Question from a community member on our local online education forum:
"I'm unclear about the aim of the 1:1 initiative and what it entails other than providing students with netbooks. Can you provide a little more information about that, or maybe provide some links that articulate the 1:1 initiative?"
My answer:
I 'd say that we want to increase both the level of engagement and the level of relevance in our classrooms via our grant team's 1:1 initiative. The netbooks, while fantastic tools, are more a means to an end than an end in themselves. The goal of our work is to prepare our students for the world that surrounds them every time they leave the doors of our school by more closely matching the skills needed in the real world with the skills that we teach in the classroom. To be more clear, I'd like to break this down into how going to a 1 student:1 computer model will increase both relevance and engagement, and then follow that up with a few links to help further inform this discussion.
Relevance
Our students live in a world that is vastly different from the one we encountered in high school. The shift towards digital information, communication, and creative collaboration has had an impact on every level of our daily lives. As our participation in this forum suggests, many ideas have moved from static statements printed on dead trees to dynamic conversations held online. Our audience has widened as the cost of publishing our ideas has dropped to nearly zero. As a Language Arts teacher, I have to reckon with the fact that my students will work in an environment in which everything they say online has the potential to reach literally millions of people. I need to teach students what it means to have such an audience, what responsibilities are entailed in having such an audience, and ways in which they can share their ideas with a high premium on quality writing and clarity of thought. I also need to work with them as they learn to seek out information from others, addressing issues of validity, authorship, ownership, and privacy. The move towards a 1:1 education allows our students to learn on the very same platform that they will use to communicate for the rest of their academic, employment, and personal lives. The same can be said for the other subject areas as well. No history textbook on earth has anything to say about this week's protests in Egypt, but I can go online and find news reports, first person accounts, and a variety of perspectives on this issue within seconds. Our science classrooms can use the internet to communicate and collaborate on a whole host of projects that are underway right now. Our Math curriculum can move from simple computation to actual application using digital models and unlimited access to data sets that matter to our everyday lives. And though our LHS2.0 program does not have a foreign language component, I envision that our students will soon be using these tools to Skype with native speakers of a language and to engage current events in a foreign language via Google Translate. The netbooks give us a window into not only the educational content that is being produced now, but also access to all of the content that has ever been produced in the past.
Engagement
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I really believe that students want to be engaged in school. The students want to learn, but they want to learn in a way that is meaningful to them. Every day we ask students to power down at school, to turn off devices that give them access to everything in the world, and to stop using the creative tools that they use at home to create YouTube videos, audio mash-ups, and yes, even lolcats. We have a generation that is more used to a keyboard and mouse than a pen and paper. As I sit here at The Root Cafe, every table that I can see has someone with a laptop at it. I see a guy creating some sort of a microphone prototype using CorelDraw, an artist sketching on a digital tablet, and another woman checking Yahoo news. There are two high school students that appear to be working on a project using Google Docs. Everyone here seems pretty engaged, and none of these people would be allowed to be doing any of this in most of our classrooms. This issue is not unique to Lakewood, it is a global phenomenon that is being encountered at every level of human interaction. Our district, however, is beginning to recognize the power of letting students use the tools that they find the most useful and interesting. The hard part, and I'm speaking from personal experience, is that we have to learn to use this inclination for digital engagement as a way to engage the students in their learning. I have to learn not only how to work all of this stuff myself, but also how to guide students towards learning the valuable skills on which education has always, rightly, focussed.
The work that has come out of this grant isn't about the nouns of our modern world (laptops, iPods/iPads, cell phones, skype, facebook, google, etc.), but the verbs (collaborating, publishing, evaluating resources, analyzing data, etc.). I apologize for not having made that clear in the first place. I was just excited to finally see this equipment in the hands of my students.
This was a bit long for a forum, but English majors tend towards the polemic.
This 2010 Literature Review from New South Wales, entitled, "Digital Education Revolution - One-to-One Computers in Schools" is a good piece of research on the topic. I would also suggest that the links in the bibliography are another great way to find out more researched-based information about the successes and needed improvements in 1:1 education initiatives.
https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/detresources/lit_review10_TrMbcLRPRT.pdf
"I'm unclear about the aim of the 1:1 initiative and what it entails other than providing students with netbooks. Can you provide a little more information about that, or maybe provide some links that articulate the 1:1 initiative?"
