Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

One-to-one: Overcoming financial and other obstacles

Today the Lake Park Audubon School District in Minnesota is known for its technology, but it didn’t earn this reputation overnight. Six years ago, the 700-student district carefully planned an ambitious one-to-one initiative and worked through significant challenges along the way.

Lake Park Audubon launched a one-to-one program in 2012 to provide equity for students. A significant number of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch programs and many don’t have computers at home. The district believed that providing devices for every student—and allowing the high school students to take the devices home—would level the playing field by giving all students equal access to technology.

I served as Lake Park Audubon’s technology director from 2008 to 2017 and shepherded it through the one-to-one planning, development, and implementation. Along the way, we encountered several roadblocks: How do we pay for the devices? How do we get buy-in from the school board? Those issues have to be addressed before you can even begin to address a third question: We’ve got these devices; now what?…Read More

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Getting started with blended learning

“I don’t think I’ll teach any differently this year. We just won’t use the Chromebooks in math class.”
—Me (at the beginning of the school year)

Last school year, our school started a one-to-one Chromebook initiative for the sixth grade. That meant our incoming seventh-graders would not only have Chromebooks, they would know how to use them!

What I thought would happen (aka delusions of grandeur):…Read More

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Teacher: These are “My Tech Essentials” for a 1:1 Classroom

Technology is an incredible resource for learning. It connects us to people all over the world, it enables us to find answers to our questions with the click of a button, and it is versatile enough to be used by students of varying skill levels.

I have been teaching in a 1:1 classroom for four years at Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School. We started in 5th grade when my colleague got a Khan Academy grant to purchase 12 Chromebooks to supplement the Chromebooks our school provided. We then did a Donor’s Choose project to purchase the remaining computers. We have 1:1 Chromebooks for each student in 4th and 5th grade, and we’re introducing 1:1 for 3rd grade this year.

Within our 1:1 framework, we start by planning our units and lessons with the International Baccalaureate (IB) framework in mind, thinking about how our students will learn best. If it makes the most sense to use the Chromebooks to research or take notes, then that’s what we’ll do, but we also make sure that we have a variety of learning experiences each day. We are a highly collaborative school and 1:1 has helped us tremendously. Our PARCC scores have risen each year since we introduced 1:1 in 5th grade.…Read More

Chromebook takeover signals major shift in education…but not in the way you may think

According to the New York Times, the massive adoption of Google and its Chromebooks in U.S. classrooms (accounting for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools) is signaling a “profound shift in American education;” and they’re calling it the “Googlification of the classroom.” But is Googlifiction spurring a much bigger shift in today’s K-12 classrooms than simply switching devices?

Though the low-cost of Chromebooks, free apps offered, and marketing to teacher and admin rather than high-level district officials are all reasons why Google is in almost every classroom today, one of the most massive underlying reasons for the tremendous adoption rate is a fundamental shift in how students are learning: from test-specific memorization of facts to harnessing online tools for problem-solving, collaborative learning.

In essence, the use of Google in the classroom is true Googlification, or modeling learning off of Google’s own employee skillset, in that the use of Google and Chromebooks in the classroom aims to turn today’s students into creative and collaborative problem-solvers that know how to intuitively harness online and in-hand technologies.…Read More

Best practices for rolling out tech in the classroom—an administrative perspective

At The Shipley School, we’ve embraced how technology can aid in the learning process for all of our students, particularly in our Middle School (grades 6-8) and Upper School (grades 9-12) classrooms. With laptops, students can quickly access information while in class, use audio and video tools to complement traditional assignments, and collaborate more easily on group projects.

We’re a Pre-K-12 coeducational independent school located in the competitive Philadelphia education market, so we’re always looking for ways to differentiate ourselves, and we pride ourselves in providing a world class education for our students.

Shipley has always been interested in student technology use, and for years that meant laptops available via computer labs and carts for teachers to reserve for their lessons. As computer use and personal laptop use became more common, we allowed students to bring their own devices to school, but recognized not every student comes from a family with the financial means to buy an extra laptop for their child.…Read More

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Teachers and IT: How to keep kids safe on Chromebooks

Just a few short years ago, Apple was the undisputed king of tech in schools. If you didn’t have iPads in your classroom, you were planning to get them soon. But today the momentum has shifted dramatically. Google’s Chromebook has almost completely replaced Apple’s iconic tablet as the first choice for classroom-tech initiatives.

