Cat Tech

The short version is this: I was away on Kairos last week while students read sections in the textbook (and had Frosh Library Orientation), and then yesterday and today they constructed and presented presentations to review what they had read about. The Chapter test is tomorrow, so I won't really know until I look at those results how effective the two-day lesson was in helping students learn 1,500 years of history. I do, however, feel good giving that test, instead of spending extra days teaching the material.

I had emailed students, asking them to bring in laptops from home, if they could. An average of five students brought a laptop to each class; to provide sufficient machines for the lesson, I used a laptop cart from the Alpha Lab. In the end, there was one computer for every two students. The groups that had a laptop-from-home were able to get to work considerably quicker than those who had to pull a laptop from the cart, log in, connect to the internet, and then begin work. When I allowed students to form their own partnerships, there was a mad-dash toward students who had brought laptops from home. Only one of the cart-laptops wouldn't accept any login credentials and couldn't be used.

I planned for students to do a digital worksheet and then create their presentation in Google Docs. I quickly realized during First Period that this was far too much work for one class period, and made adjustments for the remainder of the morning.

I found students to be thoroughly engaged in their work. With little instruction from me, they began working in Google Docs, and naturally divided the work between one typing and one researching the topic in the textbook.

Today's class, wherein students presented their assigned topic, went very well. I'd linked all of the presentations to a single page, allowing for easy transition from presentation to presentation. In only one of my three classes did we not get through all of the presentations (due primarily to the reduced class time of a Meeting Day schedule.)

The lessons that I am taking from this experience are:

• one laptop per student is better than two students per laptop;
• the cart-laptops are sufficient for basic word processing (but little beyond that); and
• longer class periods would facilitate constructivist lessons.

Finally, one of the main reasons that I put together this two-day lesson plan for the students to review on their own and teach themselves was that I needed breathing room. Coming back from Kairos, there were three assignments from each of my 76 students that needed to be corrected and returned, and I needed time to do it. Today, I passed back all 228 assignments. So on that front, this constructivist lesson worked! And, remember, the lesson planning and tech-setup took only 25-minutes on Sunday afternoon.

A guest in a classroom happened to snap this picture. There are a couple of things to note about this scene. A few questions come to mind:

• Why is the student not engaged in the class?
• What is the student looking at on his web-enabled cell phone?
• Something that the internet filter would have ordinarily blocked?
• What is the teacher doing that the guest is able to notice this, but the teacher not?

Im sure other thoughts will occur to you. Have a say in the comments. [image via Bionic Teaching]

At the end of March 2009 a survey was presented to the teaching faculty with the intention of uncovering what the hardware needs of a student laptop would be, based on the anticipated learning activities that teachers would be assigning. The survey was open for three weeks, and in that time 38 teachers responded.

Data

“I envision students in my course using a laptop...” (sorted by agreement)

“I envision students in my course...” (sorted by frequency)

Free-Response Questions
Free-responses were summarized and then grouped by similarity of theme.

“In addition to those mentioned above, what other tasks might you ask students to do RARELY?” (sorted by mentions)

“... what other tasks might you ask students to do FREQUENTLY?”

Conclusions

Based on these results, it seems fair to conclude that the faculty who participated in the survey intend students to use their laptops in a variety of ways and situations. The most frequent planned use seems to be for accessing Faculty course management materials (e.g. CatLink or faculty webpages), researching online, typing assignments of varied lengths, consuming multimedia materials, and creating and delivering presentations. These presentations will range from Powerpoint presentations to published blogs & webpages to digital videos.

In terms of the tablet vs non-tablet, the results are inconclusive. Only three faculty members responded that students would use the tablet function “frequently” in their class, while 11 responded that students would “never” use the tablet functionality. If we include the “occasionally” and “rarely” figures, we see 15 faculty in favor of tablet functionality and 15 against. The free-response portion of the survey was equally inconclusive with comments equally distributed between the in-favor remarks, “Note taking (would likely require tablet functionality due to the inherent weakness of current math (symbol) interface currently on market),” and the against remarks, “I would not need students to hand-write anything; a tablet is wholly unnecessary.” In short, it is my measured opinion that teachers would adjust to the either the presence or absence of tablet functionality.

Theoretically a netbook could fulfill the needs identified by this survey, however a few items call the practicality of this solution into question. 84% of faculty responded that students would be asked to type full-length essays on their laptop. One faculty member wrote in the free-response section: “students need a large screen in order to see what he/she is typing, researching and creating with the least amount of strain on his/her eyes, neck and back.” With the small screen sizes (8 to 10”) and small keyboards, this is a significant concern. The second area of concern focuses on the processing capability of netbooks, as opposed to traditional notebook computers. 61% of faculty plan to assign video projects and 34% plan to “frequently” assign presentations, both of which are processor-intensive learning activities. Finally, 21% of faculty responded that they would ask students to burn CDs/DVDs “occasionally” or “frequently,” which is problematic as very few netbooks have this option (the act of successfully writing to optical media is processor-intensive.)

In terms of operating system, Apple OS X, Microsoft XP or Microsoft Vista, a desire was mentioned for the interoperability of file formats, but that is all. That is to say, a word processed assignment, for example, should be editable on both faculty and student laptops. This is easily achieved by using a standard productivity suite, such as Microsoft Office or the Open Office suite, regardless of hardware or operating system platform. Using Microsoft Office, regardless of operating system, is the easy solution.

In summary, this survey has identified a limited set of minimum requirements for a student laptop to have in order for all faculty to make use of. To facilitate to the projected teaching and learning needs of our community, a student laptop should be comfortable to use for extended periods of time, and should have:

• internet capabilities,
  
• email, task, and calendaring software,
  
• word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software that is cross-compatible,
  
• video capabilities,
  
• battery life sufficient for the majority of the school day, and
  
• the capability to write to optical media.

There are certainly additional requirements not uncovered by this survey (such as antivirus software), but in terms of projected use of student laptops in the current teaching environment, the above hardware and software items are necessary. Other features seem to fall into a “nice to have” category.