"This Is Not About Raising Test Scores." | #30DBB - Day 22

This is day 22 of "The Thirty Day Blog Binge." Learn more

My partner and I presented the data from our district's 1:1 pilot program to our Superintendent and his Cabinet today. We had already created a detailed, 27 page report (a must read!) about everything related to the pilot: breakage and repair numbers, BrightBytes survey results, assessment data, student products, recommendations for next steps, etc., so today was the six slide summary of a year's worth of information.

We started with a graph that focused on "The 4Cs" and how often they were used by pilot teachers compared to our traditional  classroom teachers (this came from our BrightBytes survey results). In several areas, the difference is quite profound, with pilot teachers sometimes doubling the frequency with which students collaborate or have the opportunity to research and think critically in the classroom.

While the overall numbers are good, I was more pleased with the conversation they sparked.

Our Superintendent proceeded to remind the room that this was what our technology integration plans needed to be about: teaching students how to create, communicate, collaborate and think critically. The whole point of what we're doing is to prepare them for the future, not as an initiative to increase our scores on standardized testing.

To hear him say that made it feel like a weight had been lifted.

I never doubted his beliefs, but I know that in the day-to-day grind of trying to prove the worth of a project to board members, parents, teachers, administrators and community members, it can be easy to fall into the "technology as a silver bullet" argument. When we do that, we try to convince everyone to invest large sums of money into technology because it will make our scores look better. Test scores are an easy target for a leader to focus on because they're quantifiable.

But just because certain data is easy to obtain, does that mean it's good to pursue?

I'm grateful for a leader who realizes that we're integrating technology because students need guided opportunities to produce and publish while they work with others in a virtual space. They need think deeply and critically about the information they find online, and learn to communicate respectfully in a medium that too often values brevity and caustic wit over depth and substance.

Of course, we believe that the level of engagement and depth of thought required of high-level technology integration produces students who are more knowledgeable of the content. This can, to some extent, translate to an improvement in standardized assessment data. But that's not the objective.

We ultimately integrate to teach students what it means to operate as humans in a technologically complex world.

We'll be meeting again later this week to dig into the details of what comes next in our digital learning plan: long-term professional development, curriculum integration, instructional shifts, device types, infrastructure, and all the other details that I enjoy very much. But for now, I can breathe a little easier after being reminded that the man in charge has a vision for our students' futures, and it's not just about raising test scores.

#30DBB

6 Lessons Learned Rolling Out Chromebooks

This last week has been the focus of my last 5 months: finally, students are going to start using Chromebooks in the classroom. As part of our 1:1 pilot, the fully stocked carts are in fourteen classrooms across our districts' seven elementary schools, and will be used by about 900 students this year.

I spent Labor Day thinking about the next day, but Tuesday didn't start out looking pretty: I woke up to an early morning, district-wide email saying that we had experienced a massive outage in our main server room and certain services were still down, including the wireless. Turns out the A/C had gone out in our network operations hub and we had managed to reach about 140 degrees. Thankfully, the heat of Hades didn't take everything down, but the WiFi was victimized by the inferno.

Sure. Why not?

After giving myself texting thumb, we determined that the wireless was kind of up, but since they were continuing to work on it, there were no guarantees about it's stability for that day. With that in mind, we let our pilot teachers know that they should push back a day, so Wednesday ended up being our launch day.

So from Wednesday to Friday, here are the six lessons I learned about rolling out a whole bunch of Chromebooks with a whole bunch of kids.

1. Verify your GAFE accounts.
   We're working on setting up the sync between Active Directory and Google Apps. Until that's up and running, we just did a mass creation of student accounts using CSV files pulled from our student information system. Google has a limit on creating 500 users at a time, but the company we've been working with has a script they use to do mass uploads with no user limit.
   
   There was only one problem: somehow in the upload process, 610 students were left out (to be specific, row 2594 to row 3204 in our spreadsheet).
   
   The only way we found it was because one of our teachers decided to brave the WiFi chaos and try rolling out on Tuesday anyway. It was her campus that had been missed, so none of her students had accounts.
   
   To the credit of our vendor, when I called them they fixed it quickly. Then they re-verified all the created accounts against what we had originally given them to make sure every student could log in the next day.
   
   All's well that ends well, but the moral of the story? Download a report from GAFE and verify your accounts before day one.


2. Have a support person at every campus.
   We planned a staggered rollout with different campuses logging in on different days throughout the week. Even though our initial schedule was messed up by melted servers, we were still able to work it to where we had someone on hand to help every teacher who was logging in for the first time.
   
