If I had a time machine, these are the three things I would go back to change in our 1:1 program.

By Paul Lawrence

I understand that time travel is just a theory (for NOW) and that playing with the past can have serious repercussions for potential futures (I’m looking at you Marty McFly), but I would totally risk it if I could get a do over on these parts of our 1:1 program.

One, do not give your students unfiltered access to the App Store

We gave students access to the App Store during the first two years of our program and asked them to exercise self control when it came to downloading non-educational apps.  As you can imagine, this did not work.  Kids are kids and the delights of the limitless games to be found through the store made the teacher's’ job of managing the devices in their classroom that much more difficult.  As a result, we have locked down the App Store on iPads and the Chrome Store on Chromebooks.  Yes, this does require our division team to review and approve all Apps on the “Whitelist”, but it has been worth it to reduce to the off task behaviors that came with the open store policy.

Two, treat your devices like textbooks and make sure that every child gets one

When we began our program, we made stakeholder involvement a priority.  We made the schools our partners in the distribution process and asked them organize distribution nights at their buildings.  During these distribution nights, parents were asked to come to the school to receive an orientation and sign an agreement form before a device was issued to a student.  This system proved to be a highly effective way to distribute devices to those families who were monitoring communications from their children’s schools and had the time and ability to travel to their children’s schools for these distribution nights.  

Unfortunately, not all families were able to attend, so we got caught in a situation where our teachers were facing classrooms where sometimes up to half of their students were not issued a device.  Last year we decided that if we wanted to give our program a chance to succeed, we needed to make sure that every student received a device so that every teacher could begin to plan with the confidence that their students could and would bring their devices with them to class.  So, we made some changes to our rights and responsibilities handbooks, set a distribution schedule and passed out 12,000 devices in the first month of the school year during school hours and it turned out that our stakeholders were pretty much happier that we had taken care of it for them.

Three, don’t pick iPads (Sorry Apple, I still love you)

This is a tougher one to change, because when we began our program, the state of Virginia stipulated that to receive funding for a 1:1 program, school systems had to purchase “tablets” as that device.  With that qualification, iPads were the obvious choice.  Hampton City Schools is an Apple division.  Our teachers and staff use Macbooks and our school labs are made up of iMacs.  I would also like to go on record as saying that I love both my Macbook and my iPhone.  I can’t imagine using anything else in my professional and personal work and communication.  

The problem we ran into with iPads was that while they are fantastic for personal use, they are difficult to wrangle when you try to coordinate 10,000 of them.  The efficient Apple ID which works great with responsible adult users became a bit more burdensome when we had to create a 14 character password for each student or, god forbid, ask them to create and manage their own.  This issue alone was enough for our network and support team members to begin to question their career choices and update their resumes, but that was not all.  Apple’s custom of frequently updating its operating system can be great for personal users to insure that they are achieving maximum functionality with their device.  However, when one of these updates would hit our network it would essentially cause any potential for classroom use to be put on hold until each student had completed the task.  We still love Apple, we still give them to our teachers.  I am typing this on a Macbook.  We may check back in with Apple after they have had a chance to perfect their program but for now we are on a break.  In the past two years we have transitioned to Chromebooks and we are very happy.  They don’t have some of the cool Apps but right now we will settle for consistent and reliable.

So there you go.  When I lay my hands on that time machine, this is what I will do first.  Then I will go back and invest in Microsoft like my roommate told me to do in 1991.  I’ll still keep using my iPhone though.  

Paul Lawrence is the Director of the Information Literacy Department for Hampton City Schools, Virginia. You can reach him at plawrence@hampton.k12.va.us