ICT in my Classroom

Unfortunately it has been a while since I have been fit to write as I have been off of work, away from school with a nasty bout of tonsilitis. On a course of penicillin tablets for it now which tastes completely rancid by the way! I am feeling back to my normal self at the moment and have had a full week in school which has been busy as ever.

Throughout this week in our Year 5 classes I have planned to utilise our class Diigo account for some simple comprehension work on instructions. Diigo is a tool that allows you to add annotations and sticky notes to any web page – making the most text heavy site partly interactive. As the children roll over these highlights or sticky notes they can read the pop-up message or comment. I have used it to pose some questions about an instructional text on making a healthy smoothie. The text itself is on the excellent WikiHow website and is in fact a piece of shared writing I completed last year with my year 6 class when we did instructional text too.

The children have been working on laptops during the group time in our literacy lessons at this task. The activity has rotated throughout the week so all the children can experience it. Once the children have read a question they can view the text immediately in front of them and they have no need to navigate away to a different window etc. In an ideal world I would have liked the children to answer using something like Google Notebook which is still very much my intention. But I thought that I needed to take things slowly and explore the use of Diigo first. So the children answered the questions in their jotters – a more nostalgic notebook shall we say!

They have enjoyed the task this week and have been engaged and motivated – the problems seem to be the tendency to move the sticky notes around the screen, so the order has been a bit lost. One or two notes have also mysteriously disappeared. I have been signing into the Diigo account so we can see our private annotations, but I suppose that if the notes were public and we didn’t sign in then no alterations could be made. They could be viewed but would be protected. Mmm I will test this out.

del.icio.us has proven to be an invaluable tool with so much constant access to technology with our laptops in lessons. Our Year 6 teachers are getting stuck in too, so our school’s weblink resource will no doubt begin to grow and grow. A great tool for any school that I cannot recommend highly enough!

Today was Day 1 in terms of our laptop use in the classroom and we hit the ground running, so to speak – just how I like it. I am sure you have had days like today, when it is a bit of a whirlwind from 8am right through to 4pm – where does the time go? Today the sands just seemed to slip through my fingers! Not to say it was one of the best days for a long time.

We now have 8 Toshiba laptops running happily in both of our Year 5 classes and today we kicked off with a simple word level activity in literacy. One group worked on Race to Ramses! a game about combining prefixes and suffixes to create new words. I have taught with laptops in the past but the new technology (laptops and WAPs) is just so much more reliable. And it is great seeing children completely engaged with one to one technology supporting their learning, I am so pleased to see it in the hands of the pupils – which is the whole point. You might think “web game, one group…not really setting the world alight” – but I suppose it is a culmination of a lot of work and to finally get things in front of children, reliable and solid feels like a big achievement.

Needless to say in the afternoon we swam into deeper waters and I’d like to think we pushed the envelope a bit…

The morning was successful and the children enjoyed working on their own machine and many children asked for the web address for the game – so we will have to get our del.icio.us account sorted or get them into their Google accounts soon!

In the afternoon we were looking at some science work we have begun regarding healthy living and exercise. Today we explored pulse rates and we used an online spreadsheet to share our results, hence the title of the post. (This work is similar to some online spreadsheet action we had last year with my Year 6 class) I decided to use a Google spreadsheet as I have been using the Docs application for a while (in fact I have a few grumbles about that – more soon) but you could have easily used EditGrid as an alternative – I set the sheet up so that all of the children’s names from both classes were present in the first column. Then 10 other columns were labelled, “Resting Pulse1, Resting Pulse 2…” It was in these cells that the kids added their resting pulse after counting for 30 seconds and doubling.

I then accessed the same spreadsheet through my Google login on all 8 laptops per class that I put around the room – so in effect I logged in 16 times (plus my PC and SMARTBoard, so 17) to the same document from different locations. We talked a little about how to find our pulse and then asked the children to record 10 instances of their resting rate into the spreadsheet. It was great! With the live update feature we were able to see individual results popping up all over the place and even from next door in Rick’s class who were doing the same. Google Spreadsheets has an Auto Save option which makes life much easier and gives you the opportunity to see the live data. Not only did the hardware hold out fine, but accessing the spreadsheet was excellent – even with 17 simultaneous users on a single login. The children really enjoyed seeing each other’s work and it gave them a great overview of not only the class year group working together, but also to the sorts of data people were adding. Children from the other class were nipping across the corridor and questioning the validity of results from kids in my class.

The children had a tendency to sit with the laptop in front of them, in small groups rather than freely moving around the classroom and accessing any machine. But I suppose that is due to the nature of task.

Within the space of about 40 minutes, perhaps less, we collected approximately 600 individual results all in one place. No doubt they will be quicker next time. This method of data collection also allows us the ability to then manipulate the results afterwards, working out averages of the whole year group etc. I would highly recommend doing this if you have the reliable kit in your classroom, we have already said that it will be an excellent data entry method for our maths lessons on data handling.

It is now 12 hours since I started the day at school and I am just about coming up for air, no don’t worry I am not at school still! – but it is great to reflect here on these sorts of days. One to remember and I hope you might take some of these ideas and use it yourself.

So we are finally getting somewhere. Our laptop project has taken some big steps and we are nearly ready for September and the 4 classes to begin work with their new laptop resource. 8 is the magic number.

