The Long Road to 1 to 1

At our international school somewhere in Europe, the school has committed itself to a BYOD programme. The trouble is no one can remember how or why the decision came about. The implementation has been entrusted to two of us who are new to the school. We have both come from schools in the Far East where every student and teacher had a Mac, so we both feel that we've seen a model that works.

Our predecessors have not left any documentation about why the decision was made to start with a programme where the Upper School students (the final 4 grades) would all bring a 'device' to class from the next school year, beginning in September 2013. As we have looked at the feasibility of continuing with this thinking, one element at a time has fallen by the wayside. First it became quickly clear that to introduce the programme in less than a year, when no planning or details existed, was unwise. So the new tech team put the brakes on.

We developed a proposal in which the introduction was delayed until 2014, nearly two years hence; the staff would get laptops a year earlier than the students (there had been no planning for staff machines in the old model: not even when the students had mobile devices would teachers be in the same boat); the school would adopt Google Drive to enable teachers and students to work in the cloud; another change to the original proposal was that the devices would be in the hands of all students from Grade 6, and if it were decided to introduce to only one section, it would be to the younger students in the Middle School. We put this proposal in a Google slides show and presented it to the Academic Leaders meeting (these are the heads of each teaching department such as Science or Foreign Languages). The meeting was cordial and receptive, and the next stage was agreed to be feedback once the ALs had put the ideas to their departments. The feedback was copious and overwhelmingly critical of the proposed model. My colleague was particularly discouraged. The few positive points were very general such as 'flexibility' and 'innovation'. The negative remarks were much more prosaic including reservations about charging cables, time to connect to the projector and eye and back problems for laptop users.

These comments also focused exclusively on the teacher's experience. There was no mention of problems students might experience such as the distractions of the Internet, cyber bullying or the potential for cheating (which in my view are things you have to consider). I felt that the nature of the response said a lot about the dynamic in this established conservative institution. In particular, the consultation process seemed to afford an opportunity for moaning rather than a balanced response. It was also clear that there was very little understanding of what 1 to 1 means since very few of the staff, apart from the newest, have any experience of computers in the classroom apart from our dreadful laptop carts and the IT labs which were scrapped a few years ago.

At least this process had enabled the staff to begin to envisage the ways in which the classroom might change. But it was obvious to us that a couple of crucial steps had been skipped when the project was originally discussed. We constructed a list of questions which we felt had to be answered before any decisions could be made about the direction in which the project should go. In addition, we realised that we, new to the school, would have to take account of the nature of the staff whom we are working with.

BYOD is the answer. But what is the question?

As part of the school's Professional Growth process, I have been asked to construct some SMART targets. I don't think the ones I submitted, and had accepted, are very specific etc, but they divide my area of work into three useful questions.

• GOAL 1 - Develop the ICT in Action course for Grades 6 to 8 for the coming years including appropriate skills, knowledge and attitudes for students, identifying the time necessary for the achievement of the goals of the course, the resources and the staff required to deliver the programme.

• GOAL 2 - Assemble resources and construct an environment to enable teachers to develop professionally in using ICT in the classroom and to acquire knowledge of the innovative ways of teaching made possible by new technology.

• GOAL 3 - Contribute to the school's discussion of the implementation of the BYOD policy.

So, the three areas are developing the computer skills of the students; assisting the professional growth of the teachers in their use of computers; and working on the development of ICT for the upper school. The more I think about each of these, the more I realise that they are connected and that other issues are relevant as well. Thus, the direction the school will take with respect to Bring Your Own Device is related to the professional development of the teachers. It looks like the only planning for BYOD which has been done is a declaration that it will happen in September 2013. This year, then, is the preparation year, but without any detail worked out at all. Not only do the parents and teachers not know what is coming, but the school itself does not. Furthermore, not only have no decisions been made for the nature of BYOD, but there is also no declaration as to the direction the school wants to go in. In short, we have said we want BYOD, but we don't know why! From this it follows, that if you don't why you want something, you can't know if your decision is a good one. That's an educational question to which we have already decided that the answer is BYOD, but what's the question? (Shades of Douglas Adams). The shape of our BYOD should be dictated by this discussion and then once it is, other things fall into place, such as what hardware and software do we need to have; how should the hardware be deployed; what should the teachers be able to do, what does PD look like; what does it all mean for the students? Furthermore, once we know where we're going (and given that we do know where we are), we can start to work out how to get there.

The present ICT layout of the school has particular features such as: laptop carts (which are not effective to use, I know from daily experience); every classroom has a high-end smartboard and one desktop on the teacher's desk; the teachers have been inveigled into a scheme of buying their own subsidised tablets. Lots of kit, but what is the plan? Not 'what are the tools?', but 'what is the job which will be done with them?' That is how I am interpreting my Goal 3 right now; to help reverse-engineer a plan for BYOD on the basis of previous decisions which seem to have been made without reference to a big picture.

