The Swiss Army Knife - Why Districts Need to Thoughtfully Develop Learning Ecologies in the 1:1 World

The Swiss Army knife was the first guy gadget that I remember. My dad had one. In fact, I think most dads had one. I remember in the late 70's, my dad pulling it out and cutting a rope with it or pulling out a sliver from my had with its tweezers. It had so many useful tools. We tightened screws and opened bottles with it. There seemed always a need to have the knife around. I remember going in stores and looking through the glass cases in awe of the different Swiss Army knives. Over time, my dad purchased a different Swiss Army knife. This one was larger and had even more contraptions inside. It was the early Swiss Army knife version 1.8 or 2.2. I remember getting one for my Bar Mitzvah, but as a 13 year-old kid in the 80's you were never allowed carry a knife so it never became a habit for me and I had the ultimate useful gadget of my generation, the digital watch. It could do splits for me as I swam underwater. Some of my friends even had ones with calculators.

Growing up in the 80's, I never understood why school's loved textbooks. They were big, heavy, and often had too much in it. Becoming a teacher in the 90's, it dawned on me. The textbook was the Swiss Army knife for teachers. If you wanted to teach poetry, "BOOM!" there it was. Need a short story on the Civil War, "SHAZAM!" you had it. What's more, in the 90's textbook companies started getting smarter. Like the ever expanding Swiss Army knife, they added kits of manipulatives, leveled readers, and audio tapes for listening centers. Then the Internet happened and they added web links and evolved into carrying audio CD's. As a teacher, a textbook system was your gadget of gadgets, it had a resource when you had a need. It was a powerful tool that over time has perhaps even become just too much stuff.

So now 1:1 devices are our powerful tools. Whether you use Chromebooks or Netbooks you can welcome your students and teachers to a wonderful world of productivity. They can create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. They can share their work and collaborate on projects together. One can search the Internet for resources and record their data on a spreadsheet. They can even annotate and take notes on the screen. For the same price one can also choose a tablet such as iPad Mini or a Nexus 7 v2 that can accomplish all the tasks of the laptop-like devices and add the value of mobility. One can have reminders that beep in the hallway, use the camera's to record a lab test and screencast a reflective dialogue on it later, have a personal reader for annotation, and keep a practical calendar.

These are all wonderful gadgets, but like me carrying around a Swiss Army Knife now they are a whole lot of tools without a defined purpose. If schools want to make these tools effective, they need to create a Learning Ecology to support the tool. Using self-created websites - whether shared internally via Google Docs or externally on the web, schools need to build a system for teachers and students to apply these tools in areas within and beyond the curriculum. We need to connect the curriculum objectives to possible learning targets, assessment rubrics, usable content resources and supplementary video supports. It is too much to ask students and teachers:"Hey, go learn about recycling. There is a lot of information on the Internet about recycling. Go find it, curate it. Select the important parts. Make a product. Share with us the product. Can we have that on Friday? Great!" Handing teachers and students digital devices is wonderful, but sending them out on walk-about for resources to make it useful is a recipe for disaster. Many districts are holding iPad seminars or Chromebook institutes to help teach teachers with ways to support classroom management and workflow with digital devices. These are wonderful and necessary. However, they are just the start. If we want to seriously integrate these into learning, Curriculum Departments need to openly connect and make available to the teachers, students, and parents clear resources that connect links between curriculum objectives, content, assessment, and digital tools. We must do more than say go look on Khan Academy. Rather we should directly link the items in Khan Academy to the learning we want to occur.

Students and teachers will always search for more ideas than we provide. Twitter and Pinterest seem to be endless sources of ideas, materials, and support for most of our instructional team. These tools are great supplements. As a district it is our obligation to provide core digital resources to make the system go. The starting blocks for our teachers to expand out from. Give them a plant and they will create a magnificent garden.

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