Susan Einhorn,
Sam Farsaii
Gregory Martin
Cincinnati Country Day School 1st 1:1 School in the US
What leadership qualities are most needed?
I don't know capacity. The capacity to say "I don't know".
Need classroom teacher drivers. Need Leaders leading from the front
Not about laptops, its about changing instruction and changing educators. Need very supportive admin. Leaders must clearly articulate vision. People need to be aligned in the work. The school must be a learning environment for everyone. Leaders must provide time for teachers to collaborate.
How is instruction different?
It can be far more personalised & differentiated.
Tech amplifies the positive and the negative. Great teachers become even better, poor teachers become awful. Staff professional development is extremely important
Because school is no longer the repository of information teachers must focus more on 21C skills than on content. Roles must change. Focus is on learning more than the content learned.
Be prepared for anything. Unplanned consequences -students making videos of themselves explaining learning
What expectations do teachers need to come with?
Teachers no longer have the role of needing to know everything but they do need to be the pedagogical experts. They need the support of a well thought out plan or it all goes wrong.
Teachers need to be and remain flexible as the rate of change is not diminishing. Teachers need to be as open to learning as our students who we expect to learn 6hrs a day. We need to see teaching as learning and teaching as inquiry. Be prepared to learn from kids. Everyone can learn at the same time and this needs to be well learned.
Teachers need to take charge of their own learning just like we expect of the children.
What kind of support do teachers need?
Good food, relate PD to something that's going on in the year.
What are big ahas before or during implementation?
Children cannot do all kinds of stuff with Tech, they are not really all digital natives. Kids need support and teaching.
Systems need to be open not locked down. Lock downs create way more tech issues and require more tech support. Kids will srill find their way round it so don't waste your money. Open systems are cheaper, require less tech, and teach citizenship. Ask if this were a band instrument how would I handle it?
Getting mixed funding sources; - don't get it all from a grant that will run out and leave you up the creek. Better if parents pay something cos kids look after them better.
Make sure the programme partners know the goals and really know them, not just know them a bit differently from the next person in the chain.
How do you involve parents & community?
Involve community in decision making, find out what senior citizens think and how they would contribute. Get partnerships between senior citizens and kids.
Need a really good comms strategy and need communication to be relevant and regular
How best can we have regular updates including our pedagogical updates among other success metrics. Get parents to pay into the system. Parents are our most important filters. Most of the bad stuff happens at home not at school. Need to really work on parent relationships as you end up having to deal with that stuff.
Have open houses and hve lots of hands on stuff where you put parents in the role of the student
Where is 1:1 going next?
Uncontrolled BYOD can totally kill your 1:1 programme. You will need the most Tech/Pedagogical savvy teachers and a network and support service for 50 different devices. -Go slow on BYOD
There are serious equity issues with BYOD. Schools will need to set basic minimum standards
These people have GAE for 32,000 kids -switch to gmail really smooth
These guys find BYOD totally scarey and don't support it. They only use phones in class if part of a project
BYOD generally doesn't save money. This is an urban myth. BYOD tends to cost a
district more over time than a unified approach.
Another urban myth is that kids are directing their own learning because they bring their own device' because the drivers of their device choice are not pedagogical. Students are more likely to direct their own learning with a well spec'd pedagogically chosen device. We can't let the state cop out of buying Tech when they buy textbooks and we could replace the price of textbooks with the cost of tech.