First Semester as a 1:1 iPad School

After the first full semester of having an iPad 1:1 program, I began to reflect on our program and implementation process. Overall, I think we have had a very successful roll out and semester. We have had a major decrease in the use of paper, printing, and copying costs. We also have had only a five percent incident rate of broken or stolen iPads, which is great for a school. The integration of e-textbooks and digital assignments has been excellent. But we have had some issues too.

Several teachers are having classroom instructional issues using the iPad or having the students use the iPad appropriately. When we started the process of moving to the 1:1 iPad program over a year ago, we stated how we teach, how we transfer information, and how we use technology was going to change.

Classroom management and instructional issues have more to do with student engagement and motivation then the iPad. Please understand that we are not blaming teachers for this issue! These have been concerns that a number of schools and district struggle with throughout the world. The real questions at hand are:
 

1. How do we use the iPad to increase student engagement and motivation?
• Have we been successful in creating a strong culture of digital citizenship?
• Have we been successful in creating dynamic lessons that effectively implement the iPad to create or just consume material?
• Have we made our lessons personal for each student that we teach?
• Are we utilizing social media, games, and other media to our advantage or have we allowed it to be a disadvantage?

We all have heard the term “21st Century skills” but no one has really defined or elaborated as to what it really means or what it looks like in a classroom. 21st Century skills and why we are an iPad 1:1 school are the same. To develop students who can work collaboratively, creatively, with innovation through project or challenge based learning activities to learn new knowledge, master that knowledge to better serve our community and the world that we live. How do you make that happen? By having students use the concepts that we teach them (in small manageable chucks) to research and complete real world projects that are interesting to the student; by creating a learning environment that fosters collaboration, creativity and innovation for the students. 

With this in mind, we also realize that we need to develop additional training opportunities for all the teachers, parents and students. Asking teachers to step out of the comfort zone and to teach in a new manner described above is not easy. The job on any administration is to help each teacher get better with integrating technology into the curriculum and to make them better teachers. 

Mission and Vision need to guide your change to 21st Century Skills

Change in school systems is not always straightforward nor does it usually come easy; however, the fact that we need to embrace change as part of our professional responsibilities is evident for all of us.  For instance, due to State mandates, we will be adopting a new teachers observation and evaluation system that will use student performance as 50% of a teachers and administrators overall summative grade. Additionally, the summative assessments known as PARCC (The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) will be ready for states to administer during the 2014-15 school year. “PARCC is a 22-state consortium working together to develop next-generation K-12 assessments in English and math”. Moreover, alignment with the Common Core Curriculum Standards is coming to fruition as we speak. The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, and what we need to do as educators to maximize their potential and prepare them to be productive contributors in society. These are just a few of the new initiatives that we have or will have to integrate into our daily lives in the near future.

Ultimately, the Common Core is attempting to create the mind set that one cannot cover the entire academic content in a given discipline; however, the more you do this the more curriculum becomes a forced march through material. Teachers need to distinguish what foundational information is needed to be able to determine what must be taught. Our mind set must be that covering standards doesn’t mean just reciting answers to students instead of having students discover answers. Students retain more content when they discover and create learning for themselves!

As educational leaders, it is critical for us to measure all changes against our mission and vision for the community and the guiding principles that accompany them. If we focus on the mission and vision, it will reduce teacher stress and allow teachers to focus on teaching students to use their minds well. The intention is to ensure that both the mission and vision are forward thinking, and conducive to the guiding principles and non-negotiable values to help all of us move our school forward.

Furthermore, it is essential to implement 21^st century learning skills into the planning process, which help students master the multi-dimensional abilities required of them to be successful in college and career paths. What you know is far less important then what you can do with knowledge that you have.  Ultimately, being able to create and innovate new knowledge is a primary goal in teaching our students. This is one of the main reasons the district moved forward with our one to one iPad program. “The ability to create new knowledge to solve new problems is the single most important skill we need to teach and have our students’ master.” Tony Wagner 2012

With the the increase use of technology in the classroom, Common Core Curriculum, and PARCC assessments, the way we teach must drastically change from rote memorization of information to fascilitating a new teaching style of collaborative, hands-on, and challenge based learning through problem solving, asking questions and coming up with creative innovative uses for the content mastery. What does this mean? Rigorous inquiry based learning.

