Lausanne Laptop Institute -- Day 2

This day began with a 6:30 wake-up call. The bus was ready to take us to Lausanne at 7:30. First item on the agenda was coffee and breakfast, followed by a short welcome message from conference organizer, Stewart Crais, who is also Lausanne’s Director of Technology and Media Services. He immediately set the tone of a friendly, casual, interested sponsor and host. We certainly felt welcomed to the Institute.

Stewart introduced the keynote speaker, Howard Levin. Howard has a Northwest connection, first at Overlake School and later at the Jewish Day School. Now he’s at the Urban School in San Francisco. Howard’s talk was called, “Making the Laptop Disappear: Moving Toward Seamless Integration.” His emphasis was on the notion that we need to get to the point where the focus is not on the laptop (the hardware) but rather on the information and results…..and, of course, the learning taking place by the students. I found much to think about in his talk. Stewart said the keynotes and the other workshops will be on the Institute website in the near future, and I hope that includes Howard’s presentation. I hope to go back and look again at Howard’s talk. The notion of having the laptop “disappear” – again, where the emphasis is not on the hardware but on the learning – is a concept that I completely agree with. I don’t know how soon it might happen; the “toy” features that computers in general – and laptops in particular – offer kids (and adults) seem to be quite tempting and seductive….I mean, you gotta admit that there are a lot of fun things a person can do using a laptop computer. As great a help it can be in organizing and helping gather information, it’s also great for games, going all over the place on the Internet, and playing music, movies, editing pictures/graphics….not to mention spending hours playing around with screensavers, desktop wallpaper, emoticons, etc., etc., etc. My sense is that computers are far from a mature technology and our users are pretty far from making consistent mature use of them in the context of teaching and learning. The hardware itself also keeps morphing, getting smaller, lighter, faster, more capacity, more features, more multimedia. In any case, as I say, I look forward to going back to review what Howard had to say and continue to reflect on his ideas.

Session I for me was “Managing the Laptop Classroom” by Thomas Haynes from The Culver Academies. I happened to ride on the shuttle bus with Tom this morning and got a bit of a preview of his talk. We also chatted about the open source content management system – Moodle – which I’ve been looking at recently. In our chat on the bus ride, he talked about some of what he is doing at Culver. He mentioned that his school uses Moodle widely and is very positive about it. He included Moodle in his presentation, too. The bulk of what he had to say had to do with some pretty common-sense guidelines for classroom management, such as enforcing lids down (with no exceptions), and by being absolutely consistent in a whole series of expectations he demands in his laptop classroom. Another tip was if kids insist that they have to take notes on the laptop (when that is not necessarily the classroom practice or expectation) that they send a copy of those notes to the teacher. He strongly advocated not allowing kids to resume work on their laptop if they finished a test early….or to go off to freely surf if they used their laptop to take the test. Letting them go off on their own as soon as they finish runs the risk of encouraging kids to speed through tests/quizzes so they can get back to do what they want on their laptops. He seems to be a teacher that kids might label “strict.” In this last example, if kids do go off on their own on their laptop after finishing a test without his okay, they get a zero on that day’s work….no exceptions. These sorts of strategies stem from the right spirit – namely thinking ahead about the guidelines and tone you want to exist in your laptop classroom, and then be absolutely consistent about enforcing them – even if I might differ with Thom somewhat on this or that specific rule.

Next came Susan Artkras who presented “Computers in a Writer’s Workshop.” Susan describes herself as “a 7th grade English and social studies teacher in a 1 to 1 laptop classroom in the Webster Groves School District in Missouri.” Much of what Susan presented was a wide-ranging list of websites for writing and collaborative projects that she recommends. I’ve bookmarked her resource lists and definitely want to spend time exploring the places because there does indeed seem a lot of potential there. In some ways one of the nice features of Susan’s fairly low-key session was the amount of enthusiasm, good ideas, and resources that came from the others in the room.

After lunch I went to an open roundtable session for curriculum integrators. The subject we talked about was teacher training. It was quite interesting to hear about the challenges faced by other trainers in situations somewhat similar to mine. Schools do have different policies in place – some require hours of training in every teacher’s schedule (e.g. an hour every two weeks), some expect an explicit technology goal (or goals) in each teacher’s (and probably administrator’s) professional development plan, and some schools require department heads to develop explicit technology expectations (often in collaboration with the tech integrator in the building) which are then transmitted to department members. Department heads are responsible for tracking the accomplishment of those goals by each of her/his department members. Whatever the institutional practices/policies, all agreed to the importance in finding ways to foster an environment where faculty members challenge themselves to seek new knowledge. The role of the school and the department head, then, is more to enable, encourage, support and reinforce the individual initiative for greater technology integration among their department members.

Session IV of this day was called “Now That You Have It…..How Do You Use It??” and the presenter was Lucie Calvin from St. George’s Independent School in Collierville, TN. Ms. Calvin seems to be a very strong proponent of using PowerPoint, emphasizing that this part of Office can be used for much more than presentations. She seems concerned about the need to be responsive to the visual learners in her room, and uses PowerPoint to put together quick, one-slide current event “bell ringers” and quick quizzes. She went on to talk about using cameras for photojournalism and presented sample worksheets. In her examples the websites and other resources that students are to use are listed. Wide-open web searches are requested of her students sometimes, but she more generally recommends having teachers search out the most useful resources and providing those links to students. The final portion of her presentation was an attempt to give us some sites that have “ready-made activities” and a quick word about blogging.

The Institute provided a sit-down dinner at the Hilton which was quite enjoyable. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.