EduSlam: How To Get Chromebooks for Your Classroom

I got to film an #EduSlam with Tanya Avrith and Holly Clark about how I went 1:1 Chromebooks in my classroom. The link to their write-up is here.

 Hint: the devices didn't come from my district. Through my awesome friends, family, former students, and parents of students and former students I was able to raise about $8000 through Donors Choose to get every student in my class a Chromebook.



The moral of the story: go out and do it. There is money out there. People want to support education. And those devices? They've changed what a history class can be in my room!

Thanks for having me on, Tanya and Holly!

Collaborative Structures and Inquiry in a 1:1 Class

I've been lucky to get to work with a really awesome teacher candidate (TC) this year: she has totally rolled with and been flexible in the weird (or more accurately the hot mess) that is my classroom. She asks good questions. She adds value to assignments and projects.

She has been working recently on a group task that she taught and is an assignment for one of her grad school classes. I went through the same grad program she did, and this was a class I remember pushing back a little bit against the class this assignment was for as well.

There are some structures to this group task that are imposed on TCs that they are required to use. As I reflected on her task with her, we got into a fascinating discussion about fostering collaboration versus assigning group work.

I then took this discussion to a few awesome members of my PLN. After bouncing ideas around with them, a few things became clear. One, the difference that I was trying to force between collaboration and groupwork was, as Kelly Kermode rightly pointed out, largely about labeling the negative aspects of poorly designed or thought out groupwork as groupwork and labeling the better parts of groupwork as collaboration.

So what were my issues? Hokey roles being assigned to kids. Too much structure in the resources - my class is 1:1 - for my liking. Not always having the necessary time crunch - in group tasks, kids can fall into what Jon Corippo calls The Suck: periods that lack productivity because of this lack of a time crunch. (Or sometimes because there isn't enough work for the kids to do, and people feel like they can slack off - someone else will do the work. But that's my addition to The Suck.)

So where is all this going? Yeah, that.

Well, all these ideas - yes, ideas fueled by an awesome PLN (#BetterTogether) - created a new iteration of historical inquiry for my kids. In groups of three or four, they had sixty minutes to figure out why people allowed the Holocaust to happen. I provided some initial resources and a description of the product. I intentionally created a task that was too big for kids to get done in sixty minutes. (Link to the description of the task is here.) They had to divide up the work and talk about what their research turned up and then create.

Collaborative Google docs were started immediately. Some groups made graphic organizers on the docs. Others cordoned off parts of the page to take notes on. And then they went at it.

I haven't had a chance to look over the products yet, but there was a lot I like about this task. It was too big for groups to handle without collaborating on it so The Suck didn't happen. Kids had to share - and listen - to their group members. And they had to come to some sort of a consensus about why people allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Was it perfect? No. Inquiry never will be. Was it a step in the right direction? I'm going with a hearty yes on that. The size do the task made collaboration necessary. Kids had a real reason to use devices: they needed to go out and locate more resources and test their hypothesis. The lesson was a step in the right direction towards what collaborative inquiry can be in a 1:1 classroom.

So what's next? A couple things. Look at the products my kids produced. Think more about the level of scaffolds that I provided for them: were more needed? Fewer? And finally - and most importantly - ask the kids how it went. What changes do they think need to be made?

I'm excited to keep pushing on this: good collaborative historical inquiry that leverages tech? That's moving towards exciting places in SAMR land.

The Squeaky Wheel

Yes, that in fact is my very own wifi network at school. The BYOD network that students used crashed when I hooked 28 Chromebooks up to it. After six weeks of complaining/prodding, like magic it happened. Faster wifi!

Yes, I know: the ultimate #FirstWorldProblems. But still. Digging it.

Crowd-Sourced Information in Class

So thanks to a blog post by Catlin Tucker, a brilliant NorCal English teacher (if you’re not following her on Twitter, do it now), I figured out how to start my world history units this year: crowd-sourcing schema from a unit! Why? Well, before my kids can dive into their chosen inquiry question within a world history unit, they need some schema for that unit. But the question is, how do you get that schema?

Obviously there are a ton of ways to do this, but Catlin’s crowd-sourcing idea was attractive to me for a couple reasons. First, I was able to provide my students with some structure to direct their research. For the Russian Revolution, I asked my students to look at the following six areas:

1. What were the conditions in Russia in the early 1900s that led to people revolting in 1917?
2. What did Lenin and the Bolsheviks offer the Russian people? Why was this offer appealing? Hint: think about the context of the Russian Revolution (see question one).
3. What was the Five Year Plan? What impact did the Five Year Plan have on Russia?
4. What was collectivization? What impact did collectivization have on Russia?
5. What tactics did Lenin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.
6. What tactics did Stalin use to keep power? Describe the tactics in some detail.

