A new twist to Parent Engagement

One of the strengths of the Manaiakalani cluster is the collegiality and diversity within our schools, and it is always a priviledge to be invited along to participate in their Home School Partnership nights. Having learnt from some of the other schools, St Pius X used a group of Year 7 and 8 students as the 'coaches' for the parents tonight.  Sure the teachers were present in the room, but the students were the trainers.  And they worked with other adults, not their own parents. See the video below for more.

Another positive aspect of our diversity is the perspective a Catholic school brings to our cluster.  This prayer that Paul Coakley, principal of St Pius X, opened the evening with is masterly, whatever your faith....

Lord, as we attend this meeting tonight,

Give us the patience to accept the true believers and carefully listen to the thoughtful critics. Help us understand and welcome technology as a tool, not as a Saviour sent from on high or a devil destined to destroy us. Let us not worry nor let fear stand in our way as we thoughtfully integrate information technology with the basic skills necessary for our students as they become educated citizens in a world filled with information. 

Encourage us as we embrace the humbling feeling of techno-ignorance. Help us use this process to better meet the challenge and stress that many of our students feel as they continue their studies at our school. Keep us open to new learning from anyone, especially open our spirits to the possibility that the students may need to be our guide, at times, as we step into this new world.

In all we do with technology, let us ask the burning question: "How does this practice improve student learning?" Moreover, let us use technology to answer even more questions about our students’ learning journeys. And let these answers make us sure that our technology use makes a difference. In short, grant us the ability to move beyond the intoxicating interest in the novel and the new, to a deeper concern for the learner and the learning.

We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen

Student Internet Use in the Holidays

After the July school holidays seemed like a good time to check up on how much access our kids have to the internet out side of school.  I wanted to get a feel for the different age groups across our seven schools and so I tried to come up with a few questions that would help them to be quite clear in their own minds about what they did online.  We have filed the report that Colleen Gleeson kindly wrote up, after analyzing the data, under 'Research', but it definitely fell into the 'snap poll' category rather than scientific research!
However, the idea was to capture a snapshot of our students and I am pleased we got that.

In the week following the July holidays, teachers were asked to survey their classes, using a show of hands for responses.

Student Internet Use in the Holidays
This is what they were asked for:

"I would like to get an idea of how many of our students had access to the internet over the holidays. The Tamaki Wireless Net is going ahead, and in time the whole community will have wireless. So it will be interesting to look back and see how many kids had access to the internet BEFORE this was established.
Please ask your class these questions and complete the form."

The questions were: (with teacher clarification in brackets)

1. Did you go on the internet in the holidays?
2. Did you go on the internet by yourself ie. You held the mouse, or did you watch other people using the internet? (Tease out who actually chose what to click themselves and who were bystanders.)
3. What did you look at most on the internet? (Group the responses and give numbers eg YouTube = 13)
4. How many children visited school or cluster blogs? (To read, comment or post - you could verify this by asking what they saw )
5. Where did you use the internet? (Try to find out how they get access to it. Group the answers and give numbers eg Home = 12, Internet cafe = 11, etc)
6. What device did you use to access the internet? (eg. Computer? laptop? Phone? PS3?)

We had six of the schools respond, so the results covered Years 1-8.  Although Mike has rightly reminded us that Decile rating is not a good description of schools, in this case it is helpful as an economic reminder.  All the students in the survey are Decile 1a, and that gives a clear indication of the lack of resources available to them out of school.  Our wider community has two excellent libraries in Glen Innes and Panmure (the Mt Wellington library) and both have a number of computers available for kids to use.

What did we find out?
29 classes responded. 25% of our students had access to the internet at home.

