If I Had A Million Dollars

We first started seriously discussing laptops for our students in the fall of 1999. At that time, the obstacles were cost and infrastructure (wireless), and not everyone was convinced that they would help students learn. Over the years the cost came down, the infrastructure began to be built out, and more and more folks were convinced that laptops would not only be helpful for students, but essential to their learning process. Yet still we didn't do it.

It took until the Fall of 2012 to pilot a program, and then the Fall of 2013 to roll it out for all Freshmen at AHS. We did it via a Bring-Your-Own-Device program, counting on a large percentage of our students to bring their own, and then we would provide laptops (netbooks) for those who couldn't afford one or didn't want to bring one. The district provided support in terms of helping us with a few netbooks and, more importantly, guaranteeing that if we didn't get enough students bringing their own, they would help us financially to make up the difference. It turns out that our students did bring their own in the expected amounts (roughly 65% that first year, and now well over 70%), but it was nice to have that insurance. Since then we've now rolled it out to two classes (this year's Freshmen and Sophomores), and next year will roll out it to a third class (Freshmen, Sophomores and Juniors), and possibly to our Seniors as well depending on a few things (more on that later).

Two weeks ago my school began receiving what will ultimately be 993 Chromebooks from our district. These weren't purchased because we've finally decided that laptops are important enough instructionally for our students to provide them, we're receiving them due to mandated state testing. Because both the PARCC and the CMAS tests are taken via computer, and because we can't sufficiently lock down the netbooks we had previously, the district decided to replace them with Chromebooks - and, of course, we had to add significantly more in order to test all of our students. After sixteen years of not being willing to spend money to support our students instructionally, we are willing (actually, forced) to spend money to support testing. Our Superintendent told us in a faculty meeting that district-wide more than $1 million dollars was being spent to purchase Chromebooks.

Now some folks might argue that I shouldn't complain, we are getting laptops that we will be able to use instructionally when we are not testing. (And, given this influx, this may allow us to accelerate our rollout to include Seniors next year - one year early.) I am certainly appreciative of this, and we will do our best to take full advantage of it, but I still think it's important to note the priorities of our national and state leaders, and what actually makes school districts spend money they otherwise wouldn't.

Since we have so many of our own students bringing their own devices, much of this $1 million will end up sitting most of the time in carts, unused (once we've rolled out Connected Learners to all four grades). So I wonder what else we could've spent $1 million on? I'm sure we could all come up with lots of ideas, but here's one pretty simple one: let's hire more teachers.

Now, I realize that $1 million doesn't go very far when you're talking about hiring teachers, but what if we did this. What if we hired eighteen teachers and provided six teachers each to three elementary schools in our district that we identify as being the most at-risk. Each school could decide how best to utilize those teachers. One school might decide to create one more class at each grade level (K-5), thereby lowering class sizes and student-to-teacher ratios across the board. Another school might decide to leave classes the same, but have one teacher work at each grade level, helping the existing teachers co-teach, or working with individual or small groups of students. Or a school might choose to place all six of those teachers in K-2, creating two extra sections at each level. How many of you think any of these ideas - or some permutation I haven't enumerated - would have a more positive effect on students than state-mandated testing? Which is more likely to change students' lives?

The problem with testing isn't limited to the dubious quality of the data we get when we purport to measure what's "important" for students to know. It's the opportunity cost of the testing. It's not just the $1 million spent on chromebooks that will often sit in carts instead of spending it on something that will help students learn. It's the tremendous monetary value of the staff time that goes into administering these tests including, but not limited to, a district assessment coordinator and their secretary, building-level assistant principals and counselors that spend an inordinate amount of time coordinating these tests, and the time that teachers spend in proctor training for these exams.

And then there's the value of the lost instructional time, not just the time students spend taking the tests, but the time taken in class to prepare for the tests (even teachers who don't do test-prep are very much encouraged to expose their students to the format of the test ahead of time), and the lowered quality of the instructional time that we typically have on testing days (where we test in the morning and have altered schedules in the afternoon).

