The demand for technology in classrooms has given rise to a slick and fast-growing sales force. Makers of computers and other gear vigorously court educators as they vie for billions of dollars in school financing. Sometimes inviting criticism of their zealous marketing, they pitch via e-mail, make cold calls, arrange luncheons and hold community meetings.

via Silicon Valley Wows Educators, and Woos Them – NYtimes.com.

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It got me thinking about the nonverbal messages that we send in our day to day interactions with students and other teachers. What are the implicit perspectives you’re pushing out to the world?

I started thinking about this because of a couple of really nice sessions that I chose to go to, somebody pointing out ways that I modeled for others in my own presentation, and interacting with my colleagues during downtime.

At the first session I attended on Media Literacy in the Elementary School, Katya Vigil‘s modeling of thoughtful reflection on her own practice really impressed me. At so many of the sessions you go to at a conference, the person presenting their work feels a need to put on an air of authority. Everything is wonderful, and that’s why I’m here in front of you today! In contrast, the presenter actively discussed throughout the presentation what she liked or didn’t like about the units that she planned. She told us explicitly what she felt did not work, improvements that she would make the next time, and research that she still needed to do before deciding on other improvements. I don’t know about you, but I respect that a whole lot more than the person pushing their own perfection. I’m glad that she had a few minutes of commenting and questioning in the end so that I could tell her that I felt that way.

At the other session I attended (more on that in a moment), Suzy Brooks ran a fabulous, fast-paced session where she modeled the value of choice for people. Instead of body-slamming through a ton of topics in the order of her own choosing (like I did in my presentation, of course), she had a list up on the screen and encouraged people to call out the topic they wanted to hear about. It kept audience engagement high through the presentation, people heard what they wanted to hear about, and yet she still somehow hit almost every point that she wanted to. I’ve already assured Suzy through Twitter that I plan on stealing her format at some point.*

At my own sessions, I’m fortunate that I had Jeremy Angoff** there to point out my own modeling for me. With some technical issues popping up, during the presentation, he pointed out to me afterwards that I modeled how to handle that well. I did my best to make light of the situation, and to just keep on moving. If something didn’t display right, I’d do my best to describe what it should be.

Before my second session, a woman politely told me that she would be leaving it early, and assured me that I should not be offended. Jeremy was sitting right behind her, so I asked him if I, a person who runs unconferences in my free time, would be offended in the slightest by somebody leaving my session. In the funniest moment of the whole two days, he replied, “He invented leaving sessions. Wait! I didn’t mean it like that!”

Of course, I did skip a whole bunch of sessions. I took the time to gather my thoughts and have meaningful discussions with my colleagues. I know many people who left sessions multiple times to find something more useful to them. When a bunch of us realized one session had slim pickings for us, we decided to meet up together and run a mini-edcamp in the middle of the conference. We’ve had enough unconference experiences at this point that we just ended up modeling the most basic principles of it just by second nature.

So when you get back to school after reading this, think about those messages that you send out. It may be easier at first to observe others and think about the messages they send. Do they model collaboration or do they send the message that working together with you is a waste of their precious prep time? Do they value student voices, or do they insist on compliance at all times? Do they demonstrate that learning happens constantly by sharing their own learning, or do they represent themselves as the authority at all times? Is learning messy student-driven or perfection and teacher-driven? Look at these things, find the ones modeling the things you value, and try to pick up on ways you too can send those kinds of messages. It takes purposeful effort at first, but the more you practice the modeling, the less you have to think about it. At some point, if you keep acting like the teacher that values collaboration, student voice, and honest sharing, you actually become the teacher that implicitly and naturally demonstrates those values.

*I swear to God that my blog series on remix teaching is coming! When a big idea rattles around in my brain, it can take ages of me wrestling with it to form some sort of coherent thoughts. If you don’t believe me, talk to my wife sometime about how long it was obvious that we would get married before I actually proposed to her. Fortunately, I make up for it by acting rapidly once I know exactly what I’m going to do.

