Lessons Learned from the Illinois 1:1 Laptop Technology Immersion Pilot Project


The State of Illinois, through the leadership of Lt. Governor Pat Quinn, has sponsored a 1:1 pilot program 1:1 laptop initiative with fifteen schools throughout the state. The first year of the pilot, called the Technology Immersion Pilot Project (TIPP) is winding down. The project involves every sixth grader in the fifteen schools receiving a laptop on loan to use. Plans are for them to use their laptops in 7th grade next school year and 8th grade the following year. Meanwhile, each of the students in the succeeding grades will receive a laptop, until all students in grades 6-8 have one to use.

A “TIPP Community Meeting” was held recently to gather information on the progress of the program from teachers, administrators and tech people from the fifteen schools, as well as with various state and district people involved in the pilot.

Some of the lessons learned that I heard during discussions involved the themes of leadership, tech infrastructure, professional development and tech support. All four are essential components!!

1) Leadership: The leaders provide the vision and the will to create, plan, develop and sustain the program. Leadership in this program comes from the state, district, and school (including principals and key members of staff) levels. Leadership involves everything from inspiring others to overcoming shortfalls in equipment, and much, much more.

2) Tech Infrastructure: Without having enough electricity, servers, routers, bandwidth, printers, projectors, laptops, carts (for both projectors and for recharging the laptops), etc. etc, the program would be dead in the water from the beginning.

3) Professional Development (PD): Enough lead-time (a minimum of 6 months) is necessary for teachers to receive laptops, other equipment (such as projectors) and software applications before the time students receive computers. PD not only should include how to physically use the new equipment and applications, but also should include ways to transform learning. PD should mainly revolve around the issue of student learning which is the reason why the program exists. PD should not be a rare or brief event, but should be developed into an ongoing and self-sustainable system and culture of learning for teachers.

4) Tech Support: Without adequate tech, things stop working and the program grinds to a dead stop. Another lesson is that tech support people should get the laptops before the teachers do so that they can make sure all the application, hardware, and network issues are resolved)

As far as assessing impact on learning by the pilot program, since most of the students have had the laptops for less than five months an evaluation of TIPP is too early yet. The vast majority of observations made by teachers and administrators indicate that students are more motivated, on task and do better work than before the laptops were given out. As one student told me, “Now learning is interesting.”

Will Richardson's Passions


Will is presently giving a workshop on how to apply Web. 2.0 tools to learning for a group of administrators in DuPage County, IL. There's a lot of excitement about these tools, mainly because I think that people sense his passion for how students learn.

During the workshop, Will is emphasizing his own learning through conversations with people, mostly through blogs, and is asking us to examine how we learn. This is a recurring theme with Will. He stated in his blog that “the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students.”

This theme is a necessary reminder and leads us into another recurring theme of Will’s that “teaching is modeling”, and unless we display and affirm our learning processes to our students, they will not be able to understand how to develop their own learning processes/systems/networks.

Will stated “if we educators don’t take the lead on this and soon, we’re going to be rendered irrelevant. As I’ve said before, we don’t own the content any more, and what we should own, the mastery of how to use that content, is sorely lacking. Unless we become able to teach and model effective practice in short order, it will be more than passivity that we’ll have to deal with.”

On a side note, a great resource he showed us is his wiki on Why the Read / Write Web Changes Everything. Check out his examples!!


References

Owning the Teaching…and the Learning
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2006/owning-the-teachingand-the-learning/

The Flattening of the World and Pancakes
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2005/04/03

Tell Me Again Why They Need to Learn That???

In a recent interview, David Brin, who has an excellent track record portending the future, made some observations about the effects of technology on society.

He said “In the 15th century, we got the printing press. Printing is a way of augmenting human memory. Printing not only vastly expanded the ability to convey human knowledge and memory to other people but also made it more robust.”

“People tend to assume that when things like this happen, it automatically results in an improved humanity. … It is a religious statement that what we are seeing on the Internet today is improving discourse and improving democracy and improving markets.”

“I’m very skeptical of that because at the beginning of any of these (technological) revolutions, always what is empowered is demagoguery. The immediate outcome of the printing press was the Thirty Years’ War. The immediate outcome of radio was the empowerment of demagogues like Huey Long and especially Adolf Hitler. It always takes a while for the people to learn how to use the new media critically, to be able to perceive the good from the bad (my emphasis).”

Elsewhere in the interview, Mr. Brin discusses his book ‘The Transparent Society’ in which the “age of amateurs” is progressing faster than he envisioned. He states “What’s very fast paced is the spreading of seeing in parallel” … “Fifty million hobbyists are demanding that professionals, from doctors to scientists to movie directors, accept a new world where expertise is not limited to the licensed.” …There is a “redistribution of power”.

My question is how do we trust this wisdom of the masses? How do we know what is true, and how do we determine it is the truth? As Mr. Brin puts it “What is going to enable us to perceive better?”

Just how are people going to learn how to use the new media critically? Shall we ignore these necessary skills in schools, since they is not easily assessed on high-stakes, standardized tests and therefore not tested? Or should the tests be changed to address these critically important issues?

Or should the issues be emphasized anyway (remember the book “Teaching as a Subversive Activity”?) because we know that these information literacy skills (such as the 4 E’s highlighted by David Warlick) are necessary for our children to become good citizens through being good consumers, managers and producers of information.


References:
The Discover Interview – David Brin by David Kushner, Discover Magazine, Special Issue June 2007, pp. 64-7
Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century http://davidwarlick.com/wordpress/?page_id=61

“Yeah, but What’s Writing For?”

Not my title, but that of a very readable article by Lisa Mendelman. She discovered after a year of teaching a writing class that, when allowing students to delve into their own interests and to write about issues important to them “the results were staggering”.

Ms. Mendelman determined her students discovered that the significance of writing is “the ability to connect people, to put us in another’s skin, to teach us what it means to be human.”

A great lesson for everyone!


Reference:
Teacher Magazine May/June 2007 p. 56