1 to 1 comes to the monastery

You may have seen this video before: Brother Ansgar is introduced to the new technology called a 'book'. 

It's always worth another look, but what is not so well known is a later conversation between the two monks, also based on a real event in history. There is no video, but fortunately a scroll was found and has been translated from the original Norwegian.

Ansgar comes into Morten's cell. Morten is reading.

Ansgar: I've got much more used to these books now. But I hear that the trainee monks will all be bringing their own books next year.

Morten: Yes, that's the new 1 to 1 programme. We're hoping that it will inspire the novices and the monks to teach and learn in new ways.

Ansgar: Yeees... but I'm not sure it's such a good idea. Just because the Abbot of Clervaux is doing it, doesn't mean we have to follow suit.

Morten: We were 1 to 1 at my previous monastery. I wasn't sure about it in the beginning, but I soon found that it allowed me to do things I couldn't do before in the schoolroom.

Ansgar: Ah yes, but you've always been a lover of new technology. What about the rest of us? I already teach my novices very well. I don't see the point of bringing something new and distracting into the lessons. If they all have a book with them, how do I know they are listening to me?

Morten: You tell them to close it. You are in charge. And you're right, Ansgar, you are a very good teacher and your students appreciate that. But the book is a new development which affects all areas of life. Education too. It is not fair on your novices to ignore it.

Ansgar: But I don't know where to start! You're asking me to do a completely different job...

Morten: That's not the way to look at it, Ansgar. First of all, you are already an expert. You know how to teach your subject; your students do very well and you know a good teaching idea when you see one. You are always looking for ways to improve how you teach. All a 1 to 1 book environment does is to give you new ways to engage the novices in addition to the excellent things you are already doing.

Ansgar: But where do I start? I'm not used to a 1 to 1 schoolroom. Suddenly I have to do every lesson in this new way.

Morten: No you don't. Don't listen to those who say that a revolution has occurred. You will evolve into a 1 to 1 monk at your own pace. Why would you throw away everything that works so well? But I know you are honest with yourself and you will see ways that you can teach your novices better using books: new ways you have waited your whole career to see made possible.


Ansgar: So it's OK to have lessons with no books?

Morten: Of course. There are many occasions when the old methods such as scrolls, plainsong or meditation are the most suitable. But it would be a mistake not to take advantage of what 1 to 1 books allow you to do which you could never do before. This monastery admires risk-takers, so try something new, but do it with your least successful unit where the stakes are not too high - not everything will go right the first time. Also, work with your colleagues; share ideas and experiences. And talk to the Book Facilitator; he will come to your cell with some ideas or he can meet your novices in the cloister and model a lesson with 1 to 1 books.

Ansgar: I'm afraid of what the novices will say. They already know so much about books.

Morten: It's easy to think that, but don't assume because they have their noses buried in a book all day they know how to use it in an academic situation. The novices are in a rut with their technology. They still need you and your teaching expertise to help them use the books to understand your subject. The role of the good monk has always been to take the novices out of their comfort zone, to bring them to higher levels of thinking. The beauty of 1 to 1 books is that you have more possibilities than before to do just that. All of your novices now have access to knowledge when they need it and at the speed that they can learn. That leaves your hands free to help individuals, suggest another book or give them different tasks.

Ansgar: I don't even need to use the books all lesson, it could just be one activity...

Morten: Exactly.

Ansgar: But sometimes things will go wrong...

Morten: That's life, Ansgar. Saint Sirken has preached: "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original".

Ansgar: But I'm so busy...

Morten: I'm not going to tell you that you won't have to do some work and spend some time learning new ways with 1 to 1 books, but there are many ways to be efficient and effective: working with your fellow monks, Ecclesiastical Development, getting ideas from colleagues at other monasteries. You are not afraid of a bit of hard labour, Brother Ansgar. The important thing is to be motivated and to see that you are not being asked to change completely; the monastery wants you to apply your expertise to the new tool and become an even better teacher for your novices. You may even enjoy the journey.

Ansgar: Well if you put it like that...

Morten: And now I must leave you: the Abbot was reading in the refectory and has spilt mead on his scroll.

Both: God be with you, brother!

The Long Road to 1 to 1 (Step 3)

You would have thought that, 17 months after my last post, a lot must have happened: 1 to 1 would be here, for example. But that is not the case. 1 to 1 isn't here, though we have a definite date more than a year hence. To recap: September 2013 was originally the date at which students would all be required to come to school with a 'device'. The teachers would not get a device, or rather, they would continue with desktops. And there was no justification for Why?

That was the plan, no other details. It has been a good move to push it back a year, even two. Where we are now might be called Year Minus One. In 2015, a year from now, three year groups, grades 6 to 8, will be required to bring a laptop to every lesson (either Mac or Windows). About one year earlier, the teachers of these students will receive a laptop - these will all be the same, and probably Windows. In the 2016-17 school year, the rest of the students (the older ones) will be obliged to have a laptop. Possibly, by then, many will have brought them in before the deadline. The second phase of teachers machines will happen one year before (in Year Zero, to continue the terminology).