And then there's the effect on students, both psychological and philosophical. Where they are stressed by the testing, and their motivation is decreased by constantly being told what they aren't good at. And it's the philosophical message we send to students, that being able to prove that adults are doing their job is more important than the students' learning.

If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you the opportunity for more learning, not more testing.

One-to-one With Our Freshman Class

My school crossed over what I think is going to be seen as an important dividing line this year - we went one-to-one with our freshman class. This is something we've talked about since 1999, so it certainly wasn't an overnight decision, and there's still a lot to do, but I think it's a step toward "what's next." I thought it might be valuable for other folks to hear a bit about the process we went through.

Last year we started a pilot we called "Connected Learners." Four sections (one each in Algebra, US History 9, English 9 and Biology) required laptops, with students either bringing their own or us providing them one if they chose not to. We felt like the pilot went well, with both students and teachers reporting back that they felt it made a difference in their learning (formal surveys twice during the year, and many meetings among the teachers for more anecdotal stuff). So as we looked at this school year we wanted to expand the program.

We surveyed teachers in the building to see who was interested in participating and got back a huge response, which was good. We initially decided to expand to nine sections, which would contain a little more than 200 of our freshmen (hard to tell exactly how many in advance because some kids would be in multiple sections). As we started to work through the logistics, I kept coming back to the same realization - going from nine sections to the entire freshman class really wasn't that big of a leap. (And, full disclosure, that's what I wanted to do in the first place and, well, I'm not terribly patient.)

So I went back to my administration and made the pitch. After some discussion - and with some very good and thoughtful questions asked by said administrators - we decided we wanted to move forward. For something this big, we needed district support, so we wrote up a proposal and submitted it. After further discussion, the district was on-board as well (and not just support for the idea, which was crucial, but also some monetary support if we needed it - which we might).

The only problem with all this discussion and changing our minds and going from nine sections to the entire freshman class was that by the time this decision was official, it was already the end of May (which is when school gets out for us). That's not an ideal time to try to get all the logistics worked out for an August start date, not to mention to get parents of incoming freshmen informed. (Ideally we would've let them know back in the fall during our Freshman Showcase, and then again as they went through the registration process this spring. That's what we'll do this year, which should help a lot.)

So we spent a very busy summer doing all the work necessary to get this up and running on our end, including developing material to share with the parents, and developed an online form (Google, naturally) for them to complete. We then sent this information out via email to all the parents (and phone calls when we didn't have an email) and started collecting the information on whether they would be bringing their own laptop or would like to use one of ours. (This was a key worry for us because we could only pull this off if a significant percentage of students brought their own, like they had during the pilot. So we included some verbiage indicating that we might have to back off of doing the entire freshman class if enough folks couldn't bring their own.) We also tried our best to answer questions from parents who - legitimately - were a little surprised to just be hearing about this now. (Again, that part should be much better this year.)

On our end we had to prepare an unknown number of laptops (netbooks running ubermix, although as a district we are headed toward chromebooks in the future), figure out a bunch of processes (distribution, trouble shooting, what happens when things break, etc.), and make a plan for supporting teachers. We've had on-going professional development for teachers in the use of technology in their classrooms, but clearly this was taking things to the next level, so we wanted to provide support. So, with the help of our district technology support personnel, we devised a very flexible professional development plan for this year.

We didn't want this to be a "one-size fits all" plan, yet we are constrained by the realities of people's schedules. So we wanted to create an opportunity that met teams or individuals where they were at, and try to take them where they wanted to go. This might look very different for a teacher of History versus a teacher of Algebra. So we presented to our Department Chairs and then had them share some basic information with their departments (including, but not limited to, this). We then requested that any team of teachers (or individual teachers if they wanted) contact us and set up an initial meeting so we could plan what this would look like for them. This is optional (after all, teachers are also going through a new evaluation process as well as new standards), but we were hopeful to get a decent response. So far we have teams from US History 9, Algebra, and Integrated Science (the "typical" social studies, math and science classes for our freshmen), as well as a team of Art teachers. We hope to get one or two more teams on-board later this fall.