To help create an environment like the one described above, one technique, and it is not an all the time technique, is to invert teaching. Using videos or other media to explain concepts to students for homework allows class time to be used for collaborative, hands-on, and challenge based learning through problem solving, asking questions, and coming up with creative innovative uses for the content mastered. There are many more examples such as the techniques. For example, using such techniques as a fishbowl, jigsaw, think pair share, SQ3R, Challenged based learning or project based learning, differentiated instruction and planning through backwards design are effective instructional strategies used to increase student engagement and achievement.

Although it will be challenging, even disruptive to our normal practice and traditional teaching styles, we must look at giving students more of a voice in their learning. To help lessen our feelings of anxiety, it is necessary to have detailed lesson plans and maintain continuous reflections on how to make our practice better and improve our skills.

Lastly, teaching is about motivating students to take ownership of their own learning. Students today crave a sense of belonging, identity and connection to something bigger than themselves. Successful teachers make learning fun and meaningful for students, so they have the ability to take ownership over their own educational experiences.  We need to collectively demonstrate our passion and purpose for learning; this is why we are educators and love to teach!  

Industrial Model to a 21st Century Model

This week I have spent a lot of time researching how we should design and change our current structure of the high school education delivery from the industrial model to a 21^st century model. If you have been reading my blog, you know that this year we went to a one to one iPad program with students. The next step for us to fully utilize this tool for education is to evaluate our current deliver model.

What I envision for our students is more of an open structured campus that will allow students and teachers to meet and work in both small and large group settings in a new more applied curriculum where students need to apply knowledge to real world problems. After reviewing a number of journals, videos, and papers on this topic, I have developed several questions that will need additional research.

1.     Most of the research alludes to project based learning that incorporates inter-disciplinary units. This requires teachers to ask higher thinking, critical thinking, and guiding questions for students to discover their own learning. What types of professional development do we need for teachers to make this transition from delivering content to facilitators of knowledge?

2.     To facilitate the type of educational model necessary, traditional bell schedules and sorting of students is not going to be practical. How do you develop a master schedule that supports learning in this type of environment?

3.     Changing from the traditional model, how do you design a model utilizing a building built in the early part of the 1900’s?

4.     How do you change the expectations of your community, parents, teachers, and leaders to support making the dramatic changing that you envision as the future of education?

I think everyone in education realizes the professional development, professional learning communities, and inclusion of teachers in planning is critical to success of any change. But how do we realistically change the entire industrial education model to a 21^st century model quickly and efficiently?

Reflecting on One to One

As a One to One school, reading and learning all that we could prior to and during implementation, one important factor missing from most research we read was pedagogy. While everyone agrees that pedagogy has to change in a One to One environment, there are may different opinions on how it should change. Project Based Learning, Flipped Classroom, Individualized Instruction, online courses, using Apps in the classroom and the list goes on. These are all wonderful techniques that teachers can use at certain times in the classroom but teachers need time to plan, experiment, and reflect on each of these modalities to see what best fits their teaching and expertise.

As a district, we started a full year prior to student iPad implementation with professional development of our teaching staff. We allowed the staff to use, experiment, and test applications on the iPad for the student and classroom. With that in mind, we did not tend to an important area of need in this preparation, instructional pedagogy. As with any teaching staff, you have some teachers who need additional support for improvement of instruction. I think all teachers can always improve in the teaching and learning process that is what life long learning is all about. As we move forward, our professional development focus will be on instructional planning and pedagogy.

It is obvious which teachers planned, experimented, and reflected on uses of technology in the classroom.  While most of our teachers are using the iPad in class to a high level some, which we did expect, have not embraced the technologies usefulness to enhance instruction. The questions that we raised are did our planning for implementation fail or was our expectation for our professional staff to high? Did we have enough professional development? Or did we fail to cultivate the basic need for our staff, instructional pedagogy?

