Cheat Sheet

About three weeks before the final exam, I told my algebra students that I didn't mind if they cheated.  In fact, I thought it was a good idea for them to bring a cheat sheet into the testing room.  "But, we could write down all of the answers, Mr. Kapferer."  "What answers? You don't know the questions."

http://bit.ly/bbh9GS

They determined to take full advantage of my foolish offer with elaborate diagrams, hordes of example problems, and lengthy lists of definitions and formulas.  Even the most carefully prepared crib notes, however, are meaningless in the hands of a student unable to interpret or apply their contents.

We'd spent an entire year building a repertoire of problem-solving skills.  At exam time, I am more interested in gauging whether a student knows when and how to use the Pythagorean Theorem than determining if they've committed it to memory.  Only in a classroom is that sort of reference material routinely withheld at the precise moment when it would be most handy.

Can you imagine that happening in a workplace?  “Bob, I need you to finish those TPS reports... but, I’d prefer that you not look at last month’s for comparison.”  “Sally, I hope you’ve got those structural formulas memorized.  You'll need them to finish the calculations for the bridge project.”  Naturally, Bob could work more efficiently by referencing past work, and Sally’s design would be more sound if she had the necessary guides close at hand.  Both may benefit from the feedback of peers.

In an educational setting, we ought to be preparing young people to use the various resources that they already have unfettered access to in the outside world, and will be expected to use in sophisticated ways by future employers.  There's no doubt that they’ll have the tools, but will they be able to use them well?  Can they quickly find a source of reliable information appropriate to a particular situation?  Can they organize data in meaningful ways?  Are they able to clearly communicate their ideas to others?

Contemporary computing devices are integral to what should be happening in the classroom.  If we’re presenting the right challenges, these devices are less like cheat sheets and more like tools of the trade. In any case, the iPad is a phenomenal cheat sheet.

It's Been a While

OK, so it's been a while since I've blogged about the administrative side of the iPad program. Have we given up on the program? Have we moved on to tackle other things? No way.

Here are a couple of interesting things that have happened in our iPad world recently that are of interest. First (and most sad) would be that I lost my iPad. The most likely scenario is that it was stolen out of my car, but I can't be sure. Either way, I had to drop $600 to replace it. Ouch. Why do I bring this up? Because it stirred up questions that I'm not sure we have easy answers to. If we do an iPad program, what happens when something like this occurs? With a high deductible business insurance (or homeowners, for that matter) it doesn't pay to file a claim. And who would be responsible for something like this? The student or parents? The school? Would it make a difference if it was off-campus or on? We'll be exploring these questions as we move forward so that we're prepared.

Second, we got to meet with Fraser Speirs (speirs.org) in Washington, DC and talk about his iPad 1:1 program at Cedars School in Scotland. Fraser was very personable and talked easily about the program, both the good and the bad. However, it was clear early on that the good was far outweighing the bad in his mind. He brought up a million interesting points, but here are some that stuck:

• The fact that the iPad is not a content creation device is nonsense. He showed me things that his kids were creating and I was blown away.
• The Cedars School is not using any other computers. This is sort of goes with the previous point. Intriguing...
• When asked about printing, he said "We don't." I love it. I'm still blown away by how much printing happens at a school. The other day I had to help clear a job in a computer lab here that was a printout of a PDF that resembled a book. It wasn't even an original work. Shouldn't happen.
• The learning curve was very minimal on the iPad. If you read the blog, they rolled out the iPad in the summer and kids and teachers came back to them. They rolled into the new year with a completely new device in everyone's hands. How many devices do you know of that would be successful in that scenario?

And finally, we are moving forward with designing an iPad pilot phase II. We hope to include students in this version. I can't give any details yet, but hopefully we can keep the ball rolling towards an eventual 1:1 program. I am excited!

Mike Schmelder

Clearing the Way

In his recent New York Times article, “Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Brain?”¹Jaron Fanier sets out – via little more than folksy anecdote and pure conjecture – to argue that there is some connection between technology in the classroom and our species' burgeoning inability to proliferate our brains². In the article, Fanier writes, “Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.” Putting aside the idea that these two hyperbolic uses for computers in a classroom are either binaries or the only actual two uses for computers in the classroom, one sentiment is made overly clear in paragraph after turgid paragraph of his argument: that there lies some kind of natural tension between all that is good in education, and gol' danged computers.

I've long argued that education remains one of the few industries deeply suspicious of efficiency – that because wonderment and joyfulness and curiosity and deep intellectual engagement feel somehow at odds with organizational tools and automation and systematic sophistication³ our tendency more often than not is to rely on what we've always done as opposed to seeking out certain types of institutional innovation⁴. We like big libraries a whole lot more than our students do, for example. We like tactile media more than our students do. We like piles of file folders. We like precedent. We like chalk⁵. Teachers are a preternaturally nostalgiac bunch – few industries seem so connected to the tics of Americana the way ours does (here I mean: to football; to baseball; to fairs; to leaves; to seasons, etc. etc.) – and my guess is some of our folksiness comes directly from our deep and historic connection to our calendars, but I think too there is in each of us a Fanier-like fear that when our faces turn once toward the cathode ray we will forever turn away from each other.