Second, my students had some schema about this era: they had started to read Animal Farm in English and knew some information about the Russian Revolution. By running a modified KWL to start this activity, my students were able to both activate and build their schema and start to figure out what further questions they had about the Russian Revolution. Here’s the perfect time to start crowd-sourcing information! Third, my students got to practice their research skills, but this knowledge came from them. No screencast. No lecture. Their research. Their ideas.

And like anything else I’ve done that’s new, I learned some things. One thing in particular. The maximum number of users you can have on a Google doc is 50 - after that people don’t have editing privileges on the document. No good for a crowd-sourced research section. My classes max out at 28, so I wasn’t worried about this. I didn’t have students log into their Google accounts first period - 27 kids? Why bother? Well, with that many anonymous users on the document, Google Drive freaked out a little bit. Some students started to get an error message - too many editors on document. Which didn’t make sense - there were way less than 50 kids in the class. Next period, my class - 24 kids - logged into Google Drive, then accessed the document they were recording their research on. No problems. No problems the following period either. Weird. Live and learn though - have students log into their Google Drive account before crowd-sourcing information with your students.

It was a great kick-off for the unit. In the coming days, students are going to go back and check out the documents from the other classes and start to find areas that they are interested in spending a couple weeks researching intensely. Even today, as kids were doing the basic schema-building research, they were starting to generate questions that they wanted to answer. Excellent!

It was definitely the right start to the unit - thank Catlin!

School Redesign Project

I spent a good chunk of the summer planning an introductory Humanities group project that students would be working on in both their English and history classes with my Humanities partner. It was a cool project - it required internet research, original research (interviews, surveys, class observations, etc), and a presentation. Plus, getting students to think about how to make an aspect of school better works on the ‘I’d like my classroom to be a little subversive’ meter.

Several cool things came out of the project. In no particular order…

Major growth in creating presentations. Did some kids still have whole sentences (and even paragraphs in some cases) on slides? Yes. Were there groups that presented only with images? Yup. That growth was cool to see.

Instead of saying school sucks, kids were starting to say that we start school too early (7:45am) and that the start time should be moved back because cognitive research shows that kids don’t learn well that early in the morning.

I saw students present about alternative assessments, the miracles of Finnish education, and a new way to do teacher evaluations to name just a few cool things that came up. Super cool!

There were more, I know. I am hopeful that this has started some real thinking about school and what it could be for my kids. As one said Friday as we wrapped up presentations in one class, “Was the point of this project for us to go out and like try to change school? And the world?” YES. #EduWin.

I want to leave with one last awesome piece of this project. Every year at Back To School Night the members of the smaller learning community I am a part of at Hillsdale gather before BTSN and have a potluck with the parents and students that we have that year. These are always fun, and the food is always spectacular. This year, we had two groups of students volunteer to present their projects to the 150 or so students and parents there.

These kids showed a ton of courage, both groups that presented really rocked it. Step back for a second. Think about those teachers that aren’t interested in using technology in their classrooms to push student learning. They have lots of reasons. One of them, though, is the what if it doesn’t work when I’m trying to use it reason. Well, when Charlotte and Eli were presenting, the internet was really slow. And when they tried to advance their Google presentation, it didn’t respond. So they hit the arrow a second time. And the preso skipped forward two slides. Then they hit back to get to the correct slide. Nothing happened. Back got hit again. And promptly, the preso hopped back two slides.

What’d they do? Made jokes. Acted like it was no big deal. Made the audience laugh. And continued on. Didn’t freak out. Didn’t act like anything abnormal was happening.

It was later in the evening that I got to talk to Charlotte and thank her for presenting. She mentioned how she was freaking out during the preso when the internet decided to hate her. And then it hit me: I had just had two of my kids present in front of parents, have tech difficulties, and handle it so calmly that it didn’t strike me until two hours later WHAT AN AWESOME JOB THEY DID handling those tech difficulties.

Those tech difficulties that would send some teachers running. Or cause them to not integrate tech at all. Yeah, my 10th graders crushed it.

Victoria, Daniel, and Claire presenting about tracking

DIY Chromebook Storage

I was lucky enough to get two Donors Choose requests funded, making my classroom 1:1 next year. I did not, however, have enough money to buy a $2000 cart to store and charge them. Thanks to the IT department in the district my mom is on school board, I just made a DIY Chromebook storage cart for $182.

#EduAwesome

And there you have it!

Briefly

A brief update via Twitter: 

That is all.

Okay, it isn't. Those boxes contain 8 Chromebooks that my (incredibly) gracious friends and family funded for my students. I am REALLY excited to see what we can do with these tools!