Pockets of Change

After all that talk about small steps towards change, our school is about to undergo a  watershed event that will propel us into the midst of rapid change: we are moving to a 1:1 tablet program, first in grades 10 and 11 this August, and then adding more grade levels in subsequent years so that we are a full 1:1 program in 4 years.

As a member of our school’s Tablet Steering Committee, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a 2-hour meeting this afternoon.  The bad news is, it was two hours long. The good news is, it wasn’t totally unbearable. A lot of good things came out of that meeting. We identified  a lot of logistical issues that need to be resolved between now and August (stay tuned for late breaking news as it unfolds).

There is one point that I think is single-most important issue on the table: identifying a small number of skills that can be easily taught (not necessarily mastered) to students and staff to allow us to harness the power tablet we will be given?

In a perfect world, these are the skills that I would like to teach to every student and every staff member who will be using the tablets next year, maybe during that first week of school in some sort of workshop format:

•  RSS - This simple tool will have the biggest impact on all teachers since less that 10% of teachers know what it is, let alone know what it can do.  It will revolutionize the way that information is accessed. Heck, for some of us, it already has.
• OneNote - Like one teacher told me recently, if you’re not using OneNote (effectively), you might as well save some money and buy a laptop instead of a tablet.
• Outlook - The ability to pull information off of our SharePoint portal is key. Read and update shared calendars, get notifications for updates to particular wikis or folders, even use it as your RSS feed reader if you like. Plus the other well-known functions like meeting requests, task lists, and oh yeah, email.

I think that if we can start with these three areas, we will be well on our way of increasing efficiency, productivity and collaboration. And isn’t that one of the main goals of moving to a digital environment?

Photo Credit: Gerard Bierens