And kids will never go outside again. And no-one will ever play baseball. And the maypole will rust. And our brains will no longer proliferate.

None of this is true of course, and we've been facing these kinds of terrors head-on since the Victor Talking Machine Company made wanton an entire generation of children, but still we wring our hands and we worry.

Whenever I'm asked why the iPad makes sense for my students and for my classroom, I say this: because it makes our lives easier, and because it's really pretty. The second part is the simplest: it's just a pretty thing to have around, it's fun to play with, it's hard to keep my hands off⁶. But the first part is the important one – it makes our lives easier. It just does. When we finish iPad integration school wide, there will come a day when my students will be able to sit in front of me with their iPads on their desk and pretty much nothing else between us. No reams of paper, no mess of pens, no need for the pencil sharpener, no pencil kit; no lost books; no battered assignment tablet; no planner; no battery cable; no ethernet cord; no keyboard; no lost energy, no misplaced worries, no drag. Just an iPad that contains their entire academic universe in a neat black sleeve, and the best space for conversation I can possibly create in my classroom. And it will be in those moments – when the chaos is pushed to the side, and my students need not feel that drag of their lost detritus – that something truly remarkable will pass between us all. Put another way, there will soon come a time in my classroom where we are using computers neither to represent ourselves nor to build anything at all, but merely to preserve for us all time to be together.

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1 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-essay-t.html –

2Literally, this is what he argues. He writes, “To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension”. This is all true, I believe, Because Jaron Lanier Says So (BJLSS). You'll find BJLSS to be the core rhetorical strategy of the entire article.

3The most absurd section can be found where Lanier writes, “Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to.” This is something of “epic fail” by way of simile: listening to an mp3 is not at all like learning robotics for the sake of simulated erotica, and is exactly the kind of logical non-sequitor Lanier relies on throughout.

4As a clarification, I'd say that in my experience many teachers are quick to test new modes, paedagogies, approaches, etc., but that it is the rare institution for which the same can be said.

5Here when I say, “We” I obviously mean, “I”.

6The same goes for my students, who were drawn immediately to the thing when I bought it. Even today, when I walked down our Middle School hallway, a sixth grader – who's never spoken to me before – said, “Hey! Nice iPad!” The fact that he said that to me today does not serve ipso facto as evidence that iPads are the pre-eminent tool for education, but it certainly speaks to the instinctive level of attraction our students do hold for them. Know why? Because they are pretty.

On Tote Bag Theory

(in which the author only hints at talking about iPads in education, but promises that he will -- eventually)

When I was in the Middle School I used to walk my teachers to their cars pretty much every afternoon. I was that nerdy kid with the girl's[1] haircut that hung out in his teachers' rooms after school (or pretty much any other time I had a chance) and as such when they wanted more than anything just to get me out of their room and get themselves on to their own lives they'd say, "Mike -- want to be my big helper?' and I'd say yes, of course, because that’s what I wanted more than anything^[2], and then the two of us would clomp through the school with like four of those green LL Bean tote bags each stuffed to the point of exhaustion out to some maroon Volvo in the Middle School parking lot. We’d spend a few minutes stacking everything in careful enough piles that – with a little luck – nothing would topple over, and almost inevitably the teacher would sort of grimace and say, “I don’t know how I’m going to get all of this in my house.” Then they’d head off with a wave and I’d be left standing in the parking lot wondering what would happen if they opened a car window on the way home.

That was the price of being a teacher – the burden of tote bags. I sort of understood it then, and I certainly understood it fifteen years later when I too was a teacher buried beneath the impossible weight of my own stuff: two LL Bean tote bags of my own, a brown paper shopping bag, a laptop bag, a thermos, two sets of keys, my cell-phone, my lunch bag, my badge, my coffee, etc. etc. As such, one morning in the school parking lot I had one of those "I need to quit my job and work in a pizza joint" moments that served as an indicator of a creeping unhappiness not-quite-job-related: in this case, it was “stuff” related. Not that my stuff wasn't organized (because in a vague, perhaps unrecognizable way, it was); not that I didn't love my job (because in every way I did); I just didn't have the energy to match the kind of system-wide resistance all my stuff had created for me. So I did what we all do at least once in our professional lives -- I just sort of sat in my car and thought about how awesome it would be to never get out[3].

Eventually I did make it out of the car -- people were starting to stare -- but I decided, at least for one day, to just leave everything in my car and see what happened. I brought with me my keys, my wallet, my coffee, and nothing else. And it was fantastic. I felt light, agile, smart, dexterous and awake. For the first time since the first day of school I knew what I was responsible for, and where it all was.

That was the last day I let a tote bag in my car[4].