I have managed to purchase 8 laptops for each of the 4 classes involved which is great news. After much deliberation and balancing of features and budget we have gone for Toshiba A120s and I am happy with the sort of spec these machines have and also the sort of pedigree they come with. We also were able to take advantage of an amazing 3 year swap out and refund warranty. So they will not only replace the broken machine but refund us the cost of the machine!
I never imagined these machines to be high flying super computers. They need to slog through just basic multimedia and online work – as we have a very strong computer suite too, we can afford for these machines to be slimmer in terms of their computing power and features. So what will happen with these new machines? What will be their regular diet in terms of use?

I suspect that it will take some time to get used to the idea that no one is going to book the laptops out or take them away. They are in the classes to stay – what a luxury! But the pedagogical change cannot be underestimated and over the next few days, and early on in September I will be working closely with the teachers involved to ensure our eyes are open to the possibilities.

It would be very easy for someone like me to go charging in spouting about all sorts of stuff that can be done but that would be wrong. My past experiences of colleagues working with new technology has taught me to ensure they are comfortable accepting it into their learning environment and that they can happily access it for short period of time independently. So that they become familiar, they form an opinion and want more. All guns blazing is not the drill here. Remember not everyone thinks like you Tom!

After this initial time I will then work with the staff to focus their attention on specific aspects of the technology and perhaps deliver some training. I may introduce one thing such as Diigo for research or something like Voicethread. This is how I approached the whole school training and development of our interactive whiteboards back in 2004 and that was very successful.

So the wheels are in motion and no doubt will gather in momentum as we get storage and wireless connectivity sorted.

Following a link to my blog from Stephen Hall at Tech Waves I unearthed a rather strong opinion against the idea of 1 to 1 laptop projects in the US. His post “Laptops are a costly Mistake for Schools” gave a me a good dose of reality just as I am on the brink of finalising our first step in this direction. I was curious to read articles here and here, that clearly illustrated the potential ills of such projects on such a wide scale.

Nevertheless I am determined that our approach is different, as I commented, we do not have deep pockets nor are we going to only measure standards after a year and say it was a failure or a success. We know from our own experiences that such projects are much more complex and often have unplanned impacts.

It was good to read a reply by Dennis Harter to these views and I truly value the variety of opinions that are so easy to access via our blogs. It helps so much as a subject leader to hear these comments and debate such real issues borne of real experiences.

Some of the main differences between many of the US models and our own is:

• Age of the children – I work in a primary school, so problems evolving from a growing technical expertise within the student body will be limited.
• Scale - we will be beginning this project with only 40 odd machines, no doubt this will stretch some of our resources, however it is not in the realms of 1000′s of machines to manage. Lessons we learn from this will help to shape the future of the project.
• Focus - For a long time my headteacher and I have been saying that we want more choice for the children when it comes to technology. So that they eventually will be able to choose the most appropriate tech for their own learning. I believe our measure of success may be different to many of the US schools cited in those articles.
• Access - in many of the articles there were huge ramifications from allowing machines to go home. For us the laptops will remain in the classroom for those children’s use. No sharing, no trolleys the responsibility for them will be the teacher’s and the children’s. As they will not be leaving the site we will hopefully reduce accidental damage and other related incidents.

With 3 quotations currently in my possession the next step for me will be to meet with my headteacher and discuss the details and what  follows.

Back in December I posted about my thoughts on investing in a pool of laptops for classes at school. Well it has been nearly 5 months since those initial thoughts and since then I have managed to pin down the make and series of machine we want and I have a much clearer understanding for the sort of resource we want.

The most important thing for me is the variables that may affect their performance in the classroom and I want to pre-empt these so that the classteachers and children can confidently turn to the technology when they want. The 16 SMARTBoards we have were installed after many weeks of intense research and price hunting. It has been much harder to find the right hardware with this laptop project, for a start. There are so many machines to choose from.

The problems that I envisage (from experience and advice):

• Battery life – can they be used successfully throughout the working school day? Do we need spare batteries?
• Wireless strength – we have an old building that is not particularly conducive to wi-fi.
• Ongoing maintenance – how will problems be dealt with when we only have a part time technician?

Our SMARTBoard project had far fewer variables than this one and so far there has not been a single problem with the SMARTBoards, in what will be 4 years of use this coming December. I want that sort of reliability from the laptops. Inevitably there will be problems, and I am not daft enough to think it will be all plain sailing – I just want to solve them, or at least anticipate them before they happen. Hopefully my considered choices now will help smooth the user experience when and if we finally purchase some.

I say “if” because I was brought back into reality after reading Stephen Hall’s post ‘Laptops are a Costly Mistake for Schools’. It was such a contrasting view on laptop projects and I am curious as to the reasons that such schemes have been considered a failure. I believe that at my school our approach is slightly different in the sense that the children will have limited access within school hours, they will not be taking the machines home. We are looking into this technology as it is part of our ICT vision not to directly address standards – as I have stated previously:

We would like our children to have a uninhibitied personal choice when to use technology; whether that be a calculator or sharing an online spreadsheet on a laptop.

I just sometimes think looking at standards or levels or grades or percentages is the wrong thing when deciding whether the project has had an impact. They did it here in the UK with interactive whiteboards. The impact is so much wider.
Not many tests are taken on laptops are they?