1:1 - the early days.

It has been four weeks since we embarked upon our own 'brave new world' with the implementation of our 1:1 laptop programme. We invested a lot of time in staff development and in trialling and discussion in the two to three years prior to this. We undertook extensive preparation trying to contemplate things that might go wrong, knowing that we could never anticipate everything.

What have I seen?

On the positive side I don't think we've seen major problems. We anticipated lots of potential problems and I think we've been successful in being prepared to meet those problems. Things like preventing boys leaving laptops lying around as they attended school assemblies or chapel services.

However what I don't believe we've seen so far is radical transformation of learning. There has been no revolution in the classroom.

What I think we have seen is the beginnings of a gradual transformation. Some staff have shown a willingness to look at new ways of doing things, a willingness to take a look at interesting looking apps in order to consider how they might improve learning.

I don't think that that approach is any different to anything we have ever seen before. When overhead projectors were first introduced I don't recall teachers having a clear idea of how they would use them (I do remember their early days). Instead teachers used them to do what they'd always done, and then began to see new ways of using the technology.

I suspect that when chalk boards were first introduced it took a while to see how they might be used in a way that was different to a slate.

I think that at a professional level teachers are no different to any other work group. There are those who are innovators and early adopters, there are those who will adopt practices established by those early adopters, and those who will resist change. We are however seeing more conversations amongst staff about teaching and learning.

Deep down I reckon that most teachers are fundamentally creative. They want to do cool things, they want to use cool stuff. They just need to align those things with their personal paradigms of teaching and learning. There are (as there have always been) those teachers whose paradigm is more constricted than others. Consequently their uses of laptops in classes are less imaginative than for others. Fortunately I don't see those teachers standing in the way of the others who are keen to get on with the job.