As we have completed the first set of instructional rounds, we have identified a large number of staff members who as seen as experts in the classroom. During our PLC meetings we will begin to address the needs of some of the staff in pedagogical strategies and planning. Our focus for professional development will be to use the staff that we have seen as exemplar to train and assist other staff members moving forward. 

Digital Classroom Management

This year we have gone to a one to one iPad environment for our high school. We were able to hand out 500 iPads in less then 30 minutes to all of our students with the help of our teachers and IT department. Everyone has been working hard to make this a smooth and trouble free process for our teachers and students. With this in mind, we have had some difficulties one of which has been classroom management. Students have been and are easily distracted with social networking apps and games. But this is nothing new, whether it's been students texting, social networking on their own devices or doodling in their notebooks. For our teaching staff we created a digital classroom management sheet to refresh everyone's classroom management strategies. Here is what we handed out:

Digital Classroom Management Tips

Teachers and students must be organized to have a successful classroom and learning environment. This tenant remains the same whether or not technology is in use. For a digital classroom here are some specific strategies for you to consider. Remember, each teacher will have different strategies that will work for him or her, not everything will work for you. Individual teachers need to find what works for them!

Lesson Plan Development - Foremost to any classroom management technique is your lesson plan. A good lesson plan that keeps the students involved will reduced classroom problems whether you are using an iPad or not. In your lesson plans, spell out exactly what you expect your students to do with their iPad. Create your own expectations and furthermore make sure any use of the iPad in class is appropriate and not it's own distraction.

Consistency - Isn't that what you're always told about classroom management? It’s the same with iPads, be consistent with rules and how iPads are used! One way to reduce this is to have Q and A posters in your classroom. They are simple posters with instructions for iPad use. Some examples are basic iPad navigation, how to get handouts and how to hand in work, and how to virtual share.  Posters should always address the most asked questions and all you have to do is, calmly and coolly point to the poster on a wall instead of being distracted by answering the same question hundred times. Keeping a cool attitude also impressive students.

Expectations – At the beginning of the year, we tell our students what we expect from them. Good pedagogy require this be done for every class and every lesson, whether or not iPads are involved. As for the iPad, tell them clearly what you expect, such as no idle surfing, no instant messaging, etc.

Classroom arrangement - This is important and goes hand-in-hand with classroom management. Walking around, you have students with iPads, management by walking around is imperative! You want to arrange your room so that you can see all the iPad screen it once. 

Downtime – If students finished their work for the day, or some are done and others are not, let them do their own thing. They can do work for another class use a different app as reward for completing their assignments. If they know you will let them have the extra time to do their own thing at the end of class, they’ll be less likely to get off-task during class. 

Specific management ideas:

1.  Students need to be organized on their iPads.  Create folders for Apps.  You need to model this too!

2.  Have students make shortcuts on their iPads to sites that they go to often in your classroom.  Put these sites in folders labeled specifically for your class.

3.  Students should be creating folders inside of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for different classes. (Need two files first to do this)

4.  You need to evaluate their classroom setting including desk/table arrangements so that they can better see what students are doing with their iPads.

5.  How are you distributing electronic documents now?  You should be able to do this through dropbox, EdModo or through the WebDav.  This has to become routine for the both you and your students.

6.   Are you using survey sites like Socrative.com to get quick feedback from an activity/lesson?  Are they using tools like this to get feedback from the day? You need to do this to keep student on task and off distracting apps!

7.   Are you using Google docs, forms, or other app to get real time questions answered in class to keep your students engaged? It lets you know who is on task and who is not in real time.

8.  Have you changed the way they are teaching since the arrival of the iPad? Know that students have iPads you can’t teach like you did last year!

9.  To see what students have been doing or what Apps they have been in lately, you can do a 4-finger swipe up or double tap a students home button.  This will show the multitasking bar. Maybe you should make it a rule that all Apps need to be closed at the beginning and end of each class.  This way when they go to the next class, the only Apps that are open, are the Apps that you want.

