In our school we are testing out 1:1 learning environments with our Grade 9 students.  Perhaps one of the most intimating aspects of having student with a device is the amount of distraction and off task time it could invite. This has also hit the news cycle.

However, I realize I have been teaching in a 1:1 environment in a lab situation for several years and I have a couple tried and true methods that help me keep focus.  Generally, I go by the motto "If you don't see something you want your students to have (focus, manners, listening skills), you have to teach it to them".

Here's what I will be doing this September:

1. Set a Foundation of Community Principles

I picked these up from working at Ontario Educational Leadership Centre.  There are the cornerstone of my community practice within my class:  be positive, speaker in charge, validate others, no killer statements, everyone has the right to pass (don't force people into stuff they are comfortable with).  I will try to write a post about this later.

The community principles are important because if devices pull away from a community of learning then we need to reconsider how they are infused into our classroom. The principles help set the standard.

How do I "teach" this: I lay out the community principles on the first day and reinforce them throughout the semester.  Depending on the curriculum I will also explore different aspects through group activities and challenges.


2. Teach Active Listening

One of my pet peeves is when it feels like students aren't listening to each other. When its me speaking in class, I sometimes feel like students look at me as if they were cows in the field and I am a curiosity passing by.

The distraction of technology can make this worse.  I found that teaching active listening helps.

There is verbal and non-verbal aspects to active listening. Here is my working definition of active listening:  comfortable eye contact with speakers, turning attention through body language to the speaker, having a receptive look on your face, asking questions.  In short, its being a human towards other humans.

One I have taught these skills I can call upon them in the classroom when I don't see them. For example, I may say "I realize you are taking notes but I don't have enough eye contact to know whether you get this or not. Show me with your faces if you understand."


3. Favourite Classroom Commands

Here's my short cut of commands to help leverage technology without distraction.

Screens down (clam shell) (for quick class discussion or further instruction)

Screens Off / Shut (for longer class discussion)

Eyeballs on eyeballs

Be ready to go in 10, 9, 8, 7...3,2,1

Can someone research that question with their phone/computer/etc...



4. Cellphones on desk

I prefer that my students have their cellphones on their desk ready to be used for appropriate times. I far prefer this than having them hidden in their lap.  Years ago, I was in a meeting with superintendents who had their phones on the table and then when appropriate such as during a break, they would check for messages. I have adapted this protocol because it makes it feel professional and literally "above board".


5. Declare Technology Time Outs

Sometimes its good to detach, unplug and call a black out from all devices.  I find it a reflective time.  If you have a WIFI or electrical black out, don't despair.  Use it for review, reflection and discussion.


6. Rolemodel

Of course, this can be harder said then done when you start becoming addicted to your own techie tools.  For example, not looking up to make eye contact while trying to get an email out that is REALLY important. I am sure I have done it and I am sure I felt justified at the time.  I know I have to keep myself in check as well. 

Over the last couple weeks, the story of device distraction in the classroom has being given some space in the Ontario / Canadian mediasphere.

A colleague first texted me a reference to this Globe & Mail Article 
"Professors push back against laptops in the lecture hall"

I then heard an interview on my local CBC radio show.

And a google search lead me to a CTV hit on the story.

And then I heard on CBC's The Current.


Interestingly, the same professor was used as an "expert" in many of the stories.  This repeated story is a quick example of how media can act like an echo chamber reinforcing the same idea.  What's probably happened that one article triggered the conversation in other story production meetings and it was a cheap way of putting together an article or segment.

I actually have lots of issues how this story is being presented and slanted in certain ways.  I hope to use it as a learning exercise in my own broadcasting classroom.

The next couple posts will be about how to limit distraction in the class and what we might need to teach if students have devices.

Waterloo Region District School Board running a testing out giving a netbook to every grade 9 student in 3 local high schools. One purpose, of many, is to help give access to resources of the internet to every classroom for every student and teacher to benefit learning.  This ratio of devices to student is called1:1 learning environment.

 I teach in one of these schools and I am super excited to help document and support this learning initiative.   You can follow the hashtag #121wrdsb on twitter to see a documentation of our learning throughout the board.

For the past couple years as September looms, I find myself awake in the middle of the night thinking about school and designing course structures. But there is always one night, that rather than get up and do some work, I watch the MTV Video Music Awards (VMA)  and live performance.  It started a couple years ago when my Twitter feed started jumping to references of Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus. And this year, when a former student tweeted her vote, I realized it was time to watch.

In the next couple posts, I want to explain why I think its important for me to watch these awards to become an informed educator.  I also want to make a call out to parents to be aware of these awards and discuss the complexity of how to take apart the images in these awards.

or fragile the With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.


This next section comes right after Wordsworth mentions wreaths of smoke that come up from amongst the trees.  So it it is the wreaths of smoke he is comparing to the "uncertain notice, as might seem vagrant dwellers" or "of hermit's.  But because of the older style of English I am unsure of whether the uncertain notice is that of the vagrant dweller and the hermit to the intruder who found them or to the person who has stumbled upon them.  Or maybe it is both?  What is interesting is that Wordsworth is not directly describing that meeting but using it to describe the wreaths of smoke. But such a specific description of the wreaths of smoke expands the description of the landscape and in a sideways way, populates the poem with secondary characters - the vagrants and the hermit. I find this interesting as a literary tool or trick.  That I'm might make a comparison to one thing that helps describe something specific but also further expands the meaning or resonances of the text. Is there a name for that trick?

Teaching is changing me.  

For the last three years, I have been "teaching" Civics as part of the Futures Forum project.  I put teaching in quotations because at the same time as teaching, I have been learning.  In fact, my learning has changed the way that I look at my life and my role as a citizen in a democratic nation.

That's a big change.

I give most of the credit to using Regan Ross's brilliant Civic Mirror program that I use within my classroom.  A blended online and face to face role playing simulation, his program allows students to turn their "classroom into a country" and experience the process of making democratic decisions.  What makes Ross's game fascinating is that each student receives a Hidden Agenda that contain their ideological or economic standpoint.  These Hidden Agendas -- Conservative, Liberal, Humanitarian, Capitalist, Socialist, Environmentalist, etc -- force students to see and debate issues from different standpoints.

                                                   Once again I see             
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines             
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,             
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke             
sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

In these lines, I find Wordsworth describing the rural England I imagined in my youth when I was growing up on a dairy farm in southwestern Ontario: wild hedge rows, green pastures, cottages with smoke rising from their chimneys. 

When I was young, like maybe twelve or thirteen, I would try to imagine what England looked like.  More specifically, the rural England of Jane Eyre and Wurthering Heights -- two books that I read during a summer library club. Two books I had no real understanding of what was going on and was shocked by their content when I reread them in university.  But there was something about the description of the landscape in the books that seemed so distant to my own existence.  I lived on a modern dairy farm and would often walk the property and sometimes, with my mind's eye, I would take the slight slope of the land and imagine it was a vast pasture somewhere in England.  England seemed much more romantic.