• Approximately 50% of the surveyed students accessed the internet over the holidays at some time. 
• Of this 50%, half of them had access to the internet at home, mainly using computers or laptops.
• The majority of all age levels used the internet at home.
• The majority of students who went online accessed the internet by themselves ie they got to hold the mouse - a significant point in internet use!
• Social networks, games and You-tube were the most popular sites for students to visit. Social networks were used by all age groups. As there are no students in this cohort at the legal age to access social network sites, this is an interesting finding.
• An average of 38% of students visited their own school’s blogs or a cluster school’s blog.
• 50% of the students who used the internet had access to the internet at home. One school stood out (School E) as not having the access at home. Incidently this is the school furtherest from the libraries or shopping centers with internet cafes, so they had very little access at all.
• The older the students, the more they accessed the internet.
• A majority of junior and middle school respondents (66% and 69%) used the internet by
  themselves. 80% of intermediate students used the internet by themselves.
• Junior students mainly visited games, then YouTube and Blogs, Middle school students
  mainly visited games, then social networks and YouTube. 42% of Intermediate students
  visited social networks, then games and YouTube.
• Junior students only used computers or laptops to access the internet. The majority of
  middle and intermediate students used computers and then laptops to access the internet. However they did use PS3s, iPod touch, cell phones and X-Box as well.
   

This wasn't scientific but it gave us some useful information leading up to the first round of netbooks arriving and some students having their own device and their own free access to wireless 24/7.  

As is always the case with surveys and research, a lot of the interesting information comes out in the discussions AFTER the process.  

• A few teachers saying they were surprised by what their students revealed - mostly in terms of what they did online and the amount of access they were able to find. They can't be having these kinds of discussions with their students.  
• The amount of under-age social networking accounts owned means we will have to review carefully how we managed our filters for the wireless infrastructure. We will be supplying it to them free to use out of school.
• A teacher from School E who blogs with her class prolifically, and gets very little comments on the blog and few international 'hits' found only one student had access to the internet over the holidays.  Her question, "Why should I bother continuing when only our class reads it?" was hard to answer.
• Conversations from the students about why they didn't use their own blogs more revealed a very obvious scenario; they only get a very limited time on the internet and when they do get a look in it's YouTube, Games and Social Networking all the way.  It will be interesting to see if the Manaiakalani project ends up reflecting overseas studies; when students have their own device 24/7 and they are not time pressured they will multitask between recreational, social and learning based activities.  Time will tell.

Blogger improves Comment Management

The recent update from Blogger to comment management will make life much easier for teachers managing class blogs and for any of us managing personal blogs. At this point in writing the Manaiakalani schools have 240 blogs posting student content and we have had very little problem with inappropriate comments on any of these blogs. But we have had a real issue over the last 6 months with spammers. And when they have hit a blog they have defaced 15 posts at once, which has been very tedious for teachers to remove.

We have very reluctantly responded by turning comment moderation on (for posts older than 14 days) and activated the capcha / word verification tool. We do not like doing this because between them these actions create real barriers to our students and whanau - and anyone following this project will know that one of our major goals is developing student voice and authentic audience. Removing barriers to interaction with our students' online learning is important to us.

So it was with real pleasure we saw this notice on Google Support:

"To make it easier for you to manage your comments, we’ve created a new Comments tab for you to access them. Here, you can manage published comments, comments that have been flagged as spam and comments awaiting moderation if you have turned on Comment Moderation..."

They have made a lot of useful changes at once:

• Being able to see all your comments in an editable list - just as we do with posts and labels.
• For our researcher, having a tally of how many comments have been made on a blog at a glance is useful
• Being able to select some comments as spam and 'train' Blogger to recognise similar ones in the future as spam - just as we do with GMail. I have already had success with this in the past week.
• Being able to remove spam comments from one checklist without having to track them down on each individual post

Engaging Parents through Home School Partnerships

Engaging with parents in an authentic partnership to educate students is way more complex in this decade because we are using learning tools that didn't exist when most of our parents and teachers went to school. So we have less of a shared understanding of what education looks like and feels like.