We're almost a month into the school year and, all things considered, it has gone very smoothly. Over 370 of our freshmen are bringing their own devices (about 65% of our freshman class), and we are providing laptops to 185 of our freshmen. These numbers fluctuate some as students who we've given a laptop to decide to bring their own, or students who had been bringing their own have a problem with their laptop and decide to use of of ours. We anticipate that as the school year progresses the total number deciding to bring their own will increase slightly, but we'll see. We will be evaluating throughout the school year but, if things go well, our hope is to continue with this year's freshmen next year as sophomores, and add in next year's freshman class, and continue with that process until the entire school is one-to-one.

I started this post off saying I think this will be seen as crossing an important dividing line because I think this is a very necessary step to get to "what's next." I can't clearly define what "what's next" is going to look like, and I think it will look different in different schools, but in every vision of our school in the future I can (positively) imagine, having ubiquitous access to laptops and the Internet is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for appropriate learning. The very fact that every student will have a device, and that teachers can begin to design learning opportunities knowing that is the case, is going to have some profound impacts on what we do and how we do it. The agency these devices give students, in turn, has the potential to transform school - and their learning - in equally important ways. I can't wait to see what happens "next".

Connected Learners at AHS

We've been talking about trying to get laptops (or other devices) into each one of our student's hands for a long time at my school. In fact, I believe it was the fall of 1999 that we started up our "Laptop Committee" (creative name, I know) to investigate how we might do that. But, over the years, we kept running into the same issue: how to come up with the funds necessary to make that happen on a large scale. We never did.

Now we definitely made some progress. Through some grants as well as from some district programs we have a fair number of classrooms where we have a class set of laptops/netbooks, which means that at least when students are in those classes, they have full-time access to technology and the resources and capabilities of the web. But when the bell rings the technology stays in that classroom and the student moves on to another classroom where they don't have that access.

Our district has also had a "Bring Your Own Device" policy for the last several years, where students can bring their own device and use our (filtered) wireless network to connect to the Internet. This has been great, but a limited number of students took advantage of that and teachers still couldn't plan learning activities that required the technology because they couldn't guarantee that all the students had access.

So this fall we started a pilot. While we don't have the funds to provide all of our students with laptops, we do have the funds to provide a limited number with laptops. We also are fortunate enough to have a population of students where many of them have their own laptop or can afford to get one, if only they had a compelling reason to bring it in to school (and take advantage of the bring your own device policy).

So, with tremendous support from both my building and district administration, we decided to implement Connected Learners in four sections of our core classes (one each in Algebra, English 9, US History 9, and Biology). We wanted classes that were "average" classes in the sense that we weren't implementing this just with "honors" classes with students that were more successful at school, nor were we implementing this with special classes that might have smaller class sizes. We also wanted to target mostly freshmen who were just starting at Arapahoe for a variety of reasons, including that if they purchased a laptop we wanted them to get to spread that cost out over four years of use in high school. Three of those classes are almost exclusively freshmen, and the fourth (Biology) is a mix of freshmen and sophomores.

We chose the classes after students registered for them in late spring. This was for several reasons. First, we didn't get everything approved and finalized until after they registered :-). Second, because we knew we were only going to be able to do this with a limited number of sections, we wanted to make it as "random" as possible in terms of which students got this opportunity. You can read the information we gave to parents here, but basically we contacted them over the summer and gave them the rationale for why we were doing this, and then asked them whether they wanted to bring their own device or use one of ours (eeePC 1025c running Jim Klein's amazing ubermix version of ubuntu Linux).

As of the start of school, 57% chose to bring their own device and 43% are using one of ours (I anticipate a few more trading in their school laptop after getting gifts over winter break, so hopefully we might hit two-thirds). We have 110 unique students in the four sections (there are several students who, by chance, were in more than one of the sections), so it's still a small portion of our 2150 students, but it's a start.

We will evaluate the program as we go along, including both informally and formally soliciting feedback from the teachers, students and parents multiple times throughout the school year. We hope to learn a lot from this first year of the pilot and, if all goes well, continue (and perhaps expand) the pilot next year. I'll let you know how it goes.