   In some classrooms we modeled the process and then turned it over to the teachers. In other places, we were just support as the teacher led their class through the process. Whatever they felt comfortable doing, that's what we did with them.
   
   Doing it this way made sure that no teacher was derailed by technical issues, and they knew they had someone to ask help if something went wrong. It always nice to know there's someone there with you when you're trying something new.


3. Determine your password naming convention before you start.
   Our initial student log-ins are set to force a password change. That means this next part should be just common sense: figure out what students are going to change their passwords to the first time they sign-in. Nope. Not to this guy.
   
   Apparently I wasn't picturing actual 4th and 5th graders in my mind, because I thought we could just have the kids choose their own password. Ha! I laugh in the face of my naivete. Let's just say it was a mess.
   
   I'm not going to share our password convention here (for obvious reasons), but we established one that included all the requisite symbols, capitals, and numbers, but was still unique to each student that only they would know.
   
   It was much smoother once we got that established, but it could have been avoided if I'd been more realistic about the kind of structure we needed for our students.


4. Be prepared for the Captcha.
   I had done countless test log-ins with student accounts so I knew what to prepare my teachers for. But we learned that the first time you try to sign-in en masse, Google thinks that your system is being attacked by bots. To counteract this, every student starts to get the most impossible-to-decipher Captcha I have ever seen and must enter it correctly. This never happened in the tests!
   
   I understand the need for security, but at the same time, there has to be a balance. Google, if I call and tell you that there's going to be a sudden surge in traffic on my domain (which I did), can you not find a way to turn this off? It brought the entire log-in process to a grinding halt as students (and teachers) squinted at wavy letters, took their best guesses, and then were told they were wrong and had to try again.
   
   What does this mean for you? If you're logging in a bunch of students, the Captcha is going to happen. At the secondary level it's probably not that big of a deal, but with elementary schoolers, you may want to have a paraprofessional or aide on hand to help students decrypt the incomprehensible proof-of-humanity letters.


5. Learn from your elementary school teachers.
   One of the incredible strengths of our elementary teachers is their ability to manage small groups. They create them, pull them, design differentiated stations, and monitor multiple activities at a time. This should have played into our rollout plan from the beginning.
   
   We tried logging in the first few classes as a whole group. While that worked, it wasn't the most efficient. If one or two kids get stuck, pretty much everybody's stuck.
   
   I'm incredibly thankful for our resourceful teachers who scrapped that idea and started pulling groups of 4-5 back to their teacher table. There, they could work with a manageable cohort, make sure they could log-in, then rotated to the next group of students.
   
   This is the way we should have planned to do it from the beginning and definitely what I'd recommend for anyone doing the same thing, regardless of grade level. Whole group: no. Small group: yes.


6. It's okay to tear up when the kids get excited.
   I am not an emotional guy. I also know that using technology in class shouldn't be an event. And we're working towards that. But at first, it is an event. And that's okay.
   
   So to see students get crazy excited about the device, the touch screen, their own username, their own profile picture...you realize that this is the only way many of them will get to use technology as something other than a consumer or a gamer. Many of them don't have a computer at home, so this is their only window to a world outside what they see day in and day out.
   
   And we also know from the research that there is a serious slide that starts in the demographic we serve around 4th grade. Many of our students, especially boys, start to disengage with school around that time. But I saw lights come on in eyes this week, and I think some of them started to consider that school just might be relevant to them again. I hope so, anyway.
   
   So, yes, my eyes glistened (a couple of times, actually) as I watched kids get excited about the new tool they're getting to use in school this year that's going to help them learn the way they live.

This is only the beginning, and there's a long way to go. Now we start teaching with the devices and not just being impressed by them. I want to see these Chromebooks in the same category as paper-and-pencil: tools we use seamlessly and can't imagine life without. Students should be making, creating, researching, practicing, and learning at the level that is perfectly appropriate to them, because that's what 1:1 allows us to do.

But for now, I will bask in the fact that they can log in, the wireless works, and week one is in the books.

Planning #edtech trainings? Do some of what I did...(and also don't...)

How do you get 19 teachers up to speed on the digital tools they will need in their new 1:1 classrooms? You have an Institute! The brave educators in our district who are piloting GAFE and Chromebooks recently spent 4 days together adding to their toolbox and hammering out what 1:1 will look like at their grade level and in their content area.

This was my first time working with a team to plan any sort of extended professional development. We got some things right from the beginning, made extensive adjustments in the middle, and have many notes that we'll improve on for next year. Everything worked out well in the end, and here are 12 reflections from how we ran our Institute that you can learn from as you plan your own PD.

