November 2005 — Features
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Warming Up To Wireless
“Technology always should be a catalyst for change, but you can’t change anything if your teachers don’t understand how to use the technology first,” Owen says. “One of the biggest pieces [of wireless technology] is getting teachers prepared for the change that happens in their classrooms when you put a connected device in the hands of every student.”
To acclimatize teachers to wireless, Irving ISD begins every school year with three days of workshops, seminars, and best practice- sharing sessions in which teachers learn just about everything they can about wireless and how to incorporate it into the classroom. The classes range from general discussions on Web-based lessons to sophisticated talks about preventing music piracy and snuffing out plagiarism. In addition, two educators at each high school are employed as Instructional Technology specialists (ITS’s) and provide one-on-one advice or aid to any teacher who requests it throughout the year.
This touch has worked wonders for learning environments and teacher psyches alike. Last year, for instance, at a time when the Irving schools were struggling to prevent students from using Instant Messenger (IM) programs during class, one of the district’s high school English teachers turned to her ITS to find a way to stop the madness. The duo devised a method to turn distracting chat into a legitimate learning tool.
As Owen tells the story, the teacher instructed students to prepare group presentations about a particular book, but created groups consisting of students from different class periods. The teacher then required that students “meet” electronically to discuss their assignment, grading them on their ability to put together their entire presentations over e-mail and IM.
“It was a perfect demonstration of how we’re trying to get our teachers to see that they can relinquish control but legitimize behavior in a way that demonstrates how technology can be useful,” Owen says. “Adults use IM to get work done; this teacher enabled students to realize that chat can help them finish assignments too.”
Thanks to several bond referendums, Irving ISD began distributing laptops at a single high school in 2001; the program has grown steadily by grade ever since. In 2003, the district distributed Dell (http://www.dell.com) laptops to more than 8,000 high school students across four schools. Since then, due to a federally funded and state-distributed Technology Immersion Plant grant, another 1,500 middle and elementary school students have been added to the program.
While the logistics of loaning, maintaining, and re-collecting more than 9,600 laptops are formidable (see “Laptop Management: How It Works,” page 34), Owen says the bigger job for her is getting teachers to build their lessons around the technology. And in truth, instructing teachers to operate the technology can be an easier task than making sure they turn around and use it. In many cases, teachers have been teaching the same subjects with the same resources for years. The key issue: convincing them to give up control.
