What the 1 to 1 classroom has taught me

"Despite their growing popularity, laptops may be doing more harm in classrooms than good." (Mueller and Oppenheimer, 2014)

This grandiose conclusion was drawn when the authors tested groups of students taking notes either on laptops or longhand. "Those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who took notes with their laptops." (Professor Cindy May, Scientific American).

At least two important questions went unaddressed:

1. Were the subjects in the experiment equally experienced in paper and electronic note-taking? If not, maybe you are actually measuring their aptitude with the medium.


2. What do you mean by 'classrooms'? In the experiments, only podium lecturing was tested (recorded TED talks and verbatim reading of scripts). That's not what the classrooms look like in the schools I know.

What have I learned from 1-to-1?

In nearly all of the lessons I have taught since 2008, the students have used devices for nearly all of the time. Before then, not at all. I changed abruptly because my school did and I was interested to see how far I could take the new model.

You may be an interesting teacher, but you can't compete with the Internet

One sees the truth of this even in staff meetings if teachers have their device lids up. They are not paying proper attention because your brain can't process two information streams at once. In lessons, it's the same. When I talk to my students, I insist they should not be looking at their screens. A strategy which works for me has been to organise my class as an 'inverted horseshoe' with desks around the edge of the room, laptops facing outwards. This means that when I talk to the group, I can ask the students to face me and turn their backs on their screens.

And then I shut up so that they can get on with it. Ergonomically it's an advantage too. When the students are all working, I can stand in the middle of the room and get to anyone quickly. Not every colleague has been convinced, but it works for me.

You are already an expert

I had been teaching Physics for several years before I landed in a 1-to-1 classroom. The internet had become a cornucopia of excellent teaching materials. There were assessments, simulations and videos; there were resources produced by great teachers, inspired students and world-renowned physicists. I started a wiki and embedded, linked and organised all of the assets I had found, but after I had planned my courses there were many I hadn't used even though I knew they would be great for the students. I took a step back from my role as gatekeeper. I flung back the gate. No! I took it off its hinges. In their own time, the students who wanted to know more browsed the wiki and found materials which suited their learning style and because it was online, the site also welcomed up to 5 000 visitors per day.

1-to-1 intimidates many teachers because they assume that students are more comfortable with devices than adults. This may be true, but it's not important. A teacher is an expert explainer; he is knowledgeable about his subject; he knows good teaching ideas when he sees them. A good teacher who doesn't use technology (yet) is still a good teacher. Technology is just another tool he should use to become the best teacher he can be.

Let go

So technology enabled me to improve what I was giving to my students. It also freed me to interact with them in my version of the flipped classroom. Some of the instruction was flipped to the home, but more importantly, it was flipped to the virtual classroom I had made. As the students learned from my curated resources, I could spend time with those who needed support.

To do this, I had to trust in the students' wish to learn. I wasn't standing at the front commanding their constant attention. What they were doing instead is still called note-taking, but it only vaguely resembles the activity which Scientific American said laptops don't do well. Alongside their text, students dragged in images and graphs straight from the wiki. They added photos of my sketches on the whiteboard; links to my curated videos; their own found resources (which we could then add to the wiki).

open up the kitchen and the larder, not just the dining room

The traditional classroom is like a restaurant. The visitors consume what the chef produces because she has the knowledge and expertise. But what if the clientele were allowed to choose ingredients from the shelves and then prepared their own meals under the tutelage of the chef? Of course it's inconceivable; the result might be nourishing, but is unlikely to be sophisticated. This, however, is what we have done to the classroom when we gave the students access to the same resources the teachers have (but not the expertise). The metaphor sounds outrageous, which shows what a radical change education has seen.

Of course, if all we do is try to use devices to replicate the activities which were developed for paper, we will, like Professor May, be disappointed by them.