There is a growing feeling amongst decision-makers, I think, that BYOD needs another year to be full-blown. But the preparations need to be initiated now. 2013 would be year zero, the one before the Big Bang, but even that needs to be anticipated with actions taken in 2012. For a start, I want to get the teachers working on experiencing teaching with a laptop before the students bring them in. With the original plan of BYOD in 2013, there was no provision for teacher devices other than those PCs glued to the front desk.

One idea could be to dismantle some laptop carts (these monstrosities could only be popular with someone who has not tried to use them), and hand out some of the machines to the teachers; the large number of desktops around the place reside largely in corridors and 'workrooms'. In my opinion they would be more effectively deployed in classroom arrangements to which the users would travel rather than the other way around. The problem is that the opposite process has been underway for a couple of years, but the prevailing ideology of out of labs and onto carts hasn't been explained to me. We're going to have to start addressing that right away and deal with the loss of face this may entail. Classrooms with one computer per student is a closer approximation to a 1 to 1 laptop environment than carts which must be fetched and frequently malfunction.

It's an exciting time, and I don't know whether there is the latitude to throw around the pre-conceived arrangements. It can happen, because the plans so far only involve equipment. That can be re-deployed just like that, but the challenge is to persuade everyone that the new plan is not just another random act of technology implementation, but part of a considered plan. From that bigger picture, which relates to my goal 3, we can start to see the form of goal 2 and finally, we can work backwards to goal 1 - what the students should be doing. Wish us luck!

ICTF? WTF?

It's about a month since I started working as an "ICT facilitator" at this international school in Europe. Other schools use titles such as tech integrator, infuser. I was very happy to take on this job, being interested in using computers in the classroom. I don't have any specific computer-based education; just a Physics degree and lots of experience in schools, latterly in a one-to-one laptop environment in the Far East. For the last four years, I have been trying to teach my subjects using as great a variety of computer technology as I could manage. Since I accepted the job, six months before I started here, I have been asking myself and others "What does an ICTF do?" And I still don't know. I think no-one else does either, because there can't be a single way of doing it, it depends on the environment you find yourself in. Sure, the name tells you that the person is facilitating, which implies "making easier", but that's a result not a prescribed activity in itself. How do you achieve this?

Well, I've been casting around, attempting to profit from my status as a blank canvas. What have I been doing? There are about 80 teachers in my department whom I'm charged with facilitating in ICT. Inevitably, there is a wide range of experiences and abilities in using computers in the classroom, as well as a spectrum of positive and negative attitudes. I have undertaken to interview all 80 of the teachers, but have only met about one per day since I started - I intend to accelerate and also maybe to automate the process. I have written a short questionnaire which takes about 30 minutes to administer. It asks four questions:

• Which hardware do you use in your teaching?
• What software do you use in your teaching?
• What is your previous experience of an ICTF?
• What would you like an ICTF to do?

The idea is to get an idea of where the faculty is right now in its technology abilities and where it thinks it wants to go. These are both very interesting questions to help me identify what is expected and what is needed (not necessarily the same things). I haven't proceeded as fast as I wished with this information-gathering, and although the process is revealing and serves to introduce me to every teacher in the school, I'm thinking about automating it either with a survey or getting groups to fill it in in department meetings. I hope I don't have to resort to that: I'll just have to speed up, I guess.

I've also spent a few days out of school visiting three other international schools in the region. This was extremely instructive. I saw schools in various stages of development, applying different solutions according to their circumstances and policies. The process of visiting the schools and chatting with fellow ICTFs and teachers enabled me to think aloud about the various problems and solutions. The people I met have varying experiences and ideas, but in my opinion, we are very far from an agreed paradigm.

One of the issues which our school is shortly to face, and the schools I met already are facing, is what devices to put in the hands of the students. We are committed to a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) arrangement, but that is still pretty open. The principal decision, I think, is whether all of the devices should be the same. Several of my colleagues here, like me, have worked in schools where students were mandated to use an Apple laptop, and we are all pretty happy with the experience. You can imagine how the same model would work with Windows machines or even identical tablets, but the option most seriously under consideration is one in which the devices are not the same. Sometimes I welcome this prospect, at other moments, I agree with the tech director I met who argues that too many classroom activities would devolve to a lowest common denominator of students using word processing. This is the proverbial "expensive pencil". I need to find a school which has tried this and find out how it went.

I have also been working in more reactive ways, helping teachers who seek me out; loaning teachers cameras, microphones etc; teaching MS students a course in "ICT in action". That's the stuff of my job description.

But most of the work so far has been talking and asking questions. Now that I've been here for a month dealing with individuals, it's time to put on a more public face. At the start of next week, I'll issue a newsletter, about the world of ICTF at the school. Amongst other things I'll be inviting teachers to a course on teaching using wikis - the newsletter will also be a wikipage, that being my single favourite teaching technology.

At the end of this month, there are a couple of questions which have struck me as the key to plotting the way forward. They are:

• What are the reasons that make teachers adopt technology in their classrooms (or not)?
• Why is it so difficult to really infiltrate technology into a school? A lot of cash and energy are spent and relatively little is achieved.