Netbook Update

Ben Grey has a post over on The Edge of Tomorrow that's worth your time if you're in the position of deciding what kinds of devices to purchase for your students. You really should go read the post (and the comments), but I just wanted to pull out my comment as some folks began investigating netbooks after a previous post of mine.

So, here was my comment (in the context of that post and comment thread, but still mostly makes sense on its own):

Let me just contribute a little info about our experience with netbooks running ubermix.

First, they clearly are inferior to the MacBooks when it comes to video editing and photo manipulation. Now, you can still do some basic video editing on low-res video, and also some basic image manipulation (cropping, brightness, etc.), but you certainly wouldn’t want to do a ton of that on the netbook unless you absolutely had to. I also agree that iLife is something that’s not matched elsewhere, which is why having some iMacs or MacBooks around for those purposes is probably ideal (which is what it looks like Ben’s district has done).

Second, a Mac is going to be a little faster than the netbook at lots of things, and that’s nice to have, and typically the screen is going to be larger (both physically and in terms of pixels), which is also nice.

Third, certainly the touch interface of an iPad (and perhaps a MacBook soon?) is a great addition in many instances (and a drawback in terms of text entry, fingerprints, and scratches).

But I don’t want to get into that part of the argument, I feel like Ben looked at many devices and tried to make the best decision possible for his students, so let me talk a bit about what our netbooks running Jim Klein’s ubermix can do, as that might be helpful to folks reading this thread. Our current district approved model is the Asus Eee #1001-PXD-MU17-BU at $259.40. I can’t tell you for sure how long the battery lasts because it lasts an entire school day, but my best guess is around 8-10 hours. Our two-year old ASUS netbooks last between 4 and 6 hours, meaning they do occasionally run out before the end of the school day. In comparison our (Dell, running Windows XP) laptop batteries last 2-3 hours and also seem to degrade and need to be replaced more quickly.

The machines boot in less than a minute (and shut down in about 20 seconds) and you have a fairly extensive list of standard software to choose from, as well as you can add just about anything open source you like. Since, like lots of folks, we are moving to more web-based software, it can quickly and easily access Google Docs (and the rest of the Google suite) using either Firefox or Chrome. It does run Flash, and Java, although occasionally we’ll run across a site that requires a specific OS (typically Windows, sometimes Windows or Mac). In general, accessing the web is quick, easy and functional.

If you don’t want to use Google Docs or something else online, it does come standard with the current version of LibreOffice, which is full-featured enough for almost any student. It also has Audacity, Skype, Gimp, Google Earth, GeoGebra, Scratch, Webcam software, and a variety of other software. The only software we’ve added to it is Logger Pro to run our science probes and some Dell printer drivers (although we have customized the look and feel quite a bit). You can, of course, download and install just about any open source Linux software.

It is easily customizable and has a very nice imaging process. Once you create the image you can copy that to a 4 GB or larger flash drive and then the imaging process takes about 6 minutes per machine using that flash drive. What I do is copy the image to 16 or so flash drives, then set out 16 netbooks on a table and start imaging. By the time I get to #16 the first one is usually done imaging. If your image is complete, then you’re done. What I do because we have netbooks in lots of different rooms is I create one image that has all of the possible printers that our netbooks print to setup on them, then after I image I simply delete all but the one that needs to be there (faster for me than copying a new image to all 16 flash drives). That probably adds about 2 minutes to each machine to do that. So, by the time I image all 16 and then work my way around and delete those printers, it’s probably about 15-20 minutes per set of 16.

These machines are not locked down (although they can be), so students can – if you or they choose – customize them. While that’s scary to some folks (again, you could lock them down), the beauty is that the built-in restore function works in about 30 seconds. On boot up you can restore to your image and it adds about 30 seconds to the boot process and keeps any user documents. Or, you can choose to completely restore – wiping out the user docs as well – and it’s about 3 minutes. You can even set them to auto-restore back to the image on each boot if you’d like. (And while I typically do it, the process is easy enough that any teacher could be given a 3-step list of instructions to restore on their own if necessary.) Other than a little bit of knowledge to first create the image (and, trust me, I only have a little bit of Linux knowledge), these don’t require much support. (In fact, that’s partially why our tech department approved them, because they don’t have to support them.)

