Technology in a small school

Again, this is me, cutting it as close to the last minute as possible with this blog posting.  I am actually kicking myself over this procrastination as I was assigned a project over the winter holiday that would have been much easier if I had reached out to the Cohort 21 community and asked for support. This type of community resource sharing is so new to me that I can’t really figure out what my hesitation is in asking for help. I feel like I am going to have to make a personal action plan for myself: to get over this fear of being overwhelmed with the amount of commitment it takes to stay afloat in the tweets/blogs/resources coming my way. Honestly Justin and Garth, I don’t know how you do it, you must need far less sleep than this tired kindergarten teacher, but I digress.

The project I was speaking about somehow fell into my lap due to a combination of the size of our school and its current administrative structure. Our small (K-6) school has recently acquired a class set of ipads, however our main IT guy has just recently been hired and is still in his training phase. Since I have started at this school, it has been a long running joke that I am the “backup IT girl” as I am one of the youngest on staff and most comfortable using most software applications on our current laptops (Word, iphoto, Smart Notebook). The reality is, I typically use the magic of google and youtube to fix most problems that people bring to me, however it never fails to impress.

As a member of our PD committee, we were responsible for running a PD session on the first day back from the holiday. A major interest that surfaced within the staff was some PD on using our new ipads in the classroom. I offered to run a short session and even agreed to look into some appropriate apps for the classroom over the holiday in preparation. ***This is the point where Laura should have tweeted/blogged/asked questions to members of the cohort about their own school’s ipad uses (but we now must remember how stubborn this Laura girl is when it comes to asking for help)**

So what did I do instead? I spent hours and hours on google typing “best ipad apps for classrooms/apps for education/ipads K-6”, you name it. Not surprisingly, you can end up with a lot of web pages to choose from when doing this, however the amount of unhelpful resources you can also find is overwhelming. I ended up creating a spreadsheet of the different apps that seemed to be strongly recommended, categorized them into subject matter, and then checked out their reviews on the app store. From all of these apps, I ended up downloading about 100 of them to test out for its usefulness in our particular school and wound up with 40 that I could actually see teachers using in the elementary grades.

My main criteria for selecting apps were:

1. Does that app require a sign in or can anyone pick up the ipad and start playing immediately. A big issue I encountered was that many of the most engaging and appropriate apps I found, were designed for only one child to be engaging with it, most likely at home. For example, many  of the math apps had levels that progressed you to new and different parts of the game, but once you completed a level, it was difficult to return to that area of the game. (This was particularly important for our school as we have not yet addressed the issue of having multiple users on the same ipad, and our server was causing issues with students saving any work or progress) * I will speak more about this later.

2. Cost of the app

3. Is the app mainly for entertainment value or does it enhance teaching

In showing these new apps to the staff at our PD session, there was a lot of excitement buzzing around, however we now face an incredibly big issue as a school:

How we are going to manage these ipads without a clear plan in place, without experienced IT  support, and without previous experiences using cloud based programs for storing student data?  There are hundreds of other smaller questions we face as well, but for now, I am going to start here.

I would love advice on what your school is using, and what works/doesn’t work and hopefully I can get over my fear of asking for support fast enough to make a change in my particular school.