Today I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Sint-Ursula School in Horn, Limburg, The Netherlands together with fellow Belgian and Dutch ADEs. This school has been awarded the title Apple Distinguished School recently and has a 4 year history of implementing iPad devices 1:1 to students.

The story of learning at Sint-Ursula

Not all students at Sint-Ursula are part of the 1:1-scheme; it is a choice they make. Very important to know is that being part of an “iPad class” does implement much more than just having a device on your desk during the lessons. The emphasis is not on the device but on the way the students are activated during the lessons; technology empowers the students to learn more self-paced and less teacher-driven.

Indicators for success

At the beginning of the 1:1-project, school leaders set goals to measure if the implementation of technology is beneficial for the students. These were the following:

• Does the student show a positive attitude towards learning?
• Does the student experience the use of the device as an added value to the learning process?
• Are test results as good or better than those of their peers that are not part of the project?
• Do teachers experience an added value?
• Do parents experience an added value?

Ongoing challenges

In the first year the project had 27 students and 15 teachers. Today there are more than 250 students and more than 60 teachers involved. This puts some challenges in the spotlight:

• Tech
• Skills
• Distractions

It’s obvious every IT implementation in any circumstances poses technology problems. Scaling up only enforces these
Teachers, coaches and students all need thorough technology training. Don’t forget TPACK!!

Professional learning

At Sint-Ursula iCoaches help teachers, students and parents with their questions regarding the iPad-project. This group of coaches consists of students and teachers. They are present at school, but also online.

Learning spaces

Where before all learning took place inside a classroom with desks and chairs in rows, this has changed dramatically, not only inside the classrooms, but also in corridors and the media library. The library has been turned into an open-all-day learning space where collaborative work as well as individual work in silence is promoted.

In corridors, individual tables and comfy sofas foster learning outside of the classroom. Inside the classroom, flexible seating and table positioning is applied.

Class visits

After the introduction by Mark van de Mortel, Team leader and Apple Distinguished Educator, we went on a tour in the school with class visits. Here are some takeaways:

Video Analysis in PE

In the gym hall, students were practising Shot Put. Students got their instruction from a slowmotion video explaining the technique. Four benches divided the hall and from the center, 4 students threw. All students were in pairs, so the one not throwing was filming the other one with an app called Motion Shot. This app makes analysing the movements very easy.

A Math classroom without students

Only the teacher was present in the classroom. His students were on a digital scavenger hunt using a service called seppo. The teacher made a math quiz on geometry with real-life geometry problems hidden around the school where students had to measure corners. On the students device is a map with hotspots indicating where to go and find the questions. All results where send to the teacher in real-time.

Language Escape Room

This was AWESOME! This teacher (I’m so sorry I forgot her name …) made a digital escape room in Google Drive by hiding passphrases in quizzes in a shared folder. In order to open all the documents, students needed to find all passphrases. Such a great idea and such a buzz in the classroom!

Role play video in English language class

Students created a menu for a restaurant in English and passed these around. In a next tasks, they had to write a scenario for a role play and record this conversation. All files where uploaded to a shared Google Drive folder for the teacher to grade the results.
This might seem like a daunting task (especially editing and sharing the video) but on the iPad, this is fairly easy.

From revolution to evolution

What I learned about this visit is that this school did take a very radical decision in their didactical thinking, but implemented this with a real long term vision. They set their goals and evaluate the project on a regular basis. Also very important is the scale of the project: they started small with only a selected and motivated team of teachers and students. Everyone in this 1:1-project has opted in. But there is a clear evolution towards a bigger part of the school being involved and already a critical mass has been achieved; next school year the project will grow even further.

Many thanks to Mark, Vivian and Robin for having us and a big thank you to all the teachers that opened up their classrooms for us today.

So we decided that 1:1 iPad was the way to go Read here how we made this decision.

Next step was the most important step to take: plan. What do you need to think of before you welcome students with iPad in your class? A lot!

Apple provides with a good framework to bring an iPad implementation to a good end. They call it ‘Eight Elements for Success’ and they’ve published it as a free resource on the iBookstore.

The book guides your team through essential questions you need to answer before and during your implementation.

Let’s discuss some of the elements.

Professional Learning

On the pedagogical side, it is quite obvious that staff needs to be trained in the use of iPad.