While I don’t use this feature, you can push out updates to them from a server. A script is installed as part of your image that checks for updates, and then if you put a new update out on the server it will grab it (either at startup or shutdown I believe). I’ve chosen not to mess with that, at least partially because so far each year the updated version of ubermix has been enough better that I’ve simply chosen to reimage all of my netbooks (again, at about 15-20 minutes per set of 16, working by myself, that’s not bad, but your mileage may vary).

While our netbooks don’t go home with students, they are used pretty heavily and we’ve had very few hardware issues. In four years we’ve had 2 or 3 cracked screens, a couple of failed hard drive/ssd drives, and a fair number of keys that get picked off and then we’ve had to replace the keyboard. They connect easily to our open wireless network and seem to match our Dell laptops running Win XP in terms of download speed via wireless.

While we did do some training with our Language Arts teachers, it really wasn’t around Linux or the netbooks, it was around what to do with them. Teachers and students both just pick them up and use them – if they are comfortable using any computer, they are comfortable using these – not really much of a learning curve. We have them available for check out in our media center, and also in our Study Center, and students – even ones that don’t have a class that uses them – don’t seem to have any issues using them.

So, I’m not necessarily trying to support one side of the argument or the other, but I think many folks reading this discussion don’t have any experience with the specifics of what Ben is talking about with his netbooks running ubermix, so I’m hoping this helps a bit. For us, the cost factor (as well as the ease of setup/support) is huge. Yes, I would prefer to give our students MacBooks over netbooks, but at a greater than 3 to 1 price ratio that’s a tough call to make. I think we’ll continue to see devices evolve. In the meantime, I would encourage everyone to at least explore a netbook running ubermix if you think it might meet the needs of your students and teachers.

Linux on Netbooks and Whiskers on Kittens

This is going to be a long post, but I think (hope?) it will be worth it to many of you.

I’ve blogged previously about the Inspired Writing project that began this summer in my school district. Briefly, all 5th grade classrooms, all 6th grade Language Arts classrooms, and all 9th grade Language Arts classrooms now have ASUS EeePC 1000 netbook computers. (We hope to expand it to grades 5-12 eventually.) Those teachers also went through staff development this summer based around improving reading and writing skills through the use of technology.

At Arapahoe this means that we have 198 new EeePC 1000’s this fall. This gives us a 1:1 ratio in our 9th grade Language Arts classrooms (we have a few sections using Dell laptops that we had previously purchased with grant money), plus we purchased an additional twelve for our Special Services Department, four for our Study Center, and twenty-four for our media center for student check out. (For now, students can check out a EeePC for use in the media center for a class period at a time. Once we get settled in, we’re hoping to expand that for longer time periods and not restrict it to the media center.)

Our district settled on the EeePC’s for many reasons, two of which were licensing costs and imaging issues. We ordered EeePC’s with Xandros Linux, and they utilize our PODnet wireless network to connect to the Internet, meaning that we don’t have to worry about Microsoft licensing costs (they’re running Open Office). And the Eee’s have a built-in restore mechanism that will reset them back to factory condition, thereby minimizing technical support issues (which is critical as my district, like most these days, has had to cut positions).

So one of my self-assigned jobs this summer was to learn more about Linux in order to both support and hopefully improve the implementation of this project. So at NECC I approached Steve Hargadon, who is my go-to person in my PLN for all things open source. For those of you who know Steve, you won’t be surprised that when I finally tracked him down he was running from one presentation to another, but he kindly gave me several names to contact that he thought could help me out. They all did, but one in particular ended up helping me out more than I could’ve expected.

Jim Klein is the Director of Information Services and Technology for the Saugus Union School District in the Santa Clarity Valley in Northern Los Angeles County. When I contacted Jim with some questions, he answered them, but then also mentioned that he had an imaging process I might want to take a look at. Well, not only did he have an imaging process, but he had extensive, step-by-step documentation for how to do it. This documentation is so good that even I, pretty much completely new to Linux, could figure it out. (Jim and I did end up trading well over fifty emails over a variety of questions, which was way above and beyond the call of duty on Jim’s part, but that was mostly due to one typo on the documentation that we eventually figured out and my apparently inexhaustible capability for asking questions.)

