geek.teacher

How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code touches on a bunch of points relevant to educators, including the power of self-directed learning, the flaws with mathematics instruction, and the value of curiosity. Probably one of the better articles to end up in my Instapaper queue this week.

Edcamp Boston was a phenomenal event.

I’ve now run two Edcamps, and have attended several more. Almost a year since we got things started in Philly, there’s still a certain magic to walking into a building where you anticipate a day of shared learning and have no idea yet what that learning will be. Seeing the blank schedule board transform in an hour to 40 awesome sessions? Fabulous. It continues to bring me joy to see well over a hundred teachers give up a Saturday so they can learn from each other. There’s power in the network, and Edcamp takes a small part in bringing that alive for the educators who have now attended 17 events across North America.

Speaking of the power of the network, I am so grateful that Edcamp Boston ended up with the team that it did. Liz, Karen, Laura, Greg, Larry, and Steve were all so amazing to work with. My first piece of advice to anybody considering running an Edcamp is to find a good team. What I don’t normally tell them is that by the time you’ve finished your event, you will undoubtedly consider your team good friends. This has now personally held true for both Philly and Boston.

A few lessons learned from this, my second Edcamp as an organizer:

• There’s no need to jump the gun on registration. The longer you can hold off, the better your attendance will be in comparison to your registration, I think. We got antsy at two months before the event, and we really could have waited at least another couple of weeks and been fine.
• If you ask people for a small donation to help with costs when they get their ticket, a lot of them will. The 60 people who supported us in addition to our sponsors really helped make the event possible in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without their generosity.
• Wikis are dead, long live Posterous! We got way more sharing out of attendees by using Posterous than I’ve previously seen at an Edcamp. “E-mail it” is way simpler to explain and for people to handle than any other platform yet.
• Eat lunch on site if at all possible. Having people go elsewhere compels them to split into groups of people they’re familiar with. This leaves newbies out of the mix, which hurts the point of the day. It also means you get to save time for sessions.
• Longer days are ok. We were a bit worried by going practically nonstop from 8AM to 4:30PM, but we shouldn’t have been. The day flew by. We fit in five sessions and a Smackdown, which made for a jam-packed day of awesomeness.
• Give people a reason to stick around. Doing the Smackdown at the end of the day was a great way to have a shared ending to the day, and we were really pleased to see how many people stuck it out until the very end.
• If there’s more than one Edcamp on the same day, be sure to collaborate! At the end of the day we checked in with Edcamp Detroit, and it was great to extend that feeling of shared learning hundreds of miles west. Kudos also to Mike Kaechele and Marialice Curran for running a joint session on online collaboration between the two Edcamps.

My advice for those attending an Edcamp: try to attend at leat one session outside of your normal routine/comfort range. My favorite session that I attended was run by Jennifer Leung on Theater Games in the Classroom. It was a small group session, just five of us, but I learned a lot about something completely new to me.

Good thing it’s less than two weeks until Edcamp Philly. I’m already going through withdrawal. If you’re in the area, go! If not, check out the Edcamp wiki to see if there’s one coming up near you. Philly will be your final chance to see me run a Things That Suck session in a Very Special Series Finale. I’m officially retiring from TTS after Philly, but I do encourage other people to run their own variations at Edcamps and other events, as I’ve seen Joyce Valenza and Jeff Richardson do so to my immense pleasure.

Bonus advice to organizers: do something to get your mind off of the event the night before. I went to see Thor on Friday night and it was pretty awesome.

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I’ve kind of put off this final post in the iPad series because, hey, Edcamp happens. More on that later.

It was in conversation at Edcamp that I did finally put all of the pieces together of my conclusions during a lunch conversation.

For those who keep asking, is the iPad a perfect device for an implementation in the classroom? Of course not. But no device is. As I said in the previous post, every device is going to have its own positives and negatives.

To get this out of the way, yes, the iPad has many negatives. Many websites and resources we use do still require flash. If you’re a master touch typist, the onscreen keyboard is not an ideal solution. While there are substitutions for common pieces of software like Microsoft Office, substitutions aren’t the same as having the actual product everybody else is using. If you’ve moved onto Google Docs, it doesn’t work that well on the iPad yet.

This is a formidable list of negatives to have to throw down against.

That being said, while the iPad is not the nonexistent perfect device for use in the classroom, it is in fact a very good device for use in the classroom. Here are my top reasons why:

• Battery life – During the trial, and iPad could go through two days of classroom use before needing to be recharged. Not having to constantly worry about the state of battery life on a device for your classroom frees you up to worry about other things.
• Device management – I can install and update software on devices without having to go through the IT department. If I find a good, free app in the app store, I can have it loaded onto devices pretty easily. The school can load devices with content and then still allow students to sign in with their own iTunes account to load their own stuff on it as well. My district is also investing in some pretty hardcore remote management capabilities for the iPads.
• Instant On – When every minute in a classroom counts, not having to waste several minutes getting computers booted up and logged in at the beginning and turned off at the end can pay off in large dividends over the course of a year. The smart cover on the iPad 2 has improved this even further.
• Increasingly powerful creation tools – Camera + iMovie = all in one device for making HD movies. Students can easily make their own cartoons, create pieces of artwork that look better than what they’d do on a computer, record audio, make and record music, design comic strips, add pictures and audio to stories they’ve written, and more. I’m pretty tired of the only consuming not creating strawman that people keep trying to bring up.
• Ease of use – this is the big one, and I partly addressed this in the last post. In comparison to a typical computer, it takes about two minutes to show people the basic things they need to know in order to use the device. The finger is a natural device for people to use, and removes a layer of abstraction that you get with the mouse.

