The Long Road to 1 to 1 (step 4)

So you go 1 to 1. You give the teachers a laptop; you tell the students they have to bring one too. And that's it. Well, you bring in a LMS but you don't mandate it's use. You make Google Drive available, but again, you send contradictory messages about it (maybe OneDrive would be a better fit). You bring in a couple of tech-focused gurus for workshops. Light the blue touchpaper and stand well back! And...

Picture credit: pixabay

Well, no, nothing like that.

And that's probably for the best. Most people are not revolutionaries, they do not want to live through interesting times. But, on the other hand, if you ask your teachers to make a change (and potentially a big one), you don't want everything to be as it was, or what was the point?

Beforehand, I had encouraged people to think of it as a soft launch, or maybe not even a launch at all, but more like a milestone on the long road to 1 to 1: neither at the beginning nor the end of the journey. There was a couple of reasons for this. Many staff were fearful of the change, so it might settle their nerves to know that there would not be an expectation immediately to be functioning at a high level of technical expertise. Secondly, we were badly prepared: LMS, online storage, PD, the infrastructure are all sort-of present, but practically, each is insufficient in one way or another. Let's not point fingers (I'm sure I am implicated too), rather I am interested in how a school can up its game and become a good learning environment once the physical fact of 1 to 1 is established.

Our teaching staff are experienced educators and many have been at this place for a long time. They knew what they were doing before 1 to 1 came along. They have not been asked to do anything very different. Furthermore, there is an existing content-rich curriculum many elements of which have been in place for a long time and are not showing any moves towards retirement. So putting a layer of mobile devices on top will not, in itself, change anything. Not many of the teachers has worked elsewhere in a 1 to 1 environment, so there is not a lot of pressure from that direction, and those who have worked in 1 to 1 tend to operate in their own little isolated pockets (generally, when they try to inject some new ideas into the system this is not well-received; hence the pockets).

It's the job of the Facilitator to make a difference - and that's me and my colleague.

No-one will change the way they do things unless they see a reason to do it. So what could motivate our teachers to make the effort and go through a process of change? The problem, in my view, is that they do not know what the goal looks like. The world of educational technology is full of high-flown notions:

"Teachers use their knowledge of subject matter, teaching and learning, and technology to facilitate experiences that advance student learning, creativity, and innovation in both face-to-face and virtual environments. 

a. Promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness."

 (ISTE Standards for Teachers, 2008)

Hard to disagree, but what does that mean in practice? So I started looking for something which described more concretely than the ISTE Standards what it is we think we are doing? And I can't find it! At the other end of the spectrum are accounts of what people are doing in their individual classrooms. Great, but also not what I'm looking for. Nor do we need any more lists of '10 tools you can't possibly live without'. No, what I am working towards is a way to give some teachers who have never seen one a big and detailed picture of what a 1 to 1 classroom can be.

And if you can't even do that, then you really have done nothing more than just put some computers into some rooms.

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.