So why am I blogging about this? Because I think this is a process that many of you should take a look at for your schools. Basically, here is why I think this image is so good:

1. Jim (and his team) have created a custom Ubuntu Netbook Remix image that's optimized for battery life and made it available for anyone to download and use (with step by step directions). You can use their image or modify it for your own needs. (For my school, this included customizing the launcher to add the apps and shortcuts we wanted available to students on the main screen, changing the default save settings in Open Office, changing the homepage and security settings in Firefox, adding the Diigo toolbar to Firefox as well as the Compact Firefox extension, adding the right printer, and running a script at startup to change the keyboard settings – more on that below.)
   
   
2. This image installs from a flash drive in about six minutes.
   
   
3. It uses open source software, so less of your limited dollars are going to licensing costs. Linux is also a relatively "thin" OS, so it runs pretty well on netbooks even though they have less horsepower.
   
   
4. The image has a built-in, 10-second system recovery option on reboot (adds 10 seconds to the normal reboot time). Yep, I said 10 seconds. Wait, it gets better. The recovery preserves user documents. (You can also choose to wipe out user docs, but that process takes a little longer.) And, unlike the built-in recovery option in the ASUS Xandros distribution, this doesn’t restore to factory settings, but to your image – with all changes, settings, and printers preserved. This is also a recovery process that a teacher can do, without having to track down a tech support person or wait until they have time to troubleshoot it – they can restore on the fly in the classroom (assuming it’s not a hardware issue), so it minimizes impact on instructional time.
   
   
5. It uses the Netbook Launcher interface, which I think is more productive for students and also looks nicer. (IMO, the Xandros interface doesn’t look as professional, which I think makes a difference for high school students, and also requires more clicks to get to what you want.)
   
   
6. It doesn’t lock things down (although you could if you really wanted to) – students can make modifications as they need to. And the beauty is that if students make a modification that causes a problem, you’ve got that 10-second restore option. To paraphrase something Jim said to me, instead of trying to lock everything down, let’s allow students the flexibility to do creative things with their devices. We protect our servers and infrastructure with solid security, but instead of locking down their devices we focus on quick recoverability. (This fits in well with my school’s overall philosophy of having high expectations of students and trusting them to do the right thing most of the time.)

So, what did this mean at my school? After tweaking Jim’s image I then put that image on sixteen 4 GB flash drives (the image would actually fit on a 2 GB drive). Creating that initial set of flash drives did take several hours, but now they are ready for any subsequent image I want to put on them. (And you can quickly add two files that Jim calls “Simple Updates” that I used for adding the printer I wanted for each cart.) We have 32 in each of our carts, so I then imaged half of the cart in about 10 minutes, then the other half in another 10. After about 20 minutes, I had a cart of 32 done, with all the apps, shortcuts, printer and settings I wanted, and with a built-in recovery option. Compare this to the Xandros distribution, where I was looking at 30-45 minutes per machine out of the box to get them ready to go, and without a recovery option that kept my settings. (Plus the Xandros by default doesn’t have things like Audacity or Gimp that are part of my image.) When I went to the next cart all I had to do was replace two small files on each flash drive to add a different printer to the image. I was able to have all 198 netbooks ready on day one with students, with the apps, interface and settings we needed.

Here are some screenshots:







Now, full disclosure, it did take me longer than twenty minutes per cart, but that’s because I decided to do one more thing – switch the functionality of the right-shift key and the up-arrow key. On the Eee 1000’s the up-arrow key is in the place where you naturally press when you try to shift with your right hand. During our staff development, that meant that every time someone tried to capitalize something on the left side of the keyboard, they ended up arrowing up instead of capitalizing. So I went out and found a script on the web, figured out how to modify it for the Eee 1000, and that’s now part of my image. It runs at startup and switches the functionality of those two keys. The reason it took me more than twenty minutes per cart is that after I imaged them, I also took the time to physically switch the right-shift and up-arrow keys on the keyboard. This is not difficult, but it is a pain, and about every ninth or tenth one I messed up the little connector and it would take me anywhere from two to twenty minutes to get it fixed. But, if you chose not to do this, it’s about twenty minutes a cart.