**Jeremy is also totally my hero for coming over during my presentation to troubleshoot a display issue so I didn’t have to bring my presentation to an extended dead stop while trying to figure it out myself.

• Better battery life. My iPhone 3GS is definitely feeling it’s almost two and a half years of life in the battery department. Unlike when I first got it, I need to charge it every single day without fail, and it’s frequently been near death by the time I get home from work. Since I switched to iOS5, I’ve had a little more juice at the end of the day.

• iCloud. Everything on my phone backs up over the air and just works? Yes please. I had constant problems trying to get over the air calendar syncing to work with my Google Calendar, but everything works fast and flawlessly over iCloud. If I need to restore my phone, I don’t need to be at my home computer any more, since it all backs up to the cloud. Apps that store things in iCloud are starting to drop now. GoodReader updated today, and Apple’s apps are updating tomorrow. Expect an avalanche of updates over the next couple weeks.
• Wireless syncing. If you’re still storing stuff on your computer, you can now have the iDevice in question sync over wifi. This feature will be hugely useful for classroom teachers with small classroom sets of devices (2-5 devices, say).
• Twitter integration. Easy sharing to Twitter from any app. Of course I’m going to like that.

• Notification Center. I always hated how notifications took over my screen in iOS. Now they don’t, they sit nicely and wait for me to act on them.
• iMessages. Thanks to my school building and my wife’s hospital both being built as bomb shelters, we get terrible cell phone reception at work. Now we send texts through Apple, so they work over WiFi. Bonus: No need for me to upgrade my texting plan any time soon.

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Pine Glen was very fortunate to receive 60 iPads this school year on two Bretford Power Sync Carts! The Carts will make management of the iPads easier, because they provide a central place to store, recharge, and sync the iPads to the iTunes library on my laptop. It was quite a bit of work to get the iPads ready to go for the students. I made a few mistakes a long the way, but here’s the most efficient method that I’ve found for getting all the iPads up and running in a uniform manner, particularly if you already have a bunch of free apps and apps purchased from the Volume Purchase Program:

1. Unbox all the iPads and place them in the cart.

3. Rename one iPad and disconnect it from the cart. This will be your primary source iPad for the initial setup.

4. Send the iPad cart off to your super-nice librarian who will barcode them all and tag them by whatever naming convention you decide on. We numbered each device and assigned them a color depending on the cart they were in.

5. Move apps to appropriate pages and folders. Sign in to any accounts you want to set up on all iPads. Set up wi-fi.

6. Reconnect the iPad to your laptop. Encrypt iPad backup! This saves all your passwords so you won’t have to type them in on each device!

7. Pull the connections for each iPad on your cart and then connect the cart to your laptop.

8. Plug one iPad in on the cart. Right click on the iPad in iTunes, and choose to “Restore from Backup.” Choose the backup for your encrypted primary iPad, type in the password, and let it do its thing. Note that this is much faster than using the Restore button on the main screen and would have saved me tons of time if I’d found it sooner.

9. Rename the iPad to fit your naming convention.

10. Repeat steps 8 and 9 for each iPad until done.

11. Change the wallpaper on each iPad to fit your naming convention. I’m trying to build as much redundancy into the system as possible so the children can always locate the iPad they previously used.You can access all of the wallpapers I created here, if you don’t feel like spending an hour or so creating them like I did.

a. Visit that page in Safari http://bit.ly/pgipadwp

b. Find the wallpaper you want, tap and hold a couple seconds to save the image

c. Go to the Photos app, choose the image, hit the arrow, select “Set as wallpaper.” Set it as both.

12. Collapse. Smile. Get them into the kids’ hands.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

This series has been one piece of the puzzle ruminating in my head on that promised blogpost about teaching and remixing.

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I have a lot of thoughts about mixing and how it related to education that I’ve been wanting to write for some time, but haven’t quite pulled together yet. I think that will probably happen after school gets out.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

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.

Part 2

Part 3

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.