It seems like everywhere I look around me at the moment schools are evaluating some aspect of 1:1 computing. There are many reasons for this including the netbook revolution, Mr Rudd’s plan to put a computer on the desk of every Year 9-12 student in Australia and many more enlightened schools realising that standards for ICT are at least as important for any other core subject. As an educator that has followed and been deeply involved with 1:1 computing programmes in schools ever since David Loader kicked the whole idea off at MLC Kew in 1990. It was only 2 years after this that I found myself in an Aussie school that had followed the MLC model and Introduced a year level set of the same Toshiba 1100Plus Machines (I think it was this model but the image doesn’t look right). Yep, these “state of the art” machines had no hard drive, just a dual floppy drive arrangement which took the “newfangled 3.5″ disks” (there were a lot of 5.25″ disks around at the time).

Storage on the machine was not possible and things like networking or the internet were not even on the horizon. What was there, however, was an excitement about the possibilities and a hearty discussion about the possibilities partly fueled by Alan Kay’s Dynabook Vision which I think anyone interested in making education more relevant had read. As a result, there was not a single notebook programme that I was aware of that did not have tools for creativity on them, in spite of their clumsy interfaces and problems with loading the programme into the memory from floppies. The result was that companies like LCSI, JASC, Inspiration Inc., and Lego moved very quickly to modify pricing models and support their software on disks for student laptops.

What this naturally lead to was a lot of staffroom discussion about the use of these tools in core subject areas. Admittedly, it was a lot of hard work to get the very traditionally oriented chemistry/physics teacher or the senior literature teacher espousing the “smell and touch of books” to embrace the possibilites of making some interactive exercises to demonstrate understanding of a principle in Microworlds or to construct a mindmap prior to a book review focussing on characterisation but the conversations were taking place. Given that this was taking place in the early 90s, it is bringing a tear to my eye to read a lot of the discussion on how Australian schools should use the government money to put computers in front of students. This sort of post is typical of a focus on the machine and what IT can do. Note the absence of any comment about what students should or could be doing with it.

I was recently asked to join a meeting of School Leaders at a school that wanted to discuss the planning for a 1:1 programme at the school. Interestingly the primary (elementary) section of the school had employed a facilitator who was also an Apple Distingushed Educator. Regular readers will know that I am not a great fan of the “you promote us, we promote you” programmes of big corporates like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., but the teacher in question is a very professional, knowledgeable and caring educator and had clearly conveyed a well thought through argument to the leaders in the section of the school that they worked in. On the other hand the teachers in the secondary section clearly had not thought through what they saw the students doing with the tools. I could tell  from the email exchange prior to the meeting that this was the case so I tried to set them up a little better in the meeting by making comments like these:

Given that the emails that I was being copied in on were continuing to be about the network, the infrastructure and the clients that might access all of this, I decided that the only thing I could do was try to leave them with something after the meeting to reflect on and, maybe, assist them at a later date. To try to achieve this I created the attached document to which I added the following comments:

Some comments about the attached checklists if I may.

1.      This is the sort of list I put together when I was initiating
the discussion about what we needed on computers in every student’s hands
when I was responsible for the 1:1 program. I intentionally went as far to the
creative, collaborative open-ended side of the spectrum as I could. Some
of the teachers would have lists including such things as Math textbooks as
PDFs and extensive English literature extracts to be read verbatim on
the screen. I welcomed this as it lead to a very robust discussion which
really helped us clarify what we saw the students doing each day.
2.      The support team who worked under me would add their list of
capabilities for the machine and the ensuing document would be turned
into a checklist which we used to evaluate whether a vendor could assist us in
helping us get to where we wanted to go. (In Australia, every notebook
vendor supplying to schools offered curriculum materials, professional
development and conference sponsorships. Very different to Asia.)

I hope this helps.

learning tasks discussion paper

By the way, here are a couple of resources about schools that went with tablet PCs based on the analysis above. The first is from Paul White formally of NIST Thailand and now with the ESF in Hong Kong who talks about a tablet programme supported by wireless projectors in classrooms in this video. A more recent podcast from June 2009 has Bill Campbell, Associate Director of Technology at the Dwight Englewood School share his experiences at a Tablet PC School.

I would be very interested to get some comments from some of the educators whom I know read this blog and are in schools considering 1:1 programmes for the new school year. Are you having these sort of conversations about what learning on these machines looks like? Are you just looking at a machine that enables access and then seeing where it goes from there? Are you being seduced by the vendor that promotes the “creative notebook” and thus falling into the “iMovie project in every classroom” trap? (Had a great reference for this but can’t think how I tagged it!)

Comments, as always very welcome.

Photo: Teaching is not Rocket Science http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/2942564830/in/pool-858082@N25