Reflections on a Month of 1-to-1 Laptop (& OneNote) Program

MicroSoft

Teacher Academy OneNote

For a month all my students had their own personal HP laptop; this was our first experience as a 1-to-1 device class. The Microsoft laptop loan program is run by Ngā Pūmanawa e Waru (NPeW). Once you apply and are accepted into the program you will get an expert teacher from NPeW (and from Microsoft) to assist in setup, planning and some classroom time. When 1-to-1 is not your normal way of teaching then suddenly having these devices can disrupt your learning unless you plan, be flexible, and use the experts they provide. Luckily NPeW and Microsoft have experienced teachers who bend over backwards to help you make this a success for your own inquiry and for daily learning.

As part of the program, you the teacher are expected to reflect and share your journey. As I also focused on using the Microsoft product OneNote, I used that for planning and reflections. In my blog reflections on the 1-to-1 program using OneNote, I record my setting up and using OneNote as a learning management system. 

Having a focus for yourself as a learner and for your students will help you from being overwhelmed. My focus was using OneNote in the classroom and developing student agency. However as much as I enjoyed learning about and using OneNote, I would suggest teachers focus on using more familiar programs like the Microsoft suite for this limited time. Our first two weeks involved many technical difficulties, mainly because we were the first class to use them, but also because OneNote was a 'new' software for all involved.

OneNote is a wonderful piece of software that incorporates digital work-spaces, workbooks, pages, sections or folders, private and shared all in one. I particularly found this compactness to be one of my favourite features. I did all my planning there, anecdotal notes, shared timetables, readings and activities. Groups collaborated on shared pages, or worked on their own private OneNote, which I could see with a click of a tab. Plus I had OneNote almost constantly projected on my whiteboard as our guide and teaching space. My first OneNote Tour was made in week 2. Below under Screencasts, you can find links to my OneNote screencasts.  

 
Some positives about OneNote: easy to share pages or collaborate on a page, being able to draw as well as type on any page, picture or PDF, the ease of a whole class document management, ability to make students more accountable (see all their folders, mark their work, proved tick boxes for activities), everything in one space, abilty to add video and voice recordings to pages (I used this for feedback and students used it for learning activities). 

* Images are from the student voice reflection survey.

Some negatives about OneNote: one of the potentially best features of OneNote, the Learning Tool never work for us. Learning Tools is an add-in to include in your teacher OneNote. It converts PDF's and images into text using optical character recognition (ocr), plus will read the text and help the student identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives to aid comprehension. Also, students can dictate voice messages (reading / summary / comprehension questions etc.) on the page; wow! Check out my quick screencast on OneNote Learning Tools. Another awesome tool is the Clipping Tool which clips screencaptures and will add it to the page you specify with a hyperlink 'credit'; again it didn't work for my students so we used Windows Snipping tool. In OneNote you can share and collaborate on any page you specify, or anyone can work together in the Collaboration Space; however we found the syncing was too slow and not consistent across the class, so we used Google Docs or Padlet for real time collaboration. 

The HP laptops are quite small at first impression, but the kids loved them. They enjoyed that they could use them as a laptop or a pad, as the screen was detachable. Of course having their own personal device that they didn't need to share seemed to increase their enthusiasm for research and getting their work done. Because it was a limited time period we did almost all our learning digitally! Exhausting and not practical! I would kill to have a permanent 1-to-1 device classroom, but have realized balance with paper, whiteboards, materials etc. is essential to cater to all learners and for the teachers sanity. 

 

 

 

Some negatives about the laptops were that some keyboards would fail. Windows updating at the most inconvenient times, and the styluses were either flat or not used much (very much to my surprise!).

When preparing for your 1-to-1 laptop program, you will need to consider some setup tips. Ensure all the laptops are fully powered and updated, and all keyboards and styluses are working. Also ensure all programs you intend to use are fully loaded. If using OneNote that means setting up Class OneNote and Learning Tools, and especially ensuring the OneNote 2016 downloaded version is on each laptop, as the web versions don't incorporate the drawing and learning tools. These laptops need to be well charged or they just stop working until charged enough, so setting up a charging station and system are essential from day one. The power station can get messy and unsafe very quickly, the photo below is just two days after a tidy up! My students checked their battery life every break, if below 50% they placed them at the power station and the I.C.T. team plugged them in. As the students know they won't be able to work without power they are very good at doing this job.

 
Students quickly became the experts. Our word of the week was RECIPROCITY, which we used often to celebrate the fact that student peers were the real experts. Although my I.C.T. team started as experts, by the end of week 1 most of the class was an expert at some aspect. In the last week I surveyed my students using a Google Form. Their reflections on the HP laptops and OneNote are in this blog post, but the full survey is this spreadsheet version of the results. 

Now we are back to a few devices to share and paper and pen. Yes, in many ways we are please to be back to using paper and pen, but in context this is because we did EVERYTHING digitally because we wanted to make the most of the 1-to-1 laptop opportunity. I and my students would still love to have 1-to-1 devices all year round, but I have learnt that like any learning, it needs to be a mixture of digital, paper, practical; integrating and supporting each other, which caters for all learners as well as growing digitally literate digital citizens.

