THE
GREAT MAINE LAPTOP EXPERIMENT
Chris
Toy, Principal
Freeport (ME) Middle School
Maine is undertaking a bold experiment. The goal: Put Apple iBooks in the hands of every middle schooler across the state. In September, the first wave of 17,000 laptops were distributed to 7th-graders at 239 schools, including Freeport Middle School, where MiddleWeb diarist Chris Toy is principal. A strong proponent of Maine's Learning Technology Initiative, Chris will chronicle the laptop adventure for us.
Laptop
Diary #13
A Technology Potlatch
About once a month our students are released from school two hours early so teachers can have some time for professional development. This year I've tried to use all the available staff development resources to prepare and support the teachers involved in the MLTI.
While thinking about Tuesday's agenda, I continued to mull over the fact that even though only the 7th grade and unified arts teachers are using the laptops with students this year, next year the 