10. Group work is still OK.  Not everyone has to use their iPad at the same time or at all during specific activities.

11.  Have students turn over or put to sleep their iPads when not in use.

12.  You need to get up and move around to see what is going on in their classroom.

13.  Engage students by having them share their work via the projector (VGA Cable, Reflection Application).

Questions to consider as we move forward:

1.    How can I use the built in camera to engage students in creating meaningful work?

2.    How can I use iTunesU to help students learn or reinforce what was taught?  

3.  Can I assign a video to be watched the night before so students can come in with some background on a topic?

4.  What creative ways can I use the iPad for learning? 

5.  How can I make the iPad a tool for creativity?

Turnaround Coach

I recently interviewed for and was offered one of the Turnaround Coach positions by the New Jersey Department of Education in the Regional Achievement Centers. They required each interviewee to write a one-page outline on what experience they have in turning underperforming students and schools into high preforming. You were asked to prioritize two (2) major leverage points of interventions. (Keeping to one page was a very trying task but here it is)

The two leverage points I focused on were School Culture and School Leadership. It is clear from my experience and arrival to the district that the reason the school was underperforming because administrators were spending most of our time dealing with student management and disruptive behaviors. Without a safe, harassment, bullying, and intimidation free environment no learning can or will take place. This leads to a lack of leadership in the following areas; observation, evaluation, curriculum focus, quality meeting time for PLC groups, and lesson plan reviews.

Our first step is to develop a clear mission and vision for high expectations, to include operating principles, operating rules, operating assumptions, and non-negotiable standards. Ensuring effective school and district leadership with a shared commitment is paramount for successful execution to change. You need to develop of a team of administrators and teachers to cultivate a systemic process, through shared leadership capacity, to create a healthy, safe, and supportive learning environment is crucial for any intentional focus on improving learning.

The next step was to revise the entire code of conduct. It was evident that the current code of conduct was not deterring any inappropriate behaviors in the school. The code of conduct needed to have a progress set of consequences to deter repeat behavior, which must include detention (Ex. 1hr, 3hr, Saturday), in-school suspension, out of school suspension, superintendent hearings, and expulsion.

Following the code of conduct we revise the attendance policy and procedures making absences, lateness to school and class, cutting class and school more consequential. You can have the best teachers in the world, but if a student is not in class, is late to class or is disruptive to the class, no learning can take place. A progressive set of consequences are need including detention (Ex. 1hr, 3hr, Saturday), in-school suspension, taking the parents to court for unexcused absences, and removal of class credit.

The next key step to assist the administration was guidance to implementing the above strategies. To design these changes, the leadership needed to recruit stakeholders from the entire school community, administrators, parents, teachers, and students who are willing to develop a very strict code of conduct and attendance policies and procedures. Once these measures were in place, we focused on administering the changes, using technology, to assist in managing the day-to-day operation of the school.

1.     Student management system to track, attendance by period, discipline, detentions in a mobile platform so it is always at the administrators finger tips

2.     Instillation of security cameras in all common areas, hallways, stairwell, outside every bathroom, gym and cafeteria.

3.     Assistance in administering the code of conduct and attendance policy, it must be consistent, fair and firm.

4.     Develop time management skills, managing a calendar, and managing a typical school day.

5.     Develop a school year schedule for observations, PLC meetings, Walkthroughs, lesson plan review, and other school level meetings.

6.     Eliminate any structures that do not work

7.     Use the design-loop theory on all aspects of the school.

The following steps were taken once the successful transition of the above changes had occurred:

1.     Design curriculum and instruction with the NJCCS and CCCS to assess student work and evaluate teachers

2.     Increase instructional time for reading and mathematics

3.     Substantial investment in professional development for teachers that focus on instructional practices to help students meet academic standards

4.     Comprehensive system to monitor individual student performance and to provide help to struggling students before they fall behind

5.     Parental involvement effort to get students to meet standards

6.     District accountability systems with real consequences for adults

7.     Use of assessments to guide instruction and serve as a healthy part of everyday teaching and learning

Our work is not complete, nor should it ever be, we are continuing to improve each year!