Transformers

When you think about transformers, you probably think about cool robots that are also cars or planes. With a few quick turns and clicks any child can convert the car to a robot and back again. The robots do things the car can't and take on the world in a whole different way.


Children love transformers and use their imaginations to create all kinds of adventures and battles using these toys.

Districts who are thinking about a one to one program need to realize that the netbooks can also be transformers. Children will now be able to use their imaginations and knowledge to create and share ideas in ways that would never have been possible with paper and pencil. Teachers will be able to collaborate with students and their peers, have access to a global network of resources and teach using real world data. It will be possible to make connections to classrooms beyond the limits of their brick and stone buildings and their fieldtrip budgets. This kind of transformative learning is at the core of the 21st Century Learning concept.

In order for the netbooks to become transformers, initially teachers need to be transformed. This is not an easy task. Their approach to classroom management, assessing student learning, sharing knowledge and mastering content can not just be bent, twisted and clicked into place to create some new, 21st century teacher. Instead, they need to be coached and encouraged to make these changes themselves. They need to see concrete examples of how technology can be used in a transformative way in their classrooms, they need access to tools that work and they need the support and recognition of their peers as they try out new ideas.

The best way I have found to begin this process is to focus on developing the teacher's own 21st century skills, especially research and collaboration. There are many time demands placed on the teachers I work with in my building. Many of them are willing to try new ways to approach their content, but do not have time to find them on their own. Taking time at a staff meeting to train them on how to use a few of the free standards based lesson resources available on the web gives them some easy to use research tools to begin exploring on their own. Thinkfinity.org is a great starting place. This free website features more than 55,000 searchable, standards based lesson resources, primary source materials and interactive learning objects across all content areas. I have used the site's learning objects like the comic creator, the biocube and the dynamic paper creator to demonstrate to teachers how to integrate technology into a content lesson.

Collaboration time is always at a premium, yet collaboration is such a valuable element of the transformation process. One essential tool for collaboration in my district is Google Docs. Our district has a Google Partner Account. This is a free "Google within Google". Students and staff have accounts within this domain. Initially, teachers may feel more comfortable uploading their own document files to Google or creating word docs in Google. These can then be published as webpages and linked to a website for students to access. (click here for an example of how I use this) Once teachers feel comfortable with Google, they can begin to share and collaborate on documents, power points, spread sheets and surveys with other staff members and their students. Users can work together in real time or access the shared work at anytime from any place. It becomes transformative when students and teachers are collaborating through Google. (click here for an example) It is One Simple Tool with many possible applications.

Netbooks should not just be a substitute for textbooks and notebooks. Teachers who can not see past this will not begin to transform the learning in their classrooms. Once teachers are comfortable using the technology to improve their lesson preparation and collaboration time, the next step is to begin to support their attempts at using the technology in new ways. A student with a netbook that can access the internet now has a tool to immediately research questions that come up during a lesson. Students can post their concepts and ideas on a threaded discussion for others to comment on. Online tools like Glogster, Prezi and Animoto let them demonstrate mastery or acquired knowledge in a way that goes beyond posters and powerpoints. Google Forms surveys can be used as formative assessment tools to measure students' prior knowledge or check for understanding during a lesson. Students with a camera and a microphone can now connect with students or experts anywhere in the world to explore careers, share ideas, gather information and explore new cultures. High School level students can begin to create web resources that can be used by others in the district as a part of a service learning component. One of my students is using screencasting to make tutorials for Google Docs. Another group has created a wiki page with 2nd grade math and reading game links for our elementary students to use. My daughter's 5th grade teacher maintains a blog where students can comment on critical thinking problems, current events or writing prompts. He has added Vokis and Google Maps to this blog, and taught his students how to do this on their own blogs. Our elementary technology specialist has worked with teachers to have students film on green screen to do historical figure biographies that they edit on their laptops. Teachers who begin to use their technology to transform their classrooms need to be held up as role models and recognized for their creativity and willingness to think outside the box.

One way to recognize teachers who are becoming transformers is to set aside time at staff meetings to allow them to share their innovations with their peers. Another approach is to work with your local professional development committee to create a CEU program for teachers who attend technology workshops, take online courses that focus on 21st Century skills or who develop and present their own inservice programs to the staff. I am working on developing a certification program for teachers in my district who demonstrate expertise in a variety of technology applications and who are using technology in a transformative way. The first step of this process is to create a rubric that can be used by the teachers to demonstrate their mastery of these areas. Curriculum conversations also need to include ways to integrate 21st Century skills and state technology standards into core curriculum areas.

Finally, in order for teachers to be transformers,they need to have readily available support. My superintendent has allowed for the creation of technology integration specialist positions in each building. Tech specialists can co-teach classes to model technology use, help teachers find resources, do first line trouble shooting, provide staff development and make recommendations for the purchase of additional technology tools. This position should be an essential piece of a successful one to one program. Ideally, there also needs to be a hardware support specialist available to do basic repairs and server maintenance to make sure that the teachers or students are not spending a lot of down time without their computers. In my next blog, I will look at ways to track technology use and technology maintenance.