My answer:
I 'd say that we want to increase both the level of engagement and the level of relevance in our classrooms via our grant team's 1:1 initiative. The netbooks, while fantastic tools, are more a means to an end than an end in themselves. The goal of our work is to prepare our students for the world that surrounds them every time they leave the doors of our school by more closely matching the skills needed in the real world with the skills that we teach in the classroom. To be more clear, I'd like to break this down into how going to a 1 student:1 computer model will increase both relevance and engagement, and then follow that up with a few links to help further inform this discussion.
Relevance
Our students live in a world that is vastly different from the one we encountered in high school. The shift towards digital information, communication, and creative collaboration has had an impact on every level of our daily lives. As our participation in this forum suggests, many ideas have moved from static statements printed on dead trees to dynamic conversations held online. Our audience has widened as the cost of publishing our ideas has dropped to nearly zero. As a Language Arts teacher, I have to reckon with the fact that my students will work in an environment in which everything they say online has the potential to reach literally millions of people. I need to teach students what it means to have such an audience, what responsibilities are entailed in having such an audience, and ways in which they can share their ideas with a high premium on quality writing and clarity of thought. I also need to work with them as they learn to seek out information from others, addressing issues of validity, authorship, ownership, and privacy. The move towards a 1:1 education allows our students to learn on the very same platform that they will use to communicate for the rest of their academic, employment, and personal lives. The same can be said for the other subject areas as well. No history textbook on earth has anything to say about this week's protests in Egypt, but I can go online and find news reports, first person accounts, and a variety of perspectives on this issue within seconds. Our science classrooms can use the internet to communicate and collaborate on a whole host of projects that are underway right now. Our Math curriculum can move from simple computation to actual application using digital models and unlimited access to data sets that matter to our everyday lives. And though our LHS2.0 program does not have a foreign language component, I envision that our students will soon be using these tools to Skype with native speakers of a language and to engage current events in a foreign language via Google Translate. The netbooks give us a window into not only the educational content that is being produced now, but also access to all of the content that has ever been produced in the past.
Engagement
Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I really believe that students want to be engaged in school. The students want to learn, but they want to learn in a way that is meaningful to them. Every day we ask students to power down at school, to turn off devices that give them access to everything in the world, and to stop using the creative tools that they use at home to create YouTube videos, audio mash-ups, and yes, even lolcats. We have a generation that is more used to a keyboard and mouse than a pen and paper. As I sit here at The Root Cafe, every table that I can see has someone with a laptop at it. I see a guy creating some sort of a microphone prototype using CorelDraw, an artist sketching on a digital tablet, and another woman checking Yahoo news. There are two high school students that appear to be working on a project using Google Docs. Everyone here seems pretty engaged, and none of these people would be allowed to be doing any of this in most of our classrooms. This issue is not unique to Lakewood, it is a global phenomenon that is being encountered at every level of human interaction. Our district, however, is beginning to recognize the power of letting students use the tools that they find the most useful and interesting. The hard part, and I'm speaking from personal experience, is that we have to learn to use this inclination for digital engagement as a way to engage the students in their learning. I have to learn not only how to work all of this stuff myself, but also how to guide students towards learning the valuable skills on which education has always, rightly, focussed.
The work that has come out of this grant isn't about the nouns of our modern world (laptops, iPods/iPads, cell phones, skype, facebook, google, etc.), but the verbs (collaborating, publishing, evaluating resources, analyzing data, etc.). I apologize for not having made that clear in the first place. I was just excited to finally see this equipment in the hands of my students.
This was a bit long for a forum, but English majors tend towards the polemic.
This 2010 Literature Review from New South Wales, entitled, "Digital Education Revolution - One-to-One Computers in Schools" is a good piece of research on the topic. I would also suggest that the links in the bibliography are another great way to find out more researched-based information about the successes and needed improvements in 1:1 education initiatives.
https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/detresources/lit_review10_TrMbcLRPRT.pdf
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