Below are some supporting screencasts, tips and resources I used during this program. I hope this post will inspire you to try 1-to-1 and share your experiences with us.

Screencasts

• This is a screencast to show you how much difference the Class Notebook add-in makes to OneNote. Looking inside OneNote Class Notebook

• Looking at the Learning Tools add-in. OneNote Learning Tools

• How to group students in OneNote. OneNote Grouping Students

• A tour of my OneNote Class Notebook in the beginning. OneNote Tour

Tips & Tricks

• If you draw on an image do not move or resize it as the drawings don't scale, they seem to be independent objects.
• If the software finds a page conflict, it creates a backup highlighting the differences; handy.
• If you hit tab you get a table. 
• To resize an image, click on it and choose the bottom right  corner handle; it is the only one that keeps the proportions.
• When you copy a hyperlinked text into OneNote, it automatically pastes a website citing link.  
• Images won't act as hyperlinks (even though they have a link attached) if in a Section other than Collaboration Space (requires Control + click) and Content Library (requires a single click). Although text hyperlinks seem to work throughout.

Resources

Below are some of my learning resources that have helped me so far:

Pinterest OneNote

OneNote professional development guide: http://onenoteforteachers.com

Useful readings

OneNotePD guide

OneNote in Education

Howbeneficial are 'one-to-one' laptop programs in schools? - CSMonitor.com

Microsoft announces new classroom-focused tools for Office 365 Education

See my Classroom in 360

I like to take photos of my classroom for my own professional development records, to share with other teachers and for my own records. Usually I just take some photos, but this term tried an app called Photosynth by Microsoft. You just stand in one spot and rotate, allowing the camera to capture the empty spaces, then share. What is great is you can scroll around 360 degrees to view the classroom; try it out below.

How else could we use this fun photo app for teaching and learning?

Below: You can create a stitched 360 jpg image.

I have since learned that Microsoft have retired this app, which is a huge shame. The only other equivalents I found are paid like 365 Panorama.

Scratch Coding Maze Game - Self Guided Lesson

Coding is fun, but it's also a challenging critical thinking exercise that requires persistence. There are  many learning benefits to coding that stretch across the curriculum; however if you need convincing read this great infographic: 5 Reasons to Teach Kids to Code.

Last year I taught a Gifted and Talented group Scratch, and since have been teaching my own students, although finding a way for all students to follow was my challenge. So this year (holidays :-) I created a Scratch coding lesson that can be self-driven by students, although you can use each section as a guided lesson too. It is an introduction and scaffolds students knowledge on the basic coding, along with the thinking, planning and problem solving. I tried to give it a Maths focus with the games being based on basic facts. It is still in it's beginning phase, I hope to put it on a website for teachers and students, plus add quizzes and support material, as well as re-doing the screencasts when I find time. I would love you and your students to try Maze Game and give me feedback with your game links in the comments.

Teachers please feel free to try this Maze Game coding with your students. I suggest you sign up for a Scratch account with your school email so that your students can share their work with you. I suggest you can take the lesson yourself and decide if you want the students to do it alone, or use it for guided lessons where you can focus on a particular teaching point.



Below is the finished Maze Game that has been embedded into this blog; the link will take you to the Scratch project page. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/116495873/

Playing in the Sandpit

On Friday I attended Connected Rotorua's session on Google Classroom along with with staff from nine out of the twenty Ngā Pūmanawa e Waru schools. We explored how others have been using Google Classroom and for me is was also about comparing Google Classroom with Hapara. Hapara is a paid LMS for GAFE schools that we currently use, however I am questioning which would be more suitable for our school. My first thoughts are that they do have some similar functions yet also mange bulk student work in different ways. I suspect Google Classroom is better suited to one-on-one digital classrooms which is my personal ideal, but as it is not a reality in my school I have a plan to test Google Classroom. Through Microsoft and Ngā Pūmanawa e Waru I am borrowing 30 laptops for a period in term 3 or 4 to run my class one-to-one and plan to use Google Classroom to facilitate this. Watch this space.

What do you use, or prefer?

Using Minecraft to Develop Writing

​ This term I was asked by the Waiariki Literacy Association to present a workshop on using ICT to enhance literacy (see the flyer below).
Waiariki Literacy Association presents “Using ICT to Enhance Literacy Learning”.

I decided to share a small part of one of my units on using Minecraft to engage students in reading and writing using Minecraft. You can see my presentation below. I have removed the free lesson plan, but you can buy it on TeachersPayTeachers. I always reassure teachers that they do not need to know the game to get quality learning from it; use your students enthusiasm and knowledge, but challenge what they tell you.

We explored how to use one small part of Minecraft (animals) for reading and writing. We used our note taking and key ideas to create trading cards, with the intention of moving towards report writing. It was only a short workshop so I was just able to give the teachers attending a few ideas to get started, plus resources to scaffold the learning and at least give it a go on their own.

Reading to Learn PD

Educamp Rotovegas 2016

Educamps are a wonderful free PD opportunity for teachers who like to manage their own PD, as well as sharing their own skills. Everyone shares their ideas and resources. We started with the Smackdown (see slides below) and due to interest I took a small workshop on using Class Dojo. Like all the best PD there was lots of back channel chatting and sharing on Twitter using the hashtag #educamprotovegas