1. It's not about the tool. But...
   Our teachers had never used Chromebooks before and very few had used GAFE. So what were they apprehensive about? Chromebooks and GAFE. What did we start with? Vision, inspiration, discussion, expectations, ISTE standards, 21st century teaching and learning...anything but what they really wanted to hear about.
   
   Those other things are completely necessary, but I think everyone would have been much more attentive to the more philosophical aspects of the pilot if we had started with a concrete introduction to the basics. When teachers have questions like "When will I actually get my devices?" and "How will my students turn in their work on this thing?" floating around in their heads, it's really hard to focus on the intangibles.
   
   So next time, we will start with a brief overview of our district's vision for 1:1, a quick conversation about how coaches and teachers will work together, and then we will dive straight into what teachers really want to know about: the tools. 


2. Train with the tools teachers will use.
   We did this well. We used Google Classroom to distribute assignments and ideas during the training, collaborated in Docs, and created Slides presentations to share out lesson plans and ideas. By the end, teachers were planning how they could set up collaborative folders in Drive and talking about using Hangouts for ongoing PD throughout the year.
   
   Not only did this method give the participants more comfort with the tools, it let them see 1:1 from a student perspective. This helped them identify speed bumps their students might face and got them planning for how they would address them before they ever came up.


3. Have clear short-term goals.
   Early on in the first day, one teacher who was apprehensive about the program put up her hands and said "Just tell me what you want me to do!" She wasn't being confrontational, she was being honest. She wanted to know exactly what "extra" responsibilities this was going to involve.
   
   We have long-term goals for the pilot, but we hadn't turned those into any meaningful short-term benchmarks. So I spent the evening of day 2 talking to a friend of mine who's in a similar position, and his solution for his team was to develop goals for every six weeks, stated in terms of what both teachers and students will be expected to do.
   
   With his permission, I stole his structure, and on our final day we walked our teachers through exactly how many digital citizenship lessons (which we were providing) they needed to teach, the minimum number of assignments students needed to submit through Google Classroom every six weeks, and the precise strategies we would use to work on research and information fluency.
   
   It was definitely a win when that same teacher smiled, thanked us, and said "That's all I've been asking for."


4. Develop a mutual coach-teacher agreement.
   In groups, teachers and coaches read two excellent articles on what a coach-teacher relationship looks like and what good coaches do. We then recorded our own takeaways from the articles, and in groups came up with our top 3 requirements for how coaches and teachers should work together during the pilot.
   
   Voice, choice, control, partnership and confidentiality were recurring themes, and the discussions we had about those areas helped us develop a framework for each person's role in the pilot. As a coach, I needed to hear what was important to my teachers so I could support them in the way they need, not the way I think they need.
   
   

   

   Placemat activity on coach-teacher relationships
   These hang in my office now.



5. It could have been 3 days.
   We took 4 days, with each day going from 8:00-4:00, but looking back at our pacing and structure, we could have done the same work in 3 days from 8:30-3:30. A one day difference may not seem like a huge deal, but when you're a teacher who is coming in on your summer break, the difference is massive. 


6. Team-building is NOT a waste of time.
   I'm intensely focused on efficiency, tasks and production. This is a useful bent in a lot of situations, but it can get in the way of developing relationships. Each day, my much more relationally-oriented partner in blended learning led the team in activities that built camaraderie as well as gave them some usable ideas for their classrooms.
   
   Since these teachers are the only ones in the entire district who are in this pilot, they need to get to know the other people who are going to be facing the same challenges as them. So even though I tend to jump right into the learning when I lead a training, I see the value in taking a time to let teachers connect over a safe, shared task.


7. Mix up the seating.
   We're all creatures of habit, gravitating toward the people we know and staking our claim to a seat like we do with the pews at church. In response to this aspect of human nature, we used protocols like Clock Buddies to mix teachers up and get them sharing. This worked great and let them connect across campuses and grade levels to share ideas and get feedback on their lessons.


8. Teachers need "sandbox time" with new tools.
   We preach discovery learning, inquiry and constructivist philosophy with regard to our students, and I've come to discover that the needs of teachers are no different. Once a tool is presented and they have the basic idea of how it functions, they need time to explore and play (hence, "sandbox time") to really understand how it could fit in their classroom. Don't cut that time short, it's the most important thing there is.


9. Planning time needs clear deliverables.
   On day 2, we gave teachers about 2 hours of planning time in the afternoon to work with some of the GAFE tools they had learned that day. It was a good idea, but it wasn't structured enough with a clear objective, so teachers weren't able to focus their efforts toward a specific product.
   