Before you train your staff, they need to get a device. We agreed that iPad is the best suitable solution for our students. We don’t agree that it is the best device for a teacher. There are some tasks where a teacher benefits more from using a desktop class computer. Nevertheless, we need to give each teachers an iPad: they need to build expertise in the use of it. To build this expertise, we created a PD program that started right after our Christmas break (teachers received their iPad just before the break). The program is not compulsory and consists of small lunch break sessions, workshops that last 90 minutes or three hours, walk in 1:1 training, a website with loads of inspiration, apps and other things.

These sessions include what we’ve called First Aid With iPad, a course for novice iPad users (yes, we have loads of them) with essential skills like personalising the device, camera use, getting to know the keyboard, accessibility features and much more. It also included SOS with iPad: What if it goes wrong?: a brief course on troubleshooting tech issues.

Much more important is pedagogical training: How do we design new learning activities with iPad? How do we create better learning experiences?

Thankfully great assistance is available. I’d like to give a big shout out to the team behind The Joy Of Professional Learning. They create amazing resources on providing the best professional learning. We also have loads of help from the ICT Atelier team in Belgium. These trainers are the best you can get.

Community (and communication) & Team

You need to get as much people that are ‘affected’ by the program involved as possible. That’s why we expanded our internal task force twice, informed the complete staff a month before we did the teacher roll-out and informed the students and parents half way through our preparation period.

It was surprising how little resistance we had. Personally, I was very anxious about the response we’d get from colleagues and especially parents. Some colleagues surprised me (in positive and other ways), but I was struck by the good reception we had from parents.

In our planning we decided that staring with the whole school was a little bit of a too big step. So we selected our first grade (12y olds) and fourth grade to be the pioneers in this project. The first graders are new students to our school. Last Sunday we started the enrolment for next school year during our Open School Day. Surprisingly all seats were filled after a few hours. I guess this means parents are backing our decision!

We also created a web page to inform anyone about our 1:1 initiative. You can read it here in Dutch. It includes a video of the event we did for our third grade parents and FAQs.

Environment Design

IT infrastructure. Yes, you might think it is boring, but it is essential. Don’t slim down on WiFi. You need it and you need a lot of bandwidth. Use Caching Server too.

But it is more than that: rethink classrooms and your school lay-out. Do we have need for rows of tables? A blackboard in front of the classroom? Do we want to project the iPad screens?

And then software: how do we manage the iPads? MDM is your friend! We chose Zuludesk to manage our devices. Apple provides with good guidelines on MDM to help you.

Student Learning

I cannot repeat it enough: it’s not about the device, it’s about the learning. How do we create a culture of learning, bring intrinsic motivation to students?

We don’t want forget this item, but for the moment it seems we are stuck in finding apps and ways to enhance our existing teaching strategies. It is imperative that our teaching activities evolve . We are already seeing great initiatives, so we are confident that this train is also starting to roll. But like any train, they don’t take a jump start.

Next time: planning the roll-out. Yes, my dear tech geeks: this one’s for you!!

Start with why

My school has always been a pioneer when it comes to integrating technology in the classroom. Previous school leaders envisioned that technology brings major assistance to the instructional activities of teachers and the learning process of the students. So every classroom used to have overhead projectors, we have had laptop carts, iPad devices, Android tablets, computer labs, LCD projectors and interactive whiteboards, heavy integration of an ELO. You name it, we explored its use in our classrooms.

More recently we have reached a tipping point. The learning process and student and professional life of our staff and students became more and more digital and online. We live in a connected world where we have almost 24/7 access to knowledge, peers and experts near and far. Not bringing this 21st century reality into our school would put us in a parallel universe. If we want to make sure the years a student spends in our school is worth the time and effort, we can not put ourselves in that parallel universe and we need to prepare them for the real world.

How might we achieve this?

That’s a question that has been puzzling me in the last 5 years as technology advisor and administrator.
Do we need more technology? Can we do this with the infrastructure we already have?
I do not want technology for the technology. Any device is an investment and needs constant renewing: no other environment changes at the pace IT changes.

We concluded very quickly we do need more tech in our school: in 2010 we had a computer/student ratio of about 15:1. By 2015 we lowered this to about 5:1. Getting access to a computer requires making reservations of either a whole computer lab or a number of tablets.

It’s not about the device, it’s about the learning!

If we want to create learning opportunities anywhere and anytime, we also need access to the tools that support these learning activities anywhere and anytime. Conclusion: we need to bring the 5:1 ratio down to 1:1.