*

I think we’ve all had that moment of organizational revelation/liberation at work -- David Allen^[5] argues that we feel it most often right before we leave for vacation, when we’re forced most to confront and resolve our loose ends -- but I’m not sure my students ever really do. Some of that is their fault -- it’s because they’re kids and cultivating personal organizational skills fall pretty low on their list of priorities when compared to, you know, worrying about how you look, how you feel, whether (person x) likes you, whether or not your pants actually fit you, if there’s anything stuck to your face, why your parents said "that thing" this morning, etc. But some of it is our fault, too -- we overwhelm our students^[6] massively with paperwork, we constantly re-manipulate their schedules in major and minor ways, we load them up on materials of pretty serious mass and magnitude, and -- without any kind of professional coaching whatsoever -- expect them to manage it all. Strangely enough, they’ve all developed a pretty familiar coping mechanism: a really huge bag (these, on wheels[7]) that they drag with them everywhere they go. Thus the circle is complete.

I’m lucky to work in a pretty amazing school and luckier still to be on the inside edge of a set of discussions about technology in the classroom generally, and 1:1 programs specifically. Though there are innumerable devices out in the world that can “do” any number of technologically intriguing things^[8], I find myself becoming more interested in what a device can “remove” from my students lives: the clutter, the confusion, the psychic muddiness, those ridiculous backpacks-on-wheels. My classroom is a better place when it is a place of stewardship and engagement and diction and energy, and my sense is the distractions of the world are at near constant odds with my wants as a teacher. Put another way, this: the device I want in my classroom is the one that keeps my students organized and clear, and keeps their attention where it needs most to be – on each other.

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[1] Apologies for the gender coding, but this is true: the first time I went to camp, a young boy – who was just genuinely trying to be helpful – pointed to the “girls” side of the property and told me I’d find my kind over there. It was there haircut.

^[2] This was for one of three reasons: a. I was really into playing this futuristic role-playing game called “Star Frontiers” back then and since no-one else ever wanted to play with me I was often stuck trying to figure out how to kill time until I could go home; b. I thought in the back of my mind I was going to become a teacher and as such I was hoping an older teacher might let me take a look at a gradebook (which I was so fascinated by I’d make up my own if I found a spare piece of graphing paper); or c. I badly misunderstood “cool” and was pretty sure if my middle school teachers liked me I was well on my way up the social hierarchy of my class.

[3] And then – as I always end up doing – I imagine how awesome it would be to deliver pizza. Because in my head all that would entail would be, you know, listening to music and eating pizza.

[4] I’m serious: I put them both in a chiminea and “freed” them. Quick note to the reader: tote bags do not burn anywhere near as well as you might hope.

^[5] I’m writing this while wearing a “Team David” tee-shirt. In my head, there’s “Team David” and “Team Franklin” and it gets ugly when we’re all in the same room.

^[6] Here I’d argue, “And as such, ourselves”

[7] The saddest thing I’ve heard at school all year: a parent watching her third grader walking into school with one of those things dragging behind her said, “It’s like she’s already commuting to work”.

^[8] And each with their own cult like set of devotees, I might add.

Let's get started!

This blog is going to document the iPad program at our school. It will be written by three people, Mike Simpson, Upper School English teacher, Dave Kapferer, Upper School Technology Coordinator and Me - Mike Schmelder, Director of Information Services).

My aim is to be the voice of administration as we move through our iPad program. So I thought I’d start at the beginning. When interviewed for the IS Director role, I was asked a lot of questions around 1:1. Did I believe in it? Can it be effective? What type of device would I choose? And my initial responses were the same then as they are now. I do believe in 1:1 and believe that it can be effective if it is implemented correctly (a big if, I know). The third question is tough. We looked at Mac notebooks, PC notebooks, PC tablets, PC netbooks and PC netbook tablets. We spent a lot of time talking about the merits of each. And that discussion is still going on.

When the iPad came along, we got a couple of test machines and tried them out. As we started using them, we asked ourselves whether or not it should be a contender. And the answer was a pretty hearty “yes”. In fact, we were so enthusiastic, that we decided pretty quickly that an iPad pilot program was the right way to go. Here are a few reasons why we came to that conclusion:

iPads are:

• Instant-on
• eBook readers for textbooks
• Easy organizers
• Capable note taking devices with touch screens
• Lightweight and portable
• Excellent cloud devices
• Flat so that students can’t hide
• More in line with how kids use electronic devices
• Excellent cloud devices
• Relatively inexpensive
• Backed by Apple Professional Development

There are things that are drawbacks to the iPad of-course, but there were enough compelling reasons to move forward with a pilot program. And that’s where we are now. After discussions with administration, we bought a small number of iPads and distributed them to a cross-section of faculty members to evaluate.

Hopefully, this blog will give you insight into how the pilot program is evolving and perhaps how the entire iPad 1:1 rollout goes, depending on our decisions at the end of our pilot.