   So on day 3, we only took an hour for planning and called it "TEKS, Tool, Activity" (if you're not a Texan, the TEKS are our state standards). Teachers chose one standard, one digital tool, and created one activity they could use in their classroom. Then they contributed to a collaborative Slides presentation and shared their activity in triads at the end, receiving feedback from other group members. Knowing that there was a deliverable involved brought a sense of urgency and focus to the planning time, and the clear objective helped them not to feel overwhelmed. They accomplished more in one hour than they had in two the previous day.
   
   The final day they took that activity and turned it into a complete lesson, with both traditional and technological elements. This chunking and scaffolding was much more effective and our teachers came up with same fantastic ideas for their students.


10. Listen to the content of the chaos.
    When teachers get loud, they're either bored or engaged. Confusing. What I learned this week was to listen for the content of the chaos going on around me. If I'm conducting a training and teachers are so excited about something that they're having an in-depth conversation at their table about it, who am I to pull them out of it? That's when I need to take a step back and let them share.
    
    But if the conversation is off-topic, then I need to reconsider if my presentation is really relevant to their needs. Those situations are a good time to check in, take a break for a few minutes, or poll the group on how they're feeling about what we're working on. That can be wounding to my pride, but in the long run it creates a much more effective training.


11. Provide lunch.
    We didn't, and we should have. As we were debriefing at the end, one teacher said that she really wished that there had been lunch simply so they could all keep working. What?!? They were disappointed that they had to leave to get lunch and break the flow of what they were doing...man, I really love working with teachers. I don't think you get that kind of attitude in many other professions. So in this case, it wasn't as much about the food as it was about the networking, something teachers in this traditionally isolated profession don't typically get time to do.


12. "If you can't fail, it doesn't count."
    This pilot is a huge undertaking, the first of its kind in our district. It has the potential, like any project, to fail, which I realized that at the Institute as our vision collided with reality. But at the same time, I was reminded of the title of this book by Dave Guymon. The only way to do something great is to take a risk.
    
    We have incredible teachers who are buying in to the vision and are willing to change the way they teach for the sake of our students. We have committed coaches in place to be with them every step of the way, and incredible district administrators who believe this is the right thing to do for our kids. So sure, while it could fail, it could also be an incredible success (and of course, I think it will be). 

Adjusting and adapting mid-stream is part of any project that breaks new ground, and this Institute was a small snapshot of what this entire year will be like: plan, adjust, change, revamp, implement, evaluate, celebrate and reflect. I'm grateful to the teachers who let us experiment on them, and hopefully you can learn from these reflections on what ended up being a very rewarding, very productive week of training.

Recipe for a 1:1 Pilot

I'm sitting in a room, surrounded by boxes that hold the focus of my life for the 2015-16 school year. Really, the focus will be the students who are using what's inside the boxes, but you get the idea. 400 Chromebooks, 200 laptops, coupled with lots of planning, fun, stressing, planning, spreadsheeting, budgeting, convincing, planning, coaching, learning and evaluating. And planning. I'm ready to get cookin'.



So what's the recipe for a successful 1:1 pilot? To be honest, I don't know: we're only at the beginning. But let me tell you the blend of ingredients we're using to try and get there.

Take 20 courageous (a word I don't use lightly) teachers. Tell them they're going to be pioneers, blazing a path where no teachers in our district have traveled before. Let them know that we are all learning with them and that they have the privilege and responsibility of shaping where our district's digital learning goes in the future. Then be grateful when they don't run away.

Toss in 1100 students from 4th-6th grade. Trust in them and believe that they can handle the responsibilities that come with technology: walking the narrow path of digital citizenship, becoming creators with an active stake in their own learning, and communicating and collaborating productively with others. Also, hope that they won't learn about MIL-STD-810 testing and attempt it on their own with the devices.

Stir in "specialists" who don't feel incredibly special: just teachers at heart who think technology is a good thing for students when it's used the right way. Stick us in classrooms to coach and prod, question and comfort, encourage, laugh, model, assist, and generally do whatever we can to release the unbelievable amount of potential in the previous two ingredients.

Sprinkle in tools and terminology that are a part of digital learning, like some delightfully airy Dell 11 Chromebooks and robust 3340 laptops, all bursting with Google Apps and every web-based tool you can think of. I guess the standard edtech buzzwords will be part of the blend too, and that's okay. The goal there is to avoid "language with more syllables than meaning" and to not dilute the flavor with vacuous vocabulary and endless acronyms.

Finally, distribute everything over a supportive base of administrators, principals and board members; insert it into the pressure cooker of the importance of the moment; and pray to the Lord on high that after you've done all you can do, it comes out looking like the vision you had for it in the beginning.