Unit 8: One-to-One Initiatives

When looking at one-to-one initiatives, there are many things that come to my mind.  First and foremost, the Eureka School District has been a one-to-one school for more than a decade and I could not picture us going back.  In fact, I look at a school like Herreid where my parents taught for over 30 years and they are not one-to-one.  This actually surprises me, and makes me feel very thankful for being in a district that understands the importance of technology in our instruction. 

There are many benefits of being a one-to-one school.  One of them is that the students have the computer at their fingertips at any point work on anything they need to.  Another would be that it could be a selling point for a family to choose a district that is one-to-one compared to a district that is not.  However, my thoughts are that the most important benefit of being a one-to-one school is the ability to prepare our students for life after school.  With everything being so technology driven, it is imperative that we are teaching our students the proper skills so they can succeed in life.  Coming from a former math teacher, learning the quadratic formula is not as important as it used to be because we could all go to desmos.com and find the answers in approximately five seconds.  We need to teach them how to utilize the technology and the proper skills of desmos more than the handwritten way.  This is just an example in math.  Everything today, we need to make sure we are teaching technological skills so students are prepared for life after school.

Just as the fact that there are many benefits, there are also barriers.  A couple of barriers include the cost of the initiative along with the amount of time and energy that is put into a project like this.  However, the biggest barrier that I have observed is the teachers that do not want to change their teaching style.  They want to continue to teach with methods from the 1960s when there was not any technology and just books and paper.  Don't get me wrong, I feel like a lot can be learned using this style from time to time, but we need to make sure the teachers are changing their teaching style to benefit the kids for what it out there after school.  I have a couple of teachers who just do not want to do anything related to technology or the computer and are not willing to implement anything we do in professional development.  They do not see the value.  This might not be the proper thing to say, but unfortunately they are the teachers that have been here for 20 years and are a stalwart in the community so this first year superintendent cannot do anything to get rid of them.  It is a very difficult barrier that I am working on trying to overcome.  I figure if I keep inundating them with professional developments and tell them they have to do it, eventually they will.

I feel like I have answered how a classroom changes when a school is one-to-one.  The computer can easily become the source of the entire curriculum.  Books are not needed like they used to be.  In fact, I know a lot of teachers that create their entire curriculum compared to just going to buying books anymore.  

Being a school that is one-to-one I do not have to worry about a board member telling me we need to become a one-to-one school, however, if a board member told me that we need to cut costs and are cutting there, I would try and explain to them the importance of it.  From what I have learned, if the board and the superintendent disagree at the foundation of their education philosophy, it is probably not going to end well, I would probably start searching for a new job if we took away our one-to-one program.