I have just re-read Dr Mona Mourshed's quote from The Education Project conference I attended last year,

"Students spend 60% of their time out of school. Technology has the power to unleash the potential of the student because they have access to learning during the 60% time."

and been reminded again how important it is that we move forward WITH our parent community if we want the Manaiakalani project to be effective in our 4 major goals:

1. To raise student achievement outcomes
2. To make learning portable (Anywhere, Anytime, Anyplace =A3)
3. To have engaged learners
4. To ensure our students have employment readiness

In the early stages of this project our 4 development strands are occurring almost behind the scenes:

• Mindware development
• Infrastructure
• Devices
• Cloud solutions

But it is essential that we keep our stakeholder groups (students, teachers, parents, government officials, business partners etc) informed and included so that when the day comes to "Go Live" we are all moving in the same direction!

It has been a particular pleasure this year to participate in Home School Partnerships being held in our community of schools in the evening. I have attended and participated in the ones focussed on the Manaiakalani project and each has been a positive and successful event. We have learnt things along the way, so here goes:

The Purpose needs to be very clear, particularly within the staff and school leadership.
Trying to cram in too many key messages about a variety of events dilutes each message.
For these eveings the purpose has been; to inform the parents about the Manaiakalani project and how it is progressing in their school, and to give the parents a hands-on opportunity to interact with their own children's shared learning. And even then it has been important to take small steps, so we have been focussing on getting them interacting with the student blogs so far this year.

Knowing the parent community is most important; what are their particular needs, where are they likely to be in their current understanding of the mindware and the technology behind the Manaiakalani projects, and what will induce them to come out at night!
As all our schools are decile one and are in a 3km by 2km geographical area, the parents have a lot in common. Many of them are sole caregivers, they often have larger families, many will walk to the meetings, and our recent survey showed less than 25% have the internet in their homes. They are predominantly Maori or Pasifika families.

We know that what will bring our parents out at night is their children! They are supportive of their children and their learning and love seeing what they are doing at school. So the evenings need to include the children and we get them to bring their parents along. Issues we need to have thought through are:

Child minding

• Food - kids are always happy when they have something in their tummies!
• How are we going to get the children to interact with their parents? If the evening is about getting the parents using computers then the children need to be firmly told to keep their hands off the mouse. If the parents are not confident they will sit back and let the kids do it for them - and we all know that watching some whizz kid tearing around the screen is no way to learn anything about using a computer. We heard this thinking confirmed by teachers from the Maine 1:1 project at ISTE recently.
  

Schools have used various inducements to attend including:

• kids putting on a couple of items first
• kids writing personal invitations on cards to their parents
• printing out invitations on a thin strip of paper and attaching to every child as a wrist band before they leave in the afternoon - that way most get home!

The formalities for the evening which seem to make an impact are:

• having the principal welcome the parents and give the project a huge public seal of approval
• having a brief overview in plain English (all geek terms stripped out!) about what we are trying to achieve and why
• teachers standing up and speaking about how it is actually working in the classroom and impacting the kids
• explaining exactly what we would like parents to do - again in very plain English - "We want you to read your own child's work and leave them positive feedback!"

Giving the parents an opportunity to have a go themselves is very important. How this is best carried out depends on each school's facilities, but most have sent the parents off to classrooms along with the teachers and let the parents sit down at classroom computers with teachers helping them. We have found that where we had well laid out instruction sheets for the parents we have had the most success. Particularly with large visual screen shots of what to do.

There needs to be an extension group too because we have found in each school a group of parents who have access to computers and have technical skills, especially with FaceBook. Teaching them how to use RSS to feed their child's blog posts to their FB has been successful. And working parents have appreciated being able to include their email address in the blog RSS settings so they get notified (often at work!) when a new post is published.

The evenings have been greatly appreciated and will be an ongoing feature of the Manaiakalani project. Our next step will be providing workshops for parents to develop their digital literacy further. It will be great when we can have cluster workshops that parents from any of the schools can attend, at times which suits them.

The video below is from Tamaki Primary School, in Panmure. They held a movie and popcorn event at the beginning to show the parents some of the student' movies.

Netbooks - The pencil NOT the book

As we prepare for the unprecedented (in New Zealand) rollout of 1:1 computing for a community of Decile 1 students, one of our recurring discussions has been about the misunderstandings the terms 'notebook' or 'netbook' lead to.

In our planning and preparations we see the device the students use as the pencil or pen. This provides lots of flexibility in terms of what we choose or even what the students bring from home.

