Elementary School iPad Rollout

Fourth grade students at Woodbridge
creating their first movie.

Elementary students were brimming with excitement this week as the iPad carts were assembled and loaded into their classrooms.

Teachers have been patiently waiting and preparing for this digital disruption in their learning environment for over a year now.  To say that everyone is ready and excited is a total understatement. Already after a week of use teachers and students are off and running using the iPads in a variety of ways.

Before putting the device in the hands of students, teachers communicated a message of expectations for use and care for the iPad.  They got a little help from some courages and destined to be famous fifth grade students from Quincy.  Check out the great job they did putting together proper caring and sharing techniques for using the iPad. Other topics covered included:  Responsible and safe internet searching, proper communication protocol with teachers and peers, and teaching students about their digital footprint.

One great aspect of the iPad is the camera. Students love to take pictures and pose for them too. In Mrs. Timmer's elementary class students were learning how to classify objects, specifically contrasting human and natural characteristics of landforms.  Students were given the task of heading outdoors and capturing objects that were a part of the landscape and classifying them as human or natural.  Heading outside with the iPads gave students the feeling of exploring their surroundings like an archeologist. After capturing human and natural landforms students discussed the differences and created a pic collage of both types.

1:1 iPads year 2.0

Today marks the beginning of Zeeland Public Schools second year with iPads in the classroom.  To say that we learned a lot last year about the role technology plays in learning is a total understatement.  To say that we will do everything right this year is probably even more so an idealistic overstatement.  However, as learners we are constantly making efforts to improve the infrastructure of our digital school environment so here a few things that we took away from last year and are trying to improve on this year.

1. Create a culture of responsible and respectful digital citizens.

Last year students participated in a 2 hour ipad set up that included email accounts, Apple ID accounts, and going through the settings. There was no talk of Internet safety, cyber-bullying, and what is known as Net-iquette. 

This year we are skipping over most of the set up stuff and trying to focus on the later of the above statements. We view this similarly to getting your drivers license.  Instead of just handing over the keys and telling kids to figure it out for themselves (causing damage to themselves and others along the way) we are starting the discussion (it must be ongoing) about what it means to "drive" responsibly and respectfully.  Below are two videos that we are using to start off this year.

The first video is a local lawyer talking about the dangers and consequences of sexting.



The second video is a small introduction to the topics of neteqqute, internet safety, social media, and setting healthy boundaries around using technology.



There are lots of great digital citizenship resources found here http://goo.gl/qfQIR

2. Professional Development of staff must be ongoing and well supported.

I don't know if anyone is ever "ready" to integrate technology into the classroom as there literally are thousands of choices to be made in this respect. Even for those veteren teachers who are content experts, when it comes to changing your instructional strategies around technology everyone feels a little bit like a first year teacher.  So professional development and ongoing support is an absolute must.
As for last year, we will just say there wasn't enough (not sure there ever is).

This year we are restructuring support so that each building has a tech coach that is there and able to handle to quick and easy questions. These coaches are full time teachers and are using the technology themselves.  In addition, there is one district wide tech coach fully devoted to working alongside and serving the teachers as they work to transform their instructional strategies.  Building tech coaches will point their staff to this person for more in-depth and ongoing projects. Together the team of tech coaches will keep their fingers on the pulse of classroom technologies in the district, provide teachers with video tutorials on how to created digital learning spaces & activities, and provide the district with guidance for sustaining technology use in the classroom.

3. Student Devices

I know there are lots of varying opinions on what the student device should look like or be allowed to do.  Last year we pretty much just put the iPads out there in the hands of students with very few if any restrictions. This was not a horrible thing in and of itself, after all this post is partly about reflecting on what we learned from doing what we did. However, there were many uncontrollable issues that came out of this. And, being teachers we don't like when things are "out of control".

This year in hopes of comforting our staff a bit and responsibly training our younger learners, we are placing a few restrictions on the device and offering performance based incentives to remove restrictions.  All students in grades 6-9 will receive iPads with a set list of apps on them and not have the ability to download apps of their choice from the app store. This decision was reached in part due to the age restrictions around creating an Apple ID, but also due to the fact that the majority of discipline issues around gaming on the iPad involved freshman students.  There has been no final decision made about when, or if, the app store will be unlocked on freshman iPads but an idea being thrown around is that students will prove being responsible and respectful with the use of their device and eventually it will eventually be turned on for them. I guess we will see how it goes.

Real Reflections from the Principal turned Teacher

Principal of Zeeland East H.S., Marc VanSoest, traded in his principal hat for one hour a day to get a taste of teaching in a 1:1 iPad U.S. History class. Here are his words to his staff following the experience:

"Last week, I had the opportunity to get back into the classroom in Matt's 3rd Hour US History class. Going into it, I figured I knew what I was doing....I had taught US History for the better part of 8 years previously...and it's not like anything really changes in history. I was dead wrong. I cannot get over the way that little glass and metal device (iPad) changed almost all of my thinking. As I sat to plan the week, I figured I could do a Keynote, watch a movie clip or two on YouTube (it's Social Studies...I had to show a few movie clips...), maybe we'd do a little survey using eClicker, and I'd have them do some .pdf note taking stuff as we went along.

That was all well and good in theory. Then my old Powerpoints didn't translate into Keynote, YouTube blocked a clip, and eClicker didn't work cause the kids and I were on different networks. I even found an app I wanted the 30 students to download. I'm sure that was useful for the 26 of them that were actually able to download it. Frustrating....

Then I remembered something. I was only doing this for one hour, for one week. 5 hours of my life. In other words, one of your teaching days. I wasn't even toiling with this...this thing...for the 25 hours a week you all are doing it.

It's not that I didn't understand that the iPad was changing us. I knew that. What I didn't understand was the profound level of frustration that accompanies its use in the classroom. But having said that...when things work, it's an amazing thing to watch students create, explore, and drive the learning process in new ways."

Timing + Opportunity = Group Effort

I don’t know about you but sometimes I scan the faces of my classroom and wonder who is sitting out there. Is that kid in the front row the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, John Lennon or Aretha Franklin, Muhammad Yunus or Jessica Jackley?

This is a helpful strategy on days when students act less than appreciative of the role teachers play in their lives (which, some might argue is everyday). However, it also serves me well as I reflect upon what these students need to know? What kinds of thinking skills and strategies will help them thrive in today’s global economy? And most of all, what kinds of dreams are lying just beneath the surface of their tough exterior and what opportunities await them in the near future?

In the book Outliers -The story of success, author Malcolm Gladwell points out that “timing and opportunity” are two key factors of successful people. Gladwell tells the story of Bill Gates and Bill Joy, two Silicon Valley giants, born less than 12 months apart on opposite ends of the country. The timing was perfect for the opportunity they had as adolescents to spend thousands of hours programming what was known at the time as computers. My guess is that you know what those opportunities turned into.

When asked, ‘What do you want people to take away from Outliers?’ Gladwell responded: “My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.”

Here ZPS sits at the cusp of a multimillion dollar initiative that will put computers in the hands of thousands of students, our students, our children. The hope is that we as teachers, administrators, parents, and community members view this as more than just giving kids ubiquitous access and gadgets, and instead we see this as giving our kids opportunities.

No doubt this will take a monumental effort. It is no small task to integrate technology into classroom instruction. At times it seems daunting, however we must remember the opportunity for our students far outweighs the cost for us. And if we stick together and help one another along the way, we just might find a few outliers sitting in the front row.