Reflecting on School Use of Technology

Getting more and more technology into the classrooms to help compliment student learning has been a goal of mine for quite some time. We are steadily acquiring the technology here at St. Rita Catholic School so we can offer a student experience that takes advantage to the reality that students learn in.

In our Learning Commons and classrooms students have access to:

• 30 iPads
• a cart of 25 netbooks
• 20 iPods
• 11/13 classrooms are outfitted with a SmartBoard as is our library
• each teacher had a laptop 

We are looking at BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) activities here in our Junior grades and there has even been some collaboration of Junior and Primary students using the iPods.

Here is the St. Rita BYOD Policy for the 2012-2013 school year.

It never fails to amaze me just how much our students know about these devices. Not tapping into this knowledge to help our students meet their learning goals would seem like a waste.

I think it is important that we pause and reflect where we are at this moment. We are very fortunate to have so many great things here at our school. Taking a look at where we are and where we can move next is going to be a very important stage for us. Before use any more school funds to purchase more technology we are going to take a close look at how we use technology here at St. Rita and how we can use it to meet our students needs and to increase student achievement.

Observations of a Elementary Principal in a Digital High School

I had the opportunity to go to a neighbouring High School last week and take a Learning Walk through many classrooms during morning classes. Over the course of the morning I was blown away by so many amazing things that I saw. I would like to share some of my observations that I made over the course of that morning.

Classrooms were filled with all sorts of technology and the students were making use of it in many various ways. Some of the things I saw were:

• personal laptops
• students on Smart Boards
• iTouches
• iPads
• Smart phones

So many educators are worried that if you give students unlimited wireless broadband and allow them to use their personal devices that there will be many problems. However, I witnessed the exact opposite. The was a culture of digital responsibility at this high school and every student I saw was using the technology to further their knowledge and to complete the given task.

This visit was quite exciting for me. I could actually see what perhaps our school will look like in as little as two years. We are already wireless, have iPads, a Net Book Cart and quite a few Smart Boards.

Will we get to the point where students bring their own devices to an elementary school? This is a question that I would like to explore further.

If anyone has any experiences with this I would be very interested to hear how it went.

"Let Learning Happen"

A colleague passed this video on to me a couple of weeks ago and I was blown away by the contents.

It really speaks to how children are 'wired' today and how they learn. For the first 10 minutes of the video I was feeling a littler nervous in regards to how he was presenting the role of teachers today. However, as the video went on the role of the teacher in the digital and technological age became clearer and clearer.

The educational researcher is Prof. Sugata Mitra and he gave access to high speed Internet to children in various parts of India where there was no computer access. For more on the experiment check out:

Wikipedia - Prof. Sugata Mitra

Here are the Self Organising Systems for Schools he identified:

1. Groups of 4-6
2. One computer per group
3. Unrestricted broadband
4. Interesting questions
5. eMediation if required
6. Discussion allowed
7. Changing groups allowed
8. Watching other groups allowed
9. Leave them alone!

Hope people find this as interesting as I did.