It's a plan, as they say. Why it has this particular shape is complicated: the phased introduction is budgetary in respect of the teachers' machines; it also has a justification in terms of being able to focus PD and resources. Secondly, the phasing begins with the Middle School students. For many, this is not the intuitive decision, perhaps because secondary schools tend to design programmes from the endpoint backwards: what does the university entrant need? and deduce the earlier years pedagogy from there. Starting 1 to 1 in the MS, however, is a greater investment since the students will be staying longer at the school. Also, in theory, the stakes for teachers who wish to innovate are less high, so their willingness to experiment should be greater. Being, in theory at least, less beholden to content, the Middle School has space to try things out. Conversely, the relatively change-averse Upper School teachers will have longer to get their heads around the new landscape.

The students' computers will be 'platform agnostic'. Why? In truth, this is because the school is squeamish about requiring something too specific and had already started using the phrase BYOD back in 2012 (without knowing what it implied). I think, though, we can see this as an advantage, so long as we can also put in some constraints. Allowing either Apple or Microsoft should force more content into the cloud to enable students to access resources using their browsers. It should encourage teachers to think in terms of project-based learning rather than program-specific activities. We will, however, stipulate some technical requirements: laptops with particular specs and programs.

So given the agnostic argument, why would the teachers not also have a choice? The reasons for this are several: for the institution, it is much more efficient to buy, set up, train for, support one machine. Furthermore, even limited choice can be dangerous. Some staff can be expected to later regret the impulse choices they make and then we would have to deal with their dissatisfaction. Better not to go there.

So there we are. Many details will follow, some may even change due to force majeure, and I may have forgotten to mention some.

It has been quite a journey to get this far, to have administrative agreement and to have communicated the broad plan to staff. We have even started to soften up the teaches for the main assault with some PD. But totally missing so far are several things: an announcement to the parents; a detailed plan for the introduction; and a strategy and budget to prepare the school for the change. None of these will emerge painlessly from this particular institution, so I feel a responsibility, from the bottom up, to set these things in train.

Watch this space, hopefully more frequently than every year or so.

The Long Road to 1 to 1 (step 2)

In the previous post, I described how we have changed tack in the process of moving our established European international school towards a 1 to 1 computer arrangement. Prior to the recent arrival of the new director of technology and ICT facilitator (the second one is me), the school management had committed itself to a byod (bring your own device) project from September 2013. We have introduced an undefined delay and are carefully referring to '1 to 1' rather than byod, since we don't see any advantages to the institution of byod. The first proposal caused a significant amount of concern among staff, especially the proposal to dispense with their beloved desktops. We looked into how many teachers have experience of 1 to 1 programmes and there are only 8 teachers out of 80, of whom 5 have arrived within the last 4 months. It is maybe not surprising that they are alarmed by the idea of a move to mobile machines, citing worries about posture, power and projectors amongst others.

We have written a list of questions, which has been reduced to eight, the answers to which will allow us to write a 'manifesto' for the development of a programme. This may seem overblown, but we realised that the school had not discussed a justification for putting mobile technology in the hands of the students to use in their learning. We put together some articles and videos which covered various aspects of the issue on a learnist board and asked the leadership team to read a few each as well as considering our questions. Here are those questions:

1. How do the school’s philosophy/mission/vision/values justify 1:1?
2. How do we expect teaching and learning to change?
3. What are the expected benefits?
4. What difficulties could there be with the implementation of 1:1?
5. What if we didn't do it?
6. What process should we use to decide which model to adopt?
7. Do we know if parents, teachers and students are in favour?
8. Why should the school introduce a 1:1 programme?

We met the leadership of the school and had a thoughtful discussion around the issues. Since a meeting of the academic leaders was coming up (heads of departments such as Science and Modern Languages), we put the questions to them too for their reactions. We are expecting all of those responses by the end of the week, though the majority I have seen so far are along the lines of: you guys are the experts, tell us what we want. At least they can't say we didn't consult them. The idea behind developing the manifesto is to have the support of the institution as we go forward.

The next stage, which will run concurrently with the ongoing consultation, is to consist of research, visits and pilots. As much of the data as possible is meant to be contextual, ie How would 1 to 1 work in our school? The visits are intended to be varied and also to include people from across the spectrum in the school from techies to Luddites and admin to students; similarly we hope to set up a few 1 to 1 zones around the school eg iPad room, Chromebook room, laptops and tablets to gather different sorts of information. These spaces will also function as training areas for teachers in the 1 to 1 environment whichever it is to become.

Will this work? Will the result be a better introduction of a 1 to 1 programme? We won't know how it would been otherwise, but having observed the school during the last few months, there is a number of pitfalls I am hoping to avoid. Firstly, the experience of both students and teachers in the uses of technology in the classroom are very limited. Secondly, this is a quite conservative institution in which fear of change expresses itself in the form of banal doubts which double as passive resistance. I see no way to achieve a proper change in which education takes the central position unless the community comes with its hearts and minds. This includes the opportunity for the 'antis' to express publicly their misgivings. I have learned that whatever the outcome of a consultation, you have to keep up the momentum. When the deadline for feedback has passed, report quickly, adjust accordingly and move on. And realistically interpret both positive or negative reaction (there are dangers in giving disproportionate attention to either).

So far, the outcomes of the consultation have not really pushed us forward on a wave of new ideas, but they have allowed the expressions of doubt as well as obliging the community to envisage a future with a school where everyone has a computer in hand all day. 

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.