09.27.08
Top Reasons Why I ♡ 1:1 Laptop Learning
I feel very fortunate to be part of a 1:1 laptop program in its second year within the lower school division of a K-12 school. As I walked from my classroom to my car on Friday afternoon I started thinking about what makes it such a great part of our fourth-grade life (and new this year, the lives of our 5th graders). Personally, I sum it up this way:
We have students who are excited and who model responsibility.
Yesterday afternoon while my 20 fourth-graders were storing their laptops for the weekend, one student commented, “Today was the best day!” When I asked him to elaborate, he said, “because we had so much time to get our work done, and we got to use the laptops to do it!” Our school’s new seven-day rotation schedule has opened up longer blocks of classroom teaching time, so we all appreciate having the opportunity to begin and complete an activity (can you believe it?) in one sitting. Yesterday, I was able to teach my students how to log onto the lower school server, how to navigate through SMART’s Notebook software on their laptops, and how to complete the geography activity I had prepared for them, all in one class period. The students were motivated and excited, and I was able to circulate the classroom to assess the overall understanding of the longitude and latitude concept as they worked…a dream!
Despite all the excitement surrounding the laptop program, we have students who understand the importance of proper care and handling and the significance of setting an example for younger technology users and even teachers in our school. Our students know that laptops are used only on flat, stable surfaces, they know to remain in their seats while the laptops are in use, and they know how to move around the classroom and building with the laptops. I believe that 9- and 10-year-old minds are well-matched to participate in a 1:1 program: the children enjoy working on the laptops, the expectations put in place provide an appropriate amount of structure for them, and they understand the consequences of laptop misuse. The students help each other remember how the laptops are to be used and cared for.
Parent support and learning
Before we initiated the program last year, steps were taken to give the parents of our students information regarding our goals for the 1:1 program and our overall vision for laptop learning. Our headmaster and technology department communicated plans via a letter, we asked parents to participate in two different informational meetings, and we asked families to take part in a “laptop showcase” where our students shared projects they had been working on and general laptop knowledge. On the front end, we shared our plan for ethical use, safe Internet use, and proper email etiquette. The result was a group of parents who were just as excited about having laptops in their life as their children. We feel fortunate to work with a group of parents–many of whom are digital visitors–who share our vision and encourage their children to teach them as the year progresses.
Teacher Collaboration
The 1:1 program has been a demanding part of our lives as teachers. It’s new. It’s different. It’s time-consuming. We search for the best websites to use with our students, we create engaging content for our students to use on the laptops, we attend conferences and workshops, we read blogs to keep up with tools and strategies, and most importantly, we simply try to build a base of laptop knowledge for ourselves!
In doing these things, we have grown as a team. We have expanded our online presence. We now all use delicious accounts to manage the websites we use the most and send links to each other, we use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to track supplemental resources and texts for our social studies curriculum, we use Pagekeeper to manage the math links that correlate with our math curriculum, we dedicate time at each grade level meeting to discuss individual ways we are using the laptops in our teaching, and we share our challenges and successes with teachers outside of our grade level and division. Our 1:1 program has ignited our minds and our teaching!
