Leyden
High School District 212 right next door to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has just gone 1-1 with the
(mostly) web-only Chromebook. So, that means every student in our two high
school district has a laptop with a full keyboard. However, native programs
cannot be installed as on a a Win/Mac laptop; all applications that students
have access to must come from the web. In other words, there is no MS Office
for students- all Google Apps. Thus, we characterize our 1-1 model as "moving
learning to the web".
There
is power when you shift learning to the web. For us, there
have been two critical pieces to making this shift.
1. A Common Platform: A Learning
Management System (LMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle, or OpenClass (which is what
we use) to provide a common electronic platform is an immediate shift in how
school is done.
Look,
I realize that this may seem like an obvious use of web-based tools to some,
but providing a digital organizing structure for students is crucial. I cannot
stress this enough: The LMS is
HUGE. It's the glue that holds together our digital work.
The
immediate access to tools for posting materials, syllabi, calendars,
assessments, facilitating discussions, and communicating with students
immediately changes the educational landscape. Furthermore, the fact that it’s
a common platform for students helps them keep it all organized and coherent.
For
example, one teacher posted a lesson with an online presentation tool called
SlideRocket Complete with audio narration, students can view the material
anytime anywhere. What’s even better is that the teacher sent the link to the
presentation to his students’ parents. Having that lesson available online
helps students who were absent, students who need to hear it (or just part of
it) a second or third time, and effectively brings parents into the class with
their students.
2. An Ethos of Sharing (rather than “turning it in”): Along with the LMS, the use
of Google Apps has provided the foundation for communication and collaboration
among our staff and students.
Again,
in our district we are utilizing the (mostly) web-only Chromebook, which means
that native apps such as the MS Office Suite are off the table. Thus,
Google Apps for education provides the platform for most of our productivity
tools.
Think
about this: The move to Google docs and the ethos of sharing files, of working
with products that are constantly being revised by a team, is not a small
one. Some of have been doing this for years and take it as second nature. Personally,
it’s totally changed how I work and collaborate with others. However, it’s
taken me years to build this capacity.
In this model, students and teachers are working together, constantly revising and sharing feedback on living documents. We
sometimes forget how alien this may seem to many students, who have been
largely trained to "turn it in" (or to "attach it"), and
that's the end of the assignment. Short of receiving an assignment back
with a few red marks scrawled (or typed) on it, the work was done. Dead and
abandoned. Static. Time to move on to the next thing.
"Just"
introducing Google Apps (or other tools which allow for cloud-based
collaboration) is a big shift for teachers, students, and parents. It may not seem all
that big of a deal to seasoned Google Apps users, but introducing these tools on a mass scale can be challenging.
Yet,
it’s also critically important to our model. Institutionalizing a cycle of
sharing and providing meaningful feedback between teachers and students has
positive implications based on decades of research. Here’s
why: according to
John Hattie's table
of effect sizes, a vast body of educational research indicates that "Feedback"
is the instructional technique that has the #1 biggest impact on student
learning.
Never
heard of Hattie? Perhaps you’re a fan of Robert Marzano's “Classroom
Instruction That Works”. You will of course know that "Setting objectives
and providing feedback" is one of the nine high impact, research-based
instructional strategies advocated by that Dr. Marzano. Incidentally, Marzano’s
work is linked to Hattie’s research, so they’re singing from the same hymnal.
If
you have a handle on Google Apps and a Learning Management System, you will
have built the foundation for learning to be collaborative and dynamic in
nature as well as available anytime or anywhere. As one of our teachers said, “Class
doesn’t end at the period, it ends in the cloud.”
So,
aside from these two foundational pieces, what else can you expect when you
move learning to the web? Certainly, our teachers are using a multitude of
other web-based techniques such as
Remember
“Feedback” and Hattie’s effect sizes? How about this for increasing the amount
and quality of feedback for students:
These
are a few things off the top of my head. Now,
I realize that what I’ve been discussing isn’t full-blown Problem Based
Learning across the curriculum or anything. I worry that teachers see presentations
like the one given by Seth Godin here, and feel as though they have to
immediately meet that standard. Don’t get me wrong, I love what Seth is saying
but what he’s talking about takes deep learning on the part of
everyone in the institution over a long period of time.
We
are just scratching the surface of the pedagogical implications of the tools we have available and building the structure of our digital courses. However, that doesn’t
mean what’s going on isn’t not effective and potentially transformative.
What is the
unintended curriculum for students and teachers?
However,
you should also consider the challenges this poses for students. For students, learning to
learn in a 1-1 setting is HARD. Let’s not pretend it isn’t. It's a totally
new paradigm for interacting with a course and a teacher, for accessing
materials, not to mention the inevitable technical issues that arise.
Moving
learning to the web immediately introduces a different prototype for student
learning, and learning to navigate this takes time for everyone. Although
we sometimes perpetuate the myth that students are "digital natives"
and they innately gravitate toward electronic documents, presentations,
syllabi, calendars, and to-do lists, this is certainly not always the case. In
fact, some students have a very hard time in this new paradigm, and often it's
those who have succeeded in a traditional paper-based system.
Think
of the student binders you've seen in years past, those that look like unstable
nuclear paper bombs ready to detonate at the slightest nudge. Is it any wonder
that students might have the same trouble organizing materials electronically?
Students
need to learn HOW to learn in an electronic environment. Students have to learn
how to deal with materials (previously tree-based) that are suddenly available
electronically via a website or learning management system. Furthermore, they
have to deal with a new expectation of responsibility: Your class materials are
out there and available at any time, and you need to access them as you need
them.
Although
it's fantastic that students no longer have to rely on the teacher to access
class materials, that's a double edged sword: with these tools, there is an
expectation of personal responsibility on the part of the student. You cannot
understate that this can be uncomfortable for them.
Similarly, learning to teach in a 1-1 setting is also
HARD. Again, let’s not pretend it isn’t. It's a totally new paradigm for
organizing a course, for presenting materials, for interacting with students, and
it presents a host of new classroom management issues, not to mention the inevitable
technical issues that arise.
Teachers will try some
things that work, and they’ll try some things that crash and burn. It’s all
part of the learning process, and that needs to be OK. I certainly hope that
our teachers will make the connection that this is how learning happens for
students, too. We all need the space to be able to try things and fail.
But as one our teachers said
to me, although this is tough starting out, this is all an investment in time
and learning. Next year we will have built it a cache of digital materials and
experiences, and this will get easier. As that same teacher said, “Come and see
us next year.”
And there it is. I've
always thought of education as a process of iteration, the repetition of a process creating an increasingly complex and
beautiful result. In my brain, damaged slightly by several years as a math teacher,
our experience teaching and learning in a 1-1, cloud-based environment like a
fractal: beautiful images created by an iterative process.
Right now, we're in the
midst of moving learning to the web, our first iteration. We have just started
1-1, and as we repeat and refine our techniques, over the course of many class
periods, days, weeks, months, and years, the investment of time and learning
will produce an increasingly beautiful result.