The "book" for the Manaiakalani schools is definitely the Cloud solution we have set up. In our case this is Google Apps for Education.

We expect our students to be writing on documents in the cloud, using spreadsheets, creating presentations and even drawing and recording sound via their "books" in the cloud. The Google Apps are supplemented by a wide variety of Web 2 tools teachers and students can select from.

When our educators get their heads around this concept, it answers the questions which arise time and again; what software will be on their devices? what happens when they break or leave them at home? how much storage space will be on their hard drives? etc?

The device is simply the pencil - if it breaks, just like a pencil, get another one (or sharpen it!) and carry on working because your "book" is in the cloud.

This simplicity in thinking and working depends of course on a very reliable supply of fast internet to every school and home. And we are working on that too.

Thanks very much Lepa from Room 18 for drawing the graphics I wanted :)

Bloom's Taxonomy

It is not unusual to hear teachers dismiss Bloom's taxonomy as ' something we had to learn at teacher's college' and follow this up with why the flavour of the month is a better metacognitive approach to learning.  I have always found Blooms to be a practical and 'easy to understand and implement' approach, and even more so since Andrew Churches has begun sharing his work around Bloom's Digital Taxonomy.  It was interesting to hear how widely accepted and respected his work has become when we were at the ISTE conference too. Having Creating at the top of the Higher Order Thinking chain certainly reflects the work being carried out in the Manaiakalani schools.

This video link tweeted by @jcorippo is not only amusing, but is a good example of Creating in action.

iPad for grown-ups: reading books

I have been reading lots of educators postings about the iPad sharing all kinds of cool ways to use them in school and for learning, but I have always known that when I finally get one it will be for me!  Because I am a reader and everyone I live with is a reader (Define: reader  = a person who reads fiction regularly during the school term as well as serious work-related material; a person who will stay up into the wee hours of the morning during a working week on occasion reading fiction until it is finished!). When we all go on holiday together too much of the car boot space is taken up with library books. So the advent of a versitile eBook reader will be a wonderful asset to our household.

For the past week I have had an iPad and today I sadly/gladly handed it over to the person I bought it for.  I would have bought two so I could have one for myself, but we searched six states in the USA as we travelled and we only ever managed to find the one wifi iPad sitting in a store waiting to be bought - at Best Buy in Medina, Ohio.

So while I had the iPad I downloaded the Apple book reader, iBooks; the Barnes and Noble book reader; Amazon's Kindle reader; Borders' book reading app; and a free one called Free Books.

Then I bought a few books, took advantage of Barnes and Nobles free eBooks and downloaded lots from Project Gutenburg.  I also added a few lengthy .pdfs that I had been meaning to read. Then I tried to squeeze in as much reading time as I could. Fortunately a flight from one coast of the US to the other, a 6 hour stop-over in LAX and a 12 hour flight to NZ gave plenty of opportunity to read a few books and documents.

Here are some of my thoughts from the past week of reading....

There really wasn't a lot to pick and choose between the reading apps.  They all had nice page turning, bookmarks, the ability to go online and lookup words or information (if you have wireless - which of course I never had on a plane).  They did the double page landscape and the single page portrait.  I was a bit miffed that it was only pdfs that you could pinch and squeeze to enlarge text.  I had anticipated being able to do that with books and give aging eyes a break.

The real differences come in what they allowed you to download or to buy. Project Gutenburg is currently providing the backbone to all of the reading apps and the free book giveaways. It has 33,000 titles available to download for free and it is surprising to discover which books are already out of copyright and have now been digitised by the team of volunteers working on this project. All the classics and childhood favourites are there. I think that the Free Book app has the best interface of the ones I tried for reading these. I notice that if you go to the iTunes Store it is a free download, but the weblink is charging $1.99.