Chromebooks are in many ways ideal for classrooms, allowing teachers to leverage online resources to provide richer, more differentiated educational experiences to your students. In addition, Chromebooks have multiple, substantial layers of built-in security, providing peace of mind regarding certain types of cyber threats.

To improve on that security, school IT probably also use a secure web gateway appliance and a firewall to protect students and staff from web-borne threats. Depending on the solutions the school or district has chosen to install, this is effective—as long as the devices are connected to the school network.…Read More

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Why my students are real world-ready with nothing but a device

[Editor’s note: Award-winning science teacher Anthony Johnson, whose real-world ‘Johnsonville’ approach article was a viral hit, delves further into how his students use their devices in every lesson, every day.]

Just as few modern-day workers could function in their jobs without a cellphone, a laptop, or periodic trips to Google, I want my students to learn how to solve problems using devices that will likely be similar to ones they will encounter for the rest of their lives.

I strongly believe in the power of technology to transform learning and the lives of my students. In fact, I’m not sure where my classroom would be without it. My school is fortunate enough to have gone 1:1 with iPads, and I challenge my students to use their devices in every lesson, every project, and every experience we share as a class.…Read More

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#1: The 7 questions every new teacher should be able to answer

[Editor’s note: This story, originally published on June 13th of this year, was our #1 most popular story of the year. Happy holidays, and thank you for tuning into our 2016 countdown!]

Not long ago, the leadership team of a school district I was working with asked me: “If you were going to hire a new teacher, what would you ask in the interview?” They were concerned that hiring teachers with the right skills now can save a district a lot of money in staff development later. Moreover, they wanted to hire teachers who would be open minded about changes to come. The problem is to balance the reality of today’s pressure for test scores and required teacher evaluation with the changes that can be anticipated during the next two decades.

As I wrote in my last column, the traditional skill we valued in teachers when paper was the dominant media—the ability to transfer knowledge of a subject—is becoming less important. Increasingly, a teacher’s knowledge can be found online and in various learning styles. As the internet drives down the value of a teacher’s knowledge, their ability to personalize learning with resources from around the world will increase. We will have more data generated about our students as we build out our online communities. We will need teachers who understand how to make meaning of this data to personalize learning for every student from a vast digital library of learning resources. Also of increasing value is their ability to teach students to be self-disciplined about how “to learn to learn.” Rather than losing overall value, teachers will be more important than ever.…Read More

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How to manage your one-to-one program after you hand out devices

After the Chromebooks and iPads are distributed, admins and IT teams must keep asking the tough questions

If there’s one thing schools have learned from the multiple one-to-one mobile device implementations that have rolled out during the last few years, it’s that they’re hardly “set it and forget it” projects.

Purchasing and handing out the iPads, Chromebooks, or laptops are just the first steps on a long path that must also incorporate ongoing professional development for teachers and training for students; the establishment of acceptable usage policies and procedures; management of device support, insurance, and repair…and the list goes on.

“As a one-to-one implementation matures, different things happen that you may not have considered at the outset,” said Scott S. Smith, Ed.D., who serves as chief technology officer at Mooresville Graded School District in Mooresville, N.C — a district with one of the most celebrated one-to-one programs in the country. “For this reason, it’s important to maintain a clear vision and purpose from day one.” For most districts, that vision should center on why the one-to-one initiative is a good idea and how it will change instruction, teaching, and the learning environment for the better.…Read More

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Why some schools pay $100 more for the same iPads

Education technology experts discuss various solutions to the ‘broken’ process of ed-tech purchasing

The ed-tech procurement process is broken, said former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Harold Levy during the 2016 South by Southwest Education (SXSWedu) conference in Austin, Texas, March 8—and to prove it, he said a study last month found disparities of more than $100 per unit on how much schools were paying for the exact same iPad model.

In a session titled “Begging for Disruption: Ed-Tech Procurement,” Levy and the other panelists discussed the problems that school districts have in discovering, evaluating, and buying technology products that meet their specific needs.

They also shared information about new services that aim to bring more transparency to the buying process for schools—including a nonprofit organization called the Technology for Education Consortium (TEC) that just launched last month.…Read More