If you have netbook computers in your district, or are considering them, I would urge you – or your tech folks – to take a look at the wiki documentation Jim and his team have created (which includes a ready-to-go image you can download). Also, keep in mind that his image should work on most netbooks, not just Eee’s, although you may have to do a little tweaking. Thanks Jim and team, for making a difference for the teachers and students at my school (not to mention for me personally), and for being willing to share your hard work.

With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein . . .

Linux on netbooks and my great P-L-N;
Jim Klein, his wiki and Steve Hargadon;
Meaningful learning tied up with (virtual) string;
These are a few of my favorite things.

When NCLB bites,
When the filter stings,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And then I don’t feel so bad.

Sixty Months

I wonder what implications this article from the February issue of Fast Company has for the future in our classrooms?

After more than 100 years of dashed hopes, several companies are coming to market with technologies that can safely transmit power through the air – a breakthrough that portends the literal and figurative untethering of our electronic age.

The article describes three main variations of this technology. The first, inductive coupling, was scheduled to make it to market this month. Basically, it’s a charging pad, and you drop any device (that has the right electronics to utilize it) on it and it will recharge.

No more tangle of power cables or jumble of charging stations . . . And the pads are smart: Their built-in coils are driven by integrated circuits, which know if the device sitting on them is authorized to receive power, or it needs power at all. So you won’t charge your car keys. Or overcharge your flashlight.

It’s initially being made available to police, fire-and-rescue, and contractor fleets, and is also being integrated into a truck console (think a box connected to the electrical system of the truck, and contractors drop all their rechargeable devices into it while driving from place to place.)

The second variation is radio-frequency harvesting, which works across distances of up to 85 feet, and is also supposed to be available this month.

In this system, electricity is transformed into radio waves, which are transmitted across a room, then received by so-called power harvesters and translated back into low-voltage direct current . . . down the road, it will appear in wireless boxes into which you can toss any and all of your electronics for recharging.

But it’s the third variation which is the most tantalizing: magnetically coupled resonance (dubbed “WiTricity” by its MIT inventor). This one is supposed to be available in 12 to 18 months.

Like acoustical resonance, which allows an opera singer to break a glass across the room by vibrating it with the correct frequency of her voice's sound waves, magnetic resonance can launch an energetic response in something far away. In this case, the response is the flow of electricity out of the receiving coil and into the device to which it's connected . . . Importantly, then, WiTricity doesn't depend on line-of-sight. A powered coil in your basement could power the rest of the house, wirelessly.

The rest of the house – or your classroom.

Say you’re a classroom teacher. (Altogether now, “I’m a classroom teacher.” Thanks.) And let’s assume for a moment that you’re not in a 1:1 environment, and that you’ve been assuming that it’s going to be quite a while before your students each have their own computing device that works reliably and effectively in your classroom.

But then you notice that netbook computers are getting pretty darn good at a price point of around $300 to $400. And then you read this article and realize that in the next five years (conceivably), that the price of that very capable netbook could easily drop to perhaps $150 (or the iPhone could evolve into the netbook space at that same price point), and either of those might include the necessary technology to receive “WiTricity” right in your classroom, so no more worries about batteries going dead.

So, if you’re that classroom teacher (or principal, or central office administrator), and you’ve got sixty months until that’s a reality: what should you be doing right now to get yourself – and your students – ready for that very-near-future? You’ve got sixty months – shouldn’t you be getting started?

Inspired Writing

Last month I wrote a post about my district’s Powered Up Writing project. Dan Maas, my district’s CIO, has now followed up his previous post with a description of Inspired Writing, a new project that we've proposed as part of our Educational Technology and Information Literacy Plan that’s required by our state department of education:

Using the vehicle of the Educational Technology and Information Literacy plan, we proposed to place netbook computers in every 5th grade, every 6th and 9th grade Language Arts classroom in the district. Building on the successful support of the Learning Services' Universal Literacy Framework in five 5th grade classrooms at East, Field, Moody, Whitman and Hopkins Elementary schools, we proposed a project we call Inspired Writing.