Learn design theory - then follow your heart

It's so easy to create your own new blog or website: a handful of clicks to give it a cool name, choose a groovy template, create some pages or posts and suddenly you are an author publishing on the web. I've done it many times, but I sometimes later regret my initial aesthetic decisions. Maybe I went with the defaults and my blog looks too much like all of the others; alternatively, perhaps I threw together a palette of colours which I later feel doesn't marry with the message I want my audience to take away.

[caption id="attachment_153" align="alignright" width="300"] The blog before I changed it[/caption]

In a previous post, I described how I initially decided on the look for my Knower's Arc blog. Now everything has to change: function, layout, appearance and content. It's nice when you get it right at the start (which I didn't). Otherwise you need to intervene and fix it. Here goes.

a new function

There are two ways in which I generate material for my Theory of Knowledge course: I create online slideshows to support the teaching and I collect online stimuli to inspire student presentations. I would like to curate all of these materials in one place. Thus, the blog needs to acquire pages where my resources will live.

[caption id="attachment_154" align="alignleft" width="300"] Now it's a blogsite[/caption]

a new layout

I considered a few alternatives (Google sites, Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, Wikispaces, Squarespace...) but eventually decided to stay put on Blogger rather than re-build the site from scratch. Beside the existing blog and tag cloud, I have created pages to house resources for each of the main topics (about 20). It's pretty text heavy, but that seemed to me the most efficient way for all of the links to be on the homepage. The categories are based on the course organisation which all of its users understand. You can't tell, maybe, but there were many versions of the layout before I arrived at this which works best for me. I also changed the picture but I couldn't say why I chose the new one. It looked right.

a new appearance

[caption id="attachment_155" align="alignright" width="300"] Goethe's wheel connects colour and emotion[/caption]

Leonardo, Newton and Goethe all had theories which expressed their beliefs about what colour is and the emotion it evokes. They did not agree. None of them knew anything about hexadecimal colour codes which reduce all colour to a logical system understood by websites. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed by modern designers that colour and emotion are related. Do all cultures react the same way to colours though? Some research suggests not. So maybe someone's colour theory tells us more about the person than about colour itself. If you're going to break the rules, though, it's better to know them.

My first colour scheme combined colours from van Gogh's paintings. I suppose I thought that one of art's great aesthetic sensibilities couldn't be wrong, but why should that work for an entirely different purpose? Time to try something different. I'm not going to use someone else's palette. I'll make my own.

[caption id="attachment_156" align="alignright" width="300"] Paletton.com's wheel is based on logic[/caption]

Paletton.com is an amazing free tool. This is my chance to play with it. I used it to make some themes.

1. Monochromatic blue based on a tone in the banner photo which I sampled with the excellent ColorZilla Chrome extension.


2. Triad yellow based on van Gogh's sunflowers + two adjacent colours chosen by eye).


3. Triad purple based on the colour of my Physics website + two distant colours chosen by eye.


4. Tetrad of colours separated by Golden Ratio.

Flick through the slides to see the four schemes I tried.

In this process, I have learned a lot about colour; triads and tetrads; brightness, saturation and hue. In the end though, I will use the green theme just because it looks right to me. The colours are quite restful which I think may be due to their proximity in the wheel (but it's an emotional rather than a rational choice). I am too close to the result to judge whether it is actually an upgrade.

What I have learned about resources which are created online is that they are never finished. If you look at the KA blog today, you will probably see a different version from the one below.

[caption id="attachment_159" align="aligncenter" width="1335"] The final version for now[/caption]

Enjoy That Amazing Cloud Moment

Many times I have seen people during their Cloud Moment. This is the instant when it dawns on them that storing files online can change your working life for the better. Suddenly they see:

• It's just a link, not a heavy file!


• Only the latest version of the document!


• Everyone's copy updates instantaneously!

And when you've had your Cloud Moment, you never go back again. At a workshop in Hong Kong several years ago, I attended a session about using wikis in education. It all made immediate sense to me. As soon as I got home, I started a wiki for my Physics teaching resources. When I told my son I was looking for a good name, he said: "Just make sure it's nothing nerdy".

