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!