I presume the iBook reader is not yet available in NZ because iPads are not here yet. And if it is like the music and movie iTunes store, the US offerings will be different from the NZ ones. So that works fine if you have a US account.  Barnes and Noble work from IP address and will not sell to anyone outside North America.  I really don't know what that is about.  I downloaded lots while I was there, but know that there will be nothing more from now on - unless anyone cares to email me some of the next round of free books ;)  Amazon is quite bizarrre.  While I had a US IP address, they knew I was a New Zealand customer and wanted to charge me a $2 shipping fee!!! for eBooks.  So I didn't try any of theirs. And Borders seemed to be the most straight forward.  Give them your credit card and they will sell you an eBook.  I like that non-discriminatory approach.

Most of the readers offer the option to read in sepia rather than just black on white.  That is a nice option for the eyes.  And I did like the way I was able to turn the backlight brightness down on the plane to give my eyes a rest too.  The battery lasted easily for 10 hours, but we discovered today that it is a trial when you are up to a good part in a book and the battery goes flat.  Talk about frustrating.

Reading in bed with it is fine.  Reading on the plane was not quite as good.  Planes are uncomfortable at the best of times and the iPad didn't squish into the confined space in the same way a paperback does. But reading pdfs on a plane via iPad is way better than wads of printouts.  If you are a person who falls asleep over your reading and lets a book slide to the floor with a thunk, then you would need to invest in a good protective case!

Biggest frustration; not being able to quickly flip back through the pages when you have lost a piece of plot context and you want to check up on something that happened earlier.  

In conclusion, it is probably clear from this post that I am a fan of the iPad as a book reading device for grown-ups.

Global Collaboration

One of the joys and benefits of technology developments in the past decade has been the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate with people from all over the world as part of our shared learning experiences. We have benefited from having a number of schools in the USA interested in video conferencing with our students and working together on collaborative projects. However, because we have some shared history from Europe a few hundred years back, we can be lulled into thinking that we need to be doing 'projects' together rather than spending time finding out about how each other lives and sees life.

After two weeks in the USA enjoying the unfailing hospitality and kindness of people across the six states we visited, I have been reflecting again on the many cultural differences between Kiwis and North Americans. Many times I have reminded myself to not be deceived by the fact that we speak different versions of the same language. We have very different cultures, influenced as much by factors such as geography and climate as by our forebears.

I would urge both Kiwis and Americans to make the most of these digital communication opportunities to explore (and enjoy) the real cultural differences between us and not make presumptions based on what we glimpse on television ( NB: Kiwis) or how Peter Jackson and other movie directors portray us (NB: Americans). This is the first time I have visited the USA when more than 50% of the people I have talked to have complimented me on my soccer team! And even more have told me that visiting NZ is 'On my bucket list'.

I have been taking notes as I have travelled around, mainly via photos on my phone, of things that have intrigued / amused / astounded / informed because we don't experience them in New Zealand. In no particular order, here are some snippets - Vive la difference!

items with an ** are illustrated in the photos below....

First item has to be: everything is larger than anything New Zealand has ever experienced - you name it, it will be much bigger :)

• Portions and malls; trucks and land; holiday houses - 4 bedrooms seemed minimum- and campers; fishing lines; airports

America has great roads - huge roads, fast roads, well maintained roads. Lots of toll roads to pay as you travel on. And they drive fast on them.

• Everything on the the roads seems to be huge. The trucks, the cars, the SUVs, the boats being towed.
• People tow amazing combinations - fast eg a ute towing a very large camping trailer towing a car towing a boat. All in one long line. Going fast.
• Motor cycles don't seem to require helmets - even on the freeways going fast **
• Radio station frequencies are advertised on the sides of freeways dedicated to giving you information about the area you are traveling through
• Sign on the back of a passing truck: "My USA - no comfort or aid to the enemy".
• Every state has different laws about seat belts. They change as you cross state borders eg Virginia says " Buckle up Virginia - It;'s a law we can LIVE with!"
• In some states the speed limit is enforced by aircraft!
• On a very fast freeway we all screeched to standstill while a state trooper shooed a family of ducks across the highway
• We saw 3-4 dead bambis on the side of busy roads. Maybe cars are more lethal than guns nowdays

National pride - you have to experience July 4th in the USA to really get a picture of people who know how to do national pride.

