One year of BYO laptops

There it is - the end of our first year with BYOD .. well BYO laptop to be precise. What do I think I might have learned?

1. Laptops make a difference.
2. Staff will shift their practice when they are good and ready, and not before.
3. Laptops make a difference.
4. Staff will shift their practice when they can see some advantage to themselves - reduced workload, more efficient work flow and maybe, just maybe, improved learning for their students.
5. Laptops make a difference.
6. Many people (staff and students) believe that 'elearning' is delivery using electronic media.
7. Laptops make a difference.
8. Many people (staff and students) believe that staff delivering content is true learning.
9. Laptops make a difference.
10. Laptops enable engagement in ways not possible without them. Teachers can engage with students in ways that are difficult to achieve without laptops.
11. Laptops make a difference.
12. Laptops enable feedback in detail and volume that is very difficult to achieve without laptops
13. Laptops make a difference.
14. Life would be incredibly tedious if not boring for any student if all teachers in their lives did the same things with laptops every day.
15. Laptops make a difference.

Hmmm... is there a theme there? Of course I say all of this with no quantitative data at all to support my arguments. I did say this is what I THINK I have learned. Let's look for the data.

Twitter and that pedagogy again ..

I reprised last week's Twitter lesson today. The question was a little more challenging than last time - and the boys' economics was well and truly tested.

The immediacy of the individual feedback was effective, and the learning that occurred for them as each boy heard my feedback to others in the class seemed to be significant. I have no data to prove the efficacy of this approach, even though it sits well alongside the Hattie data about feedback. I was however able to watch them modify their answers and tweet new solutions.

What was also interesting was the evolution of willingness to take risks with possible answers. I hadn't quite registered that in my thinking before.

Google Add-ons .. wow!!!

Today a good colleague introduced me to a new Google Add-on - 'Texthelp - Study Skills'. I showed the tool to two classes today, and frankly they were wowed.

Here's the problem that has been looking for this solution. As a laptop school our students now mostly take notes most of the time mostly on their laptops.. you get the idea. Our concerns have included their ability to keep their work organised, and to retrieve that work and use it purposefully when revising.

So they have notes that they may have taken in GoogleDocs, or Word (mostly), and then there are those articles that we have distributed via our learning management system Moodle as pdfs.

I showed the boys how to:

• Import a pdf into their Google Drive and convert into a Google Doc. Of course the tool can be used directly with their own notes if they have used Google Docs to take notes in the first place, no conversion required.
• Highlight using the Add-on "Texthelp - Study Skills"

• Collate their highlights into a summary document using the Add-on
• Finally (and this isn't the Add-on) to write their own summary/synthesis of their highlights in order to cement their learning.

What a great way to engage students with text. Interestingly I was attending some staff PD this afternoon, and grabbed an online journal article to support the topic we were discussing. My first response was to import it into my Google Drive, covert it, and start annotating using this tool. Great.

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.