I’ve seen the youngest students in the school use the device purposefully and powerfully within minutes of being handed an iPad, and I’ve had some of my least tech-savvy teachers take an iPad home for one evening and come back with a bunch of great ideas for use in their classrooms. This is a device that both teachers and students understand quickly and want to use.

My job as a technology specialist is partly about teaching the kids how to use a variety of technology tools, which I can do with almost any device given the opportunity. The other piece of my job is a constant guerilla campaign to get teachers to think about ways they can use technology in their classrooms and make it meaningful for the students in order to meet their learning goals. We have some netbooks and flip cameras and digital cameras and a few other things, but those get limited use, really. The iPad is the first thing I’ve told people about this year that I had more people want to use than I had time to get it to them. Teachers that seem hesitant about using technology are willing to try it!  At the same time, the teachers who are already gung-ho about trying out new technology love the iPad more than any other thing I’ve shown them this year. In my quest to get more teachers using technology in the classroom, the iPad right now is the best ally that I have.

Is it perfect? No. But the perfect is all too often the enemy of the good. For me and my school, the iPad is very good indeed.

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I asked the teachers who did a full day with the iPads to fill out a survey. The results are pretty encouraging.

On the personal side, they all rated my technology instruction throughout the day to be excellent, which, I’ll admit, feels awesome. I can’t completely trust the results since they know that I know who’s taking it, but I figure if I keep telling people to let me know when I screw up, sooner or later somebody will.

The more useful data for me really comes from questions about engagement, activities, and overall feelings about the iPad, and potential future use. So here’s a bunch of graphs! In all graphs, 1 is poor, and 5 is excellent

Quality of engagement:

I’ll freely admit there’s some shiny-new bias in here. But the kids were overall super-engaged throughout the day, including students who otherwise frequently struggle in our pretty traditional classrooms.

Quality of activities:

I sat with each teacher for 20-30 minutes to plan the major bones of the iPad day, with each of us taking our individual pieces and coming up with additional materials or instructional plans. Whenever possible, my goal was to make plans that fit in with their general routine or current curriculum whenever possible. I’m glad to see they were overall highly pleased with the results.

Feelings about the iPad:

I’ll be frank that this surprised me. Some of the teachers did bring up the limitations of the iPad (lack of flash, google docs not working flawlessly), but even with that in mind, they see a lot of potential for iPads in the classroom. A big part of the reason why I did this pilot in the first place was to see if it could actually work as an elementary 1:1 device or not.

Future use:

We’re really in a bit of budget flux right now, so it’s honestly possible we won’t end up with many iPads next year. There’s not a lot of money, and if there is enough to get some devices, knowing whether teachers would actually use them is pretty high on the list for spending priorities. By the beginning of next year, every classroom is supposed to be equipped with a teacher laptop, Interactive White Board, and a computer that runs 4 stations. We have a set of 10 netbooks, but they were often sitting unused, which means they probably weren’t the best use of funds.

iPads on the other hand, look like they would be used a lot more frequently.

In a comment on a previous post, Jim Gates, a man I greatly admire, expressed a lot of doubt about the use of iPads for schools. I’ve seen him more than once on Twitter and now in my comments talk about how people are buying an interface.

I agree with him, but disagree with his conclusion that this is a negative thing. When it comes to using computers, interface isn’t just the only thing, it’s everything. I had the chance a couple of months ago to play with a competitor tablet that a company was trying to sell our district on, and the interface was terrible. Easy tasks felt complex, whereas on the iPad or iPhone, it’s frequently the opposite.

There are legitimate questions to be asked in regards to whether the iPad is a robust enough platform for everyday use in a classroom. Any device is going to have its positive aspects and negative aspects. The iPad is still so new that we’re trying to get a real feel for those tradeoffs, and different people are going to come to different conclusions about whether or not those tradeoffs are worth it.

I take my role of Technology Integration Specialist as a unique opportunity to expose teachers and students to more progressive ways of operating their classrooms. For many teachers, the very concept of students having constant access to a device that provides them full access to the world’s knowledge is a daunting idea. If the teachers and students are more comfortable with this new interface, then I’m willing to work around the rough edges of using this new device to help them see the potential of networked learning.

For the most part, 1:1 computing isn’t really on the radar of teachers in my building. Which is why this last graph is honestly so gratifying:

In just one day of teaching in a 1:1 environment, three out of the five teachers want a device for every student in the school. While I know for sure that one of them would have said that before the trial, I’m pleasantly surprised to gain some additional people who think that 1:1 computing is a god idea, no matter the device.

In my next and last post in this series, I’ll do my best to sum up my own feelings on the iPad and wrestle with how it does and does not fit into where my school is and where I think it’s going.