• Every house on the street flying the flag and sporting bunting. And if you go to church over the weekend you get to see it in the church context too. **
• The food in the supermarket came flag-themed with masses of red/white/blue food for sale on July 4th **
• Interesting the way they sing "God Save the Queen" on July 4th - kinda nice

Other stuff

• Inside a decadent ice-cream eatery, Cold Sone Creamery, there is a sign on the counter outlining all the ailments that these icecreams will NOT cure! We thought we were just out to get an ice-cream, not to cure cancer! **
• People kept telling us that Virginia Beach was 'very strict'. We discovered that you get fined for swearing in public, for appearing drunk while walking etc there **
• The visual pollution: power lines and billboards cluttering the sky in remote parts with beautiful scenery
• We were quite surprised that we could not eat outside when we were having meals in beachside cafes in North Carolina. The waitresses said it was against the law.
• A long public pier put over the sea was gated off and payment of $10 was required to fish and $1 to walk out onto it. **
• The air conditioning units - you need a jersey to wear inside on very hot days or you freeze
• Pennsylvania billboard: "We treasure our country, our cows, our children" - we passed it too fast to get a photo :) However, in all the miles of farmland we never saw a single cow outside on the farms. Maybe the cows were all inside somewhere….
• Bathrooms have long been a fascination of mine and this trip I saw an effective method of controlling graffiti; they placed a board inside a picture frame on the back of the toilet door - and it worked - all the messages were contained within it. But the dreaded gaps are still there! **
• Cheese - well, there is nothing that resembles the cheese we eat in NZ
• Coffee - Funny how something that you would think would be the same the world over can be so different!
• Tipping everyone, everywhere; the price appears to have gone up and they have started publishing notices to 'foreigners' that we HAVE to tip 18% of a meal bill **
• Visitors are no longer called 'aliens' - now we seem to be 'foreigners'
• Cafe menu have appetisers, salads etc but the entres section turns out to be the main course?? Asked waiters about it but they didn't understand the question (or the accent!)
  

There is lots more, but I think that we need to take time with our students to help them connect with each other and try to put themselves in each others' shoes. I believe it is easier to have a quality learning experience with kids from countries who speak a different language because we don't make presumptions that they are the same as us - just with a different accent.

The Haul - Shopping for America

Doing our bit to support the American economy is an important feature of any trip to this part of the world and we have made sure we didn't drop the ball on this one. Today I realised that this could be another authentic education activity, thanks to reading USA Today over my morning coffee.

US teenagers (I have only come across girls so far) are posting 'haul' (shopping Show 'n Tell) videos on YouTube. And stores are starting to take them seriously. Makes my couple of photos posted on Facebook pale into insignificance! The example I have embedded below is heading towards a million views and there are heaps more of them online.

After visits to the US I usually return home buzzing with ideas about how we can leverage the latest technology trends in our schools, particularly with a focus on literacy. It wouldn't take much to integrate this idea into the English curriculum, but I can also see a great 'hook' here for Maths- we just need a sponsor.
Watch this space for the launching of the "GI Haul" video channel!

A haul video is a video displaying the fruits of a shopping trip which someone uploads to the Internet. Haul videos may be used by bloggers to connect with their readers and community, and they are also used to generate communities of their own...... Researchers who are interested in the changing ways in which the Internet is utilized and people interact with each other may cite the haul video as one example of how the Internet has changed social interaction. Historically, young women commonly showed off their hauls in person to friends, parents, and roommates. Today, they may be more inclined to post a haul video which will reach not only friends and family, but people all over the world who may be interested in the vlogger's life or opinions on fashion.

Preparing for a Netbook Rollout

As we make plans for the Manaiakalani netbook rollout to the Year 5-13 students in our cluster, one of the priorities for learning at the ISTE conference was what schools, districts and states in the USA who began similar projects several years ago have learned from the experience. We were particularly interested in state schools and anyone who had implemented a project like this with lower decile students. If you don't think this distinction is important, let me tell you that whenever we talk to people outside our cluster about the Manaiakalani Project vision, the first thing more than 50% say back is, "But what about theft and damage?" A response to that question is a post on its own!

