We recently had a visit from another school who wanted to see how we were doing with our 1:1 program. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure we would have ‘showcase’ stuff worthy. I was wrong. I asked teachers if they would be willing to sit and discuss with the team that visited what they were doing in their classes and made sure that my class knew they would be involved with the discussion.
The visitors started out talking to a class of Juniors and Seniors and asking them questions about their days with laptops and how they use them. I find it so frustrating and interesting that I always feel like I don’t get great ‘data’ from students, but then I stop and realize that they don’t know really what the other side of the coin is. They are not living without technology and never have, so to ask them questions about the difference really isn’t valuable. They were able to provide some good feedback and were probably more talkative than the visitors anticipated. At least that is what I would like to believe.
Update from 1st quarter:
Crash!: Yup.. our computers had crashing issues the first quarter, then our server decided to have an issue as well. It was just because I had sat at my desk and thought to myself “Wow..things are going great!”. Then bam..we had problems. That forced us to upgrade our server earlier than we anticipated. It was on the block for reviewing and upgrading possibly this summer. It caused us to be down and without computers for about a week and a half. Nice thing it was right before Thanksgiving break and the tech gurus from New Age were able to have an extra day on the Friday we were off to get things back up and running. We outsource our network and server service.
Learning Curves: While the first semester was mostly about passwords and small tech glitches, I feel that now the majority of students have a sense for how to fix and install something's on their own or are comfortable asking for help from classmates. I see teachers asking for more help with outside things they are bringing into their classrooms and just need help with the techy side – the small tweeks to make it more efficient or work for what they want. One teacher said that planning for lessons has changed because she was trying to bring in things from outside the books and handouts to help engage kids. I love hearing that. THere are so many possibilities out there to get kids more engaged in the learning process. She was using the internet more in her planning and finding alternative ways to do things. Teachers are finding Glogsters, Voki’s, Youtube, Blogs and Vlogs valuable in the teaching process. Another teacher’s comments were that OneNote was helping keep him organized and had reduced his lesson planning time and made things more efficient in the classroom. (More about that to come)
We are still struggling with making sure that kids don’t leave their laptops unattended, but since we haven’t had an incident of theft, I think it isn’t fresh in their minds. (I need to knock on wood now though since I said that.) They don’t think that anyone will touch their computers when they sit them in their unlocked lockers or leave them in a classroom when the teacher isn’t there. That will probably be an ongoing reminder we need to really enforce.
Everyone has learned that they need to keep track of their passwords, make good backups and remember their usernames. I won’t do that for them! Although I had one student today who didn’t know what she logged into the computer with. That tells me that they don’t log out much either!
Filtering: At the start of the year we had the filter very open and were only locking down things required by CIPA. Students had access to facebook, chatting, email, etc. If I could go back and do something different, I would spend some time really talking with specific students who appeared to be spending inappropriate amounts of time on distracting websites. I didn’t have a couple of hours a day to gather that data and meet with those students. As it is, we surveyed our parents, staff and students about facebook and social media sites being open during the day. The majority felt like it should not be available, so it is now closed. Some students report that they like that, but I find myself trying to find alternative ways to contact students. They live in Facebook with instant messages showing up in red and flags that they have a new message. Email just doesn’t get to them as quickly. I liked being able to send an announcement to a class about a meeting, or a reminder of an assignment. We will have these discussions about opening the filter back up maybe next year. That can be a whole blog on it’s own though.
For now, Facebook is blocked during school hours and then open after 3:45. We do not shut down the internet at any time. I know that some schools turn it off at say 10:00 and back on at 6:00 am.
Internet: There were a handful of kids at the start of the year that did not have internet connections at home. I believe now there may only be one or two that don’t have it available at home, but do at a relatives house close by. I thought that was interesting.
On our internet bandwidth, we are still slow and suffering most days.
Breakage and Use: As of the last report, I only have a couple of other minor things that happened to computers. Those were little pieces of the cases breaking around the power cords or other plug ins and we have had a couple of other battery cables that seemed to go bad.
I have been really proud of how the kids here have taken care of the laptops. We expected that though, so that sets a standard.
The Future: Now is the time to start planning for next fall. What changes need to be made? What efficiencies can we make? What will the purchasing plan look like? Summer maintenance? Will students keep their laptops for the summer? We we let them ‘lease’ them over the summer? What upgrades do we need? Are iPads what we need to be looking at next? How can we improve teachers skills and comfort teaching with students who have the internet at their fingertips? What PD do we need?
I have lots on my plate. I still want to gather some good quantifiable data that we can use on how this year went, but I am not sure how to go about doing that. How can you look at numbers and say this plan worked or didn’t when there are so many other factors that could be the cause?
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