1:1 iPads are up and running at Kalinda. We’re finally seeing the very exciting pay-off resulting from hundreds of hours of hard work in preparing for and establishing the program.
We really wanted to do this right. And to get it right right from the start. As such I’ve personally spent 100s of hours on this. I talked to lots and lots of schools doing 1:1 in preparation for setting up our program and heard some success stories, some horror stories, and some stories of missed opportunities.
What do I mean by ‘missed opportunities’? Schools that put an iPad in every students’ hand but hadn’t prepared teachers properly and therefore they were underused or not used at all in classes. Schools that jumped from classes where every student does the exact same thing at the exact same time with pen and paper to students doing the exact same thing at the exact same time with the iPad. Schools that used the iPad purely to house text books and have students digitally complete worksheets using Goodreader. I won’t go on because I’m describing the teaching ‘syndrome’ that I’ve previously written about here.
What I wanted to cover here were some quick points that I’ve learnt along the way and thatI think are important to get ‘right’ by schools going down the 1:1 track:
1. Communicate and initiate inclusive discussions with your school community.
Change is scary for people regardless of whether it is ‘good’ or not. That’s because it’s unknown and uncertain. A wise educator once told me “its not the ‘what‘ of the change, but the ‘how‘ that’s important”. I’ve seen parents raging against 1:1 programs being implemented in their schools, not because they don’t agree with the concept, but because they felt they weren’t consulted or informed well enough. Flag the change early. I brought the idea of 1:1 iPads to my School Council at the beginning of Term 2 the year before I hoped to implement it. At that point they were almost all dead against it. By the beginning of Term 4 all but 2 members voted for the program to proceed. Another point to keep in mind: it doesn’t matter how much thought and preparation you’ve put in, if the parents only find out about the program ‘at the last minute’ they’ll assume you haven’t properly thought it through and that you rushed the decision. If that becomes the dominate belief among your parents its extremely difficult to get black on a positive footing.
2. Prepare you Teachers
Teachers need to be prepared to teach with iPads. This isn’t news. But how do you do it? My opinion is that no amount of PD is really going to achieve this goal fully. I believe the first step is for teachers to live the change you want them to be teaching. For example: want to use Edmodo with your students? Teachers can’t teach how to use a social network effectively if they’ve never used one themselves. They also can’t teach how to leverage the hundreds of tools the iPad can provide unless they’re comfortable and experienced at doing it themselves in their own work everyday. This doesn’t mean that they have to have used every app their students will use, but that they are used to the workflow of needing to do something and using 2 or 3 apps at each point of need to get it done. Or using a different 2 or 3. Whatever works. Our teachers had their own iPads for 2 years before our 1:1 program and relied heavily on Google Apps, Evernote and many other iPad essentials in their daily work life. They were also heavily encouraged to become active members of social networks such as Twitter and Pinterest for their own Professional Learning. iPads were second nature for them when 1:1 hit.
3. Change Your Pedagogy
Don’t wait for 1:1 to begin for your pedagogy to change. If each teacher’s pedagogy has changed prior to 1:1 they will be desperately needing each student to have ‘regular access’ and iPads will take off from day one. This is ideal compared to the alternative of teachers not being certain how to work them into their classes. Create the need through the change in pedagogy and then fill it. Don’t put the tool before the pedagogy. We implemented Challenge Based Learning (see Do you know your CBL from your PBLs?) in the year before 1:1 iPads came in. This style of teaching and learning was a steep learning curve for teachers and students, but wow, what a pay off in the end! The main benefit was the process of ‘letting go’. Teachers had to let students find their own way through tasks, rather than controlling each step of the process. The importance of this can’t be overstated. Too often, having 1:1 leads down the road to traditional pedagogy. Why? Because each student has the same device, just like they all had pencil and paper and the same text book previously. This means teachers can slip seamlessly from ‘every student read page 55 and answer questions 1 – 8′ to ‘every student open this app and complete the activity’. In other words, each child is still doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. This happens often and is a small tragedy in classrooms where the opportunity for individualised and personalised learning has never been greater. For our teachers it has been about focussing on the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of each activity, and letting students work out the ‘how’ themselves. This leads to a wonderful variety of responses from students using a huge variety of different applications on the iPad.
4. Get your infustraucture right
No one necessarily likes spending money on stuff no one can see. But in our case that’s where the most money had to be spent. Thousands of dollars on upgrading our server and WiFi. In particular we installed WiFi that was specifically built for environments with large numbers of wireless clients. This meant removing the Department supplied WiFi, which my research told me would simply not cope with the demand of up to 200 devices in the one space trying to use it. In our case, the new Xirrus WiFi is simply fantastic, and integrates with the existing Cisco WiFi throughout the rest of our school. Upgrade your systems and test them out well before 1:1 begins. Everything failing or falling over once the iPads get to school is a bad look. Not only is it frustrating for students and teachers, but its another sign to parents that you haven’t properly thought the whole thing through and their confidence in the whole thing may take a hit from day one.
5. Step back and allow magical things to happen
When implementing new things, the temptation is to plan every last thing to the finest detail to ensure you get it right. This is a good way to be, but not when it comes to student learning. Remember, the whole point of this is that students now have a personalised digital learning tool that should create very dynamic and individualised learning spaces in your school. Once again, if more often than not every student is sitting in their seats using the same app at the same time doing a set activity all in the same way, then you’ve stuff it up. This is the opposite of what you were hopefully aiming for in the first place. One of the things that is classically over-planned is apps on the iPad. Research shows that one of the huge benefits of 1:1 is students having their own ‘personalised‘ device. So why, as soon as they get it, do we feel this need to give them a long list of apps they all have to have on it? We get all these devices in and then try as hard as we can to make them all the same. Does every student really need the exact same apps? Of course not. There needs to be some commonality for sure, but there also needs to be scope for students to discover their own apps that will help them at points of need, and also to install apps that meet particular ongoing needs for them. One student might need a fractions app that is very basic and visual because they really struggle with fractions. For many other students this app is a waste of time because they’re well beyond it.
My advice is start simple. We put out a list of 20 apps that we want all students to have, spending only 20% of the total budget for apps for each family. We will then respond to needs as they arise, great apps as they are invented, or allow students to take their own path with apps that fill particular learning needs for them. The 1:1 iPad trials in Victoria showed that when you install a whole load of apps onto student iPads right from the start of the year it leads to students and teachers never really being sure of what most of them do. The majority of these apps end up being rarely or never used. By the end of the year students have only used a few of the apps they started with and have a whole list of apps they would have preferred to have but can’t because there was no money left.
Apps should be a toolkit that students can pull up to complete tasks as needed. As such, they need a familiarity with them to know what needs they can fulfill. Need to attach audio to a picture? Well, I know this app can do that. Then I know I can edit the image with this app etc. Start with a small and simple list and allow students and teachers to become confident users of these apps, then respond to needs as they arise.
I appreciate all this is far harder to achieve in a larger Secondary school that in a Primary/Elementary setting, however this is just one of many cases where the old school structure needs to be challenged in order for ‘real’ 21st Century pedagogy to begin to be truly taken on.
Our first days of 1:1 have been fantastic and well worth all the hard work. We are desperately trying not to be a school that doesn’t use this opportunity to its full potential, and hopefully our experiences through the year can help others to achieve the same.