The ET-IL Plan (still in draft form) is a highly structured document to meet the requirements of the Colorado Department of Education. Our attempt to write a document that both meets the requirements but also communicates our vision is presented here.

I’m sure Dan would love to hear some feedback, so head on over to his blog and leave a comment. Please keep in mind that this proposal is limited to current, already allocated technology dollars (just re-purposing them), as we – like many districts – are in the midst of some huge budget issues. But this is also laying the groundwork – the pitfalls to avoid, the best practices for instruction, the hoped-for increase in student achievement – for a grade 5 though 12 implementation for our district. If this first step is as successful as we think it will be, then hopefully we’ll find a way to expand it to 5-12 in the near future.

Powered Up Writing

We have a pilot project in some of our elementary classrooms where they are using eeePC's as part of a writer's workshop model (grant funded). Dan Maas, our CIO, recently posted on his blog asking for feedback from some of the fifth graders and others in those communities.

Many people are asking about how your classroom has changed now that you have the EeePC laptops. Can you help us tell your story?

Here are some questions we have:

How does having a laptop computer help students write better?

What happens in your classroom now that you have laptops that could not happen before?

Now that you have had laptops in your classroom, how would you feel if you didn’t have them next year?

What do next year’s 5th grade students coming to your classroom have to look forward to?

As of this writing, Dan now has 84 comments, mostly from students, but also from parents, teachers and principals. You might stop by and read through them, and perhaps leave your own comment. This comment from a parent caught my eye:

I like a father of the family am very proud because my daughter Lupita is the future with triple E's.I'm very thankful for Dan Maas for letting the 5th grade at East Elementary be part of them.Wow!I never thought Lupita would ever like writing so much.When we would tell her that it was time for her to write her patch she would say.”I don't like doing them.”But know she gets on the computer and does her patch on there without us having to tell her.That amazes me and even brings a little tear in my eye.

From Lucio (parent of student at East Elementary)

Freshmen Projects

A couple of our teachers just posted some end-of-semester projects over on Learning and Laptops. Brad posted a couple of projects on the topic of the Cold War, including one that made excellent use of PowerPoint.

Anne then posted nine projects examining the question: What does literature say about us as human beings? She likes them all, but particularly recommends "Experiences."

As always, constructive criticism is welcome (on the particular blog post, please). Since I usually get asked, these are freshmen students (that's 14 or 15 years old for those of you outside of the U.S.).

Goal: Change How Kids Learn

The One Laptop Per Child project has done its first test deployment of laptops in Nigeria.

Here's the school where 150 students attend class:

During a rigorous training session, Hassounah instructs the students to identify and hold aloft each of the laptop's components, starting with the power adapter.

After becoming more comfortable with their laptops, the children begin to explore with programs, settings and physical units. One of OLPC's major goals is helping children feel comfortable customizing their laptop configurations and guiding their own learning. Some laptops barely made it out of the plastic packaging before the students began experimenting.

The following movie (via 1 Laptop: 1 Student) is over an hour long, and except for the first and last 10 minutes, is very technical. But I would highly recommend you watch at least the first 10 minutes or so, where you get a good idea of their philosophy (it's about the learning, not the laptop). Their goal: change how kids learn. If you do that, then I'd recommend you let the rest of the movie load and start watching again at about the 51 minute mark when he answers some questions. The 40 minutes in between is also very interesting, but very technical. But even if you're not particularly technical, it's interesting to watch just to see all the issues that they're attempting to address. They really are paying attention to all the little details - I think this is going to be amazing.

Two interesting tidbits that I recall from the technical part of the movie (in case you don't watch that part). First, in real world testing, the wireless mesh network worked at a distance of two kilometers. Wow. Second, there's a "source" button on the keyboard - push it, and the kids see the source code for almost anything they're running. They want these kids to be curious and to mess around with this computer - in other words, to learn. (There appears to be an amazing revision system that will prevent any irrecoverable changes to the system).

Oh, and they're hoping to ship 10 million of them this year, 50-100 million next year.