We attended a presentation titled "How to Design a Successful 1-to-1 Program".

The brief included:

"The Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) is the largest and only statewide 1:1 initiative in the USA. Encompassing every public school 7th and 8th grade student and every educator teaching grades 7 through 12, MLTI has 70,000 laptop computers deployed across the State.... Maine has deployed over 155,000 laptops and 800 wireless networks in the last 8 years. If there are mistakes to be made, we've made them. Learn from Maine's successes and failures to help ensure a successful 1:1 program in your school."

This session provided a wealth of information and I have noted down practical ideas here which we think will be very useful to the Manaiakalani Project netbook roll out. So, in no particular order, here goes.....

Teaching and Learning thoughts:

• Teacher Preparation is essential
• One year before students have the devices the teachers need a laptop and a data projector of their own
• BUT don't wait until staff are fully trained to give the kids their netbook - they will never be fully trained for what is around the corner!
• Use online communication tools with teachers to support their learning, to collaborate and co-ordinate eg Google Apps
• Hold regular teacher meetings where these questions are asked; "What are you doing that's working?" and "What are you doing that you are having challenges with". And record the answers in an online space.
• Get teachers out of school to state and district (cluster) meetings to share their learning and needs
• Every staff meeting book 10 minutes to have a teacher show something that is working
• Don’t teach software - teaching learning, using the software
  Principals need to be attending the professional development alongside the teachers
• It won’t make a bad teacher better, but once you have taught a 1:1 class you will never want to teach in another way again
• The pedagogy must be different. Putting a device in the hands of every student and continuing to teach in the same way we were taught is not going to work.
• In the US they found that 60-70% of the text books they used were available online or as pdfs or podcasts

Parent and Community (Whanau) thoughts:

• Insist that parents come in to school for training before the individual student is allowed to take a netbook home
• Newsletters in a variety of forms are essential for communication
• Ongoing training of parents (at school) should be done by children - but always mix it up. Don't have kids train their own parent!
• By product of this is that PARENTS use technology more at home
• Send the netbooks home. Research shows that sending the netbooks home results in improved test scores.

Technical Support issues:

• Less breakage occurs in netbooks that are being used all the time than those that are stored a lot!
• Breakage is inversely related to HOW the technology is being used
  What they are being used for makes a huge difference. If the kids see classes/learning as boring.... breakage and theft goes up
• More breakage occurs with laptops than netbooks
• Need a regular weekly meeting to review challenges and highlight those that need to be urgently fixed
• Infrastructure - always double the bandwidth you think is necessary.... and double it every year. You will never have too much
• Every classroom needs its own managed access point for wireless
• Students MUST be used as technicians. You will never be able to employ enough adults.
• After trial and error, student technicians fell into two layers; kids who enjoy 'fixing' and problem solving, and kids who organise and administer the requests for repairs
• All netbook issues are logged with the kids who organise the repair scheduling - they cope with the stress being generated by kids with dysfunctional netbooks
• The hands-on techie kids liaise with the adult technicians and work through the job schedules. This way they are not having to interface with aggrieved peers
• Have two old desktop computers in the back of the room as fall backs for kids who left netbook at home or have it in for repairs. Don't replace with another netbook!
• It is not worth insuring netbooks. Cheaper to replace them.
• Use old laptops (especially those with dead batteries) as desktops in back of classroom - for when a kid has one out for repairs OR when kid has been inappropriate - give them one of those :)
• Filtering/Firewalls solution: The best solution they have found is the one they call the GOYA solution (Get Off Your A***) “Teach your teachers to get up and walk around the room” to actively monitor what students are looking at on their screens!

We would appreciate any other useful and practical tips from folk who are further down the track than us.

NB: This post clearly does not address the huge pedagogical shifts we are having to make to prepare for a netbook roll out. There are many other posts in this blog which reflect our thinking in that area.

***Update: Russell Burt has shared his notes after attending several 1:1 sessions at ISTE on a .pdf which can be downloaded from this link