Guiding Questions for Transformative Technology Planning
For teachers:

• Am I using the netbooks as a subsitute for existing materials in my classroom or am I using it in an innovative way to assess student learning, help students work towards content mastery or develop 21st century skills?
• Are my students passive users of the technology or active users of the technology?
• How has technology changed the way I think about teaching?
• How has technology changed the way I collaborate and communicate with my colleagues?
• How has technology changed the way I collaborate and communicate with my students?
• I am embedding technology into my daily teaching or is it more of a "special event"?
• What are the state technology standards that can be embedded in my course?
• How can I integrate technology standards into my daily lessons?
• How can I integrate 21st century skills into my daily lessons?
• How can I use the technology to differentiate my lessons for different learning styles, different learning levels and different ability groups?
  
• How can I encourage students who have an interest in working with technology hardware or innovating with technology?

For administrators:

• How can I recognize and encourage teachers who are integrating technology in transformative or innovative ways?
• How can I work with my teachers union to incorporate technology integration into our evaluation process?
• What process will I use to decide how to spend my technology budget?
• What changes need to be made in our acceptable use policy to adjust for a one to one initiative?
• Who will make the decisions on what websites will be filtered and for what users?
• What criteria will be used to make decisions about what web based tools and software students and teachers will have access to?

Image Is Everything

Right now my one to one laptop initiative has an image problem. And if we are going to be distributing more than 250 netbooks to students, we need the right image or we will be spending lots of time dealing with frustrated users who can not access online tools or manage information on the netbooks. In the world of one to one computers - where a large group of users will be given computers that all need to look and act the same, image is everything.

First, in the context of computer programing, image is used to describe a capture or snapshot of what applications, plugins and software are available to the user on their desktop, or running in the background from their hard drive to allow access to web based or software applications. For example, many of the interactive learning tools on Thinkfinity.org require Java or Adobe Shockwave plugins to work properly. The desktop may contain shortcuts to word processing tools or frequently used websites. This image can then be used to clone - or recreate - the same desktop conditions for any number of additional computers.

Using our goals and objective for our one to one initiative, we developed a list of the plugins and applications that we wanted to be pre-installed on the student netbooks. Our students will be moving from a Mac environment k-8 to a Windows/Linux/Ubuntu environment at the high school. In order to make decisions about what needed to be included on the netbooks, we were faced with two challenges. Initially, we needed to keep in mind WHAT we wanted students to do with their netbooks. This was based on the 21st Century Learning Curriculum. Secondly, we needed to educate ourselves about the Linux based Ubuntu operating system and explore the opensource software available to come to an agreement about what plugins and software needed to be included in the image to allow the students to do WHAT we wanted them to do.

Guiding Questions for Making Image Decisions

• What tools/applications will allow students to express creativity?
• What tools/applications will allow students to communicate ideas?
• What tools/applications will allow students to collaborate with the peers or teachers?
• What tools/applications will allow students to organize their thinking?
• What tools/applications will allow student to conduct research and share information?
  
• What tools/applications will allow students to access core content materials?
• What tools/applications will allow students with disabilities to access content, research, communicate, share ideas and collaborate with peers and teachers?

FHS List of Recommendations For Our Netbook Image
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc39nfhs_415vj4997g3

Creating the best image for your netbooks takes time and the willingness to do some research on what would be best for the students within the boundaries of the operating system. There will be a lot of frustration if you choose to use an operating system that you are not familiar with. It also requires a team approach and a lot of communication. Someone needs to be thinking about curriculum and the user end of the netbook image and someone else needs to understand the programming and technical piece. For some districts, it might be useful to bring in an out of district consultant to help with one or both of these pieces. I started a Google Doc for our tech team to share ideas and trouble shooting tips with each other. Most importantly, once a decision about the image has been finalized, the image should be installed on a small number of netbooks to use for a prototype test. These netbooks should be given to students and teachers to be used in real world learning situations to make sure that all the components of the image are working properly and that the students can be successful 21st Century Learners.

My next entry will focus on using the netbooks for 21st Century Learning.

Yoga Breathing and Developing A Set of Objectives for Your Program

Yoga breathing. Yes, yoga breathing, is the key to how I am making it through the trials and tribulations of implementing a one to one initiative. It is important to have a clear set of objectives for what you want to be able to accomplish with your technology tools...and stay focused on those objectives. As you will find out as you begin serious discussions about what equipment to purchase, what operating systems to run, what software and applications to include, how to distribute them, who to train on what... there is the potential for a lot of differing opinions and ideas. It is very easy to lose site of the fact that technology is a tool you are using to improve teaching and learning in your building. Yoga breathing is one way to take a step back and process all the information that you are wading through. It also is a way to lower your anger or frustration level before responding too quickly in a discussion.

So, here is a quick description of how to use yoga breathing to lower your stress levels. Sit up straight. Take a deep, slow breath in through your nose and focus on the breath as it travels all the way down to the base of your stomach. Slowly exhale, through your nose letting your mind follow the breath. Now focus on the issue at hand. Is it worth the argument or are there other battles to fight down the road. Can you see more clearly where your focus needs to be?

