities and I can't imagine not doing that anymore." It's funny how something can seem so daunting at first but once you've started doing it, it becomes natural and even gets to a point where you can't believe you weren't doing this before. In a recent article by Shantanu Sinha, President of Khan Academy, he quotes a video game company CEO as saying, "If we build a game in which someone is demotivated or disengaged for 45 seconds, we know we need to improve." People, especially young people, expect constant stimulation from a range of sources. And what industry has more experience in maintaining constant engagement than the video game industry?

Video games provide almost constant stimulation for the mind and, to an increasing degree, the body. When a person plays a video game, they are left to their own devices to progress and improve through the game towards an end goal.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="165" caption="My custom Mii (Frighteningly Accurate)"][/caption]

The player may decide that they need to defeat more enemies to gain combat experience or they may decide to collaborate with other networked players to join together to accomplish a particular task. Whatever they decide, they are doing so themselves with a specific and known goal in mind. Their path through the game is unique from every other player's path. At their own pace, players aim for continual improvement with aspirations of mastery. From custom avatars in these games to customized home screens to customized running shoes, people are getting more and more used to a world which is becoming more and more custom tailored to their interests.

I think the current estimate says that information doubles every 1-1.5 years (though IBM said that number could be closer to 11 hours!). The idea of teaching the same content to every student is just not a reasonable expectation anymore. "But wait!" you say, "students need to know about The American Civil War or Niels Bohr's contributions to quantum mechanics or Who Shot J.R.!" While personally, I think that students are richer for knowing such things, the fact is that they'll do just fine if they don't know it. This is simply content and content is abundant. You just need to know where to get it. Putting learning in a conceptual and context based approach in which students can use knowledge to solve problems that are relevant to them will be key to developing dynamic, adaptable learners that the future will need.

This Thursday, Google is taking a big and, from my point of view, logical step forward in unifying their privacy policy to have one single privacy policy across their entire product line. Their greatest motivation behind this is to better identify everything you do across the web to offer you more tailored services which, if done right, should provide users with a more enjoyable and relevant online experience (not to mention allowing them to provide more effective advertising and line their shareholders' pockets). With this kind of behavioural analysis possible, I'll leave this post with a question.  Could Should schools try to take Google's lead and collect usage statistics in an effort to help deliver each student with a custom tailored educational experience? Discuss.

 

Not So Easy to Flip Your Mid(dle Years Classes)

Tweet

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="216" caption="Click Image to Enlarge"][/caption]

If there's one thing I can credit the COETAIL program for, it's for getting me to think and reflect on my teaching and my thoughts about different teaching styles and techniques. A lot of those reflections have appeared in previous blog posts and have seemed appropriate and organic with what was going on with my teaching at the time. As I work through the fourth course of the COETAIL program, we've been asked to more specifically target the subjects of our blog posts based on an assigned weekly subject. Typically, these writing prompts have been helpful but this has actually been a bit challenging for me with the week three requirement of blogging about the flipped classroom. I have my opinions about the flipped classroom (if you're not up to date on what a flipped classroom is, check here for an infographic overview) but I feel like I've already blogged about a flipped classroom in the past and I haven't really had anything new to say about it lately. Then, just the other day, I was looking through the results of an end of trimester survey I had gotten my Year 9s to fill out and just like that, I had something to write about.

The students had worked through a unit that involved using Scratch to make an interactive quiz about social media. As a test to see how responsible my Year 9s could be about their own learning (and because we had lost a couple of lessons from the floods late last year), I decided that after one lesson of explaining some of the basics of Scratch, I would leave it to them to follow the well produced tutorials on the Learn Scratch website. I gave them a list of all the available lessons on that site, indexed by name and number and recommended ones that would be useful. Most lessons would take, on average, 2-5 minutes to work through. Students had about two months before they needed to use the skills so, had they even done one lesson per night, they should have had more than enough time to get through them. Every lesson, I would remind them that the online tutorials needed to be completed by the time they started in Scratch but, I wish I could say it was entirely unexpected, by the time they needed to know those skills, there were very few students who had been responsible enough to have gone through the tutorials on their own.

Why did the survey remind me of this? Well, in the open comments section which asked for suggestions for improving the course, there were a number of students who mentioned that they wished that I had taught them Scratch more explicitly and not just assigned the tutorials. Though it can be quite complicated if you need it to be, Scratch is generally a fairly easy program to work with. When it came time to create their quizzes, within half a lesson, I had taught the students enough skills to allow them to create their interactive quizzes. Not surprisingly though, the students who had worked their way through the tutorials tended to include more advanced features (like effective scorekeeping, for example) and were able to solve more problems on their own. So I have some personal evidence to support that this flipped approach can work.

Learn more about this project
(Note: You may need to zoom in your browser to see the full content of this quiz)

So what does this mean with regards to my thoughts on the flipped classroom approach? Well, a lot of the literature being written about the flipped classroom - like this article about flipping Stanford classrooms -  tends to be in reference to university or upper level classes (A-Level, IB Diploma, etc.). At that level, most  many students have started to take a more active role in selecting courses of interest to them which, I think, makes it easier for them to get interested in learning more outside of the traditional classroom. In the middle school years, students are more than capable of learning from a video tutorial but it's a matter of motivation and desire.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="277" caption="Kids Should Still Be Kids Some rights reserved by Hamed Saber"][/caption]

Many students still seem to struggle with planning, foresight, and seeing the bigger picture when it comes to a project. It seems that no matter how many reminders I gave them, for most of them, there was still a disconnect between learning the skills and having to apply the skills a few weeks later. So far, in my experience with using video tutorials and other student guided learning at a middle year level, these seem to work well for reinforcing things that I have already taught in the classroom. If students forget how to do something but know they've been taught it before, they seem more willing to follow a video tutorial than if it is a completely new concept or skill.

In conclusion, while I think that the flipped classroom is a good idea for upper years, I'm skeptical that it could be successfully integrated into most younger, middle year classrooms. And why should it? Sadly, I know that some students spend hours and hours working on assignments for my classes, as students either struggle with the material or set unrealistic goals for the given timeframe of their project but ultimately, I don't want my students taking too much of their non-school time to do these things. These kids are only 10-14 years old. They'll have plenty of time to work too much. For now, they need to enjoy being kids and I'm happy to try to to do my part to help them do just that!