[caption id="attachment_131" align="alignleft" width="120"] Babette Weatherell made the logo of my first wiki[/caption]

So my first website was born. One fortuitous decision I made right at the start was to organise the pages exactly as the IB and IGCSE Physics teaching syllabuses are structured. This means that students have an immediate understanding of where to find things. I also created all the pages ahead of time so that when I came across a resource which I would only use in six months, I knew where I could embed it to find it again.

Many wikis, websites and weeblies later, I am thinking hard about my latest online project. The IB's Theory of Knowledge programme has a strange effect on many of its teachers: we see materials for lessons everywhere. So I started Knower's Arc, a teaching blog on which I report about the resources I have found and want to share. I've made a reasonable start, but now I'd like to review my design decisions and build it out to include webpages.

Decision 1: I decided not to use any of the default suggestions from Blogger; rather, to make the blog distinctive, I adapted the Simple template with my own aesthetic choices.

Decision 2: No Ariel font, obviously. I felt that Cherry Cream Soda was a bold choice. As Claudio Guglieri advises: "be playful and consistent when using typography".

Decision 3: I read a great blog post about some prize-winning websites. One of them was inspired by Vincent van Gogh's colours which I hoped would convey his emotional values to my readers.

Decision 4: Although there are many better photographers, I prefer to communicate a personal tone by using my own images. For the banner I cropped a photo of buffalo I took last year in Wyoming. Some of the colours in the scheme I had chosen were repeated in the image.

Decision 5: My main organising principle was to use a limited range of tags related to the ToK course so that visitors to the site could search for posts connected to their particular interest.


But do they all work together?

"Symphony...is the ability to put together the pieces." (Dan Pink quoted by Reynolds)

What I tried to do was to discern simple principles with which to make my design choices. I am conscious that aesthetic decisions have an emotional component and have tried to embody a confident and calming yet inspired vibe.

It's not really for me to say whether my whole exceeds the sum of the parts. Is the font a little bit crazy? Is the title text too pale? Have I been too seduced by the idea of magnificent buffaloes and accepted a blurred picture? The creator is often not the best person to critique the creation. In the next two weeks before I work on my re-design, I'll seek advice from teachers, students and my CoETaIL cohort (please let me know in the comments!).

In his blogpost about presentations, Garr Reynolds recommends starting on paper.

"It's during the preparation stage that you slow down and "stop your busy mind" so that you may consider your topic and your objectives, your key messages, and your audience."

[caption id="attachment_132" align="alignright" width="215"] A site for sore eyes[/caption]

It's perfect advice, in my opinion. I have learned that an analogue medium is more flexible and reactive when one is throwing around ideas to see what works. On the right is a representation of the site as it is now so that I can re-imagine the elements. I'm also planning to expand its purpose to a website built around a blog.

[caption id="attachment_134" align="alignleft" width="201"] My initial thought shower[/caption]

I brainstormed that idea (left) and will let those thoughts simmer for a while now. My previous experience taught me that you've got to get the structure right before investing time in the content.

FINAL THOUGHT

Last week our Grade 7 students finished their infographics project. They did a great job and produced a lot of clear visual explanations. Something I noticed, however, was that in 100 infographics, although they had clearly cited what they had appropriated from other sources, not one student had used an original photograph or image. And the topic of the project was Luxembourg (where we live).

The Presentation Zen blog is a fund of great advice from which I have learned and which I shall pass onto my students. A school project is not a business presentation, however, and does not require the same production values. Our students have recently discovered that with Pixabay they are not even required to attribute what they have used.

Rather than capitalising on new creative possibilities, we are slipping into a world of lazy re-use (albeit perfectly cited). I am making a determined effort for myself and my students primarily to use original images in our blogs and presentations. They won't be as beautiful as the defaults, galleries and templates permit, but there will be more of ourselves in our work.