Another way to help you focus on what the main objectives for your one to one program are is to conduct a staff and student survey. Google Docs forms is one way to accomplish this. This application allows you to create surveys, publish them online, then analyze the results as a spreadsheet or series of graphs. I did a survey of my building staff about how they might use additional technology in their classrooms. I used the results to develop 5 guiding questions for our one to one intiative.

THE 5 GUIDING QUESTIONS FOR A ONE TO ONE INITIATIVE

• How can we use technology to assess student learning?
• How can we use technology to promote 21st Century skills (collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking)
• How can we use technology to support independent learning, cooperative learning and research?
• How can we use technology to support learning for all students including special needs and ESL students?
• How can we use technology to support standards based lessons that engage student learners and ensure that a rigorous curriculum is implemented in our classrooms?

Here are the responses I received from my staff in a report I shared with our Superintendent and the building principal. FHS GUIDING QUESTIONS

This information was not only useful for making some initial decisions about hardware and software, but it also served as the starting point for making decisions about staff professional development.

We worked with two technology coordinators, who are also consultants from Educational Collaborators ,to develop a 2 1/2 hour staff inservice about using technology to transform the way teachers teach, the way students learn and the way we assess mastery in our classrooms. We split the staff into two groups - teachers who would be working with Freshmen - and netbooks in their classrooms on a daily basis and teachers who would be working with the computer labs and rolling carts. By tailoring the sessions to the specific technology environment of the staff, we were able to share strategies for managing student computer use, locating content rich, engaging lesson materials and getting students to work collaboratively with each other and with their teacher.

To see some of the sites we shared as a staff, check out our Delicious bookmark page.

I am also using the guiding questions to start to make decisions about what should be on the student image for the netbooks. And that will be the topic of my next entry!

In the beginning...there was an idea.

One to One. Seems like a simple idea really. Buy a bunch of laptops - pass them out to a bunch of students. No problem. And that is how our one to one laptop initiative started. As a discussion around a table at the board office. The superintendent had a vision. Provide a laptop to each Freshmen so that they can use online textbooks and have access to web resources. But where to go from there?

I would like to say that the next step in the process involved discussions about how technology integration would help transform education in my district. But in reality, the next step, by necessity had to be looking at the budget. What could we afford to buy? For many districts looking at a one to one initiative, this may be where the discussion starts and stops. We had to make the difficult decision to roll out our program on a grade by grade basis over four years. That meant that the freshmen class would receive Dell Netbooks with a Linux/Ubuntu operating system, but the rest of the students - and their teachers - would not.

As the technology specialist, I worked with my building principal to come up with a plan to share the vision of one to one with a staff that had heard all sorts of rumors about the program and were already feeling frustrated that the upperclassmen would not be getting laptops. We could not afford to buy laptops for everyone at once. We held a staff meeting and we acknowledged their concerns and worked with them to come up with ideas for how to make the program work for our school. For the short term, the budget did allow for the purchase of 3 netbook cart labs and some upgrades for our existing computer lab spaces that will expand the access the upperclassmen will have to technology. Additionally , the staff would be given HP laptops that would be set up to run a dual boot of Windows7 and Ubuntu. In my next post, I will talk about how we surveyed the staff and began the discussion about using technology in a transformative way by focusing on the two groups of teachers in our building - those who would be dealing with students who had netbooks and those that would be using the labs.

One of the first things to consider when you are looking at budget are the hidden costs of a one to one initiative. In addition to the netbooks or laptops, you need to also consider the following:

• Infrastructure - Wireless access points, Network switches, Network Servers, Bandwidth, Web filters, Mail servers, Data back up, Data storage
  
• Software - Licenses, Operating Systems, Help Desk Management , Inventory Management
• Training - Staff professional development, Student training, Technology Staff training
• Insurance - Will this be offered by the district - or made available for students to purchase?
• Power - Spare batteries, Spare chargers, Charging Stations, Classroom outlets, Power Bars
• Maintenance - Will this be warranty work that is sent out - or done in house by a certified technician? How many additional laptops will you need on hand as loaners? If you are doing repairs in house - you will need to keep an inventory of parts.
  
• Staffing - Will you need additional tech staff to handle maintenance? Will you hire a technology integration specialist to help teachers use technology to transform student learning?
• Accessories- jump drives, bags or sleeves, wireless mice - will the district buy these or offer them for sale as a fundraiser?
• Peripherals - printers or copier/printers for student use, scanners, digital cameras, video cameras, interactive boards, responder systems, projectors, document cameras
  
• Future Planning - Is this going to be a grade by grade rollout - consider how additional laptops will be purchased - and how the addition of more laptops will impact all the items listed above.

Things to consider that could stretch your limited dollars:

• OpenSource software in place of licensed software
• Ubuntu/Linux operating system over Mac or Windows
  
• Leasing laptops rather than purchasing
• Netbooks
  
• Outsourcing network maintenance/management
• Student rentals of equipment
• Cloud computing - using online tools like Google Apps and Google Domain for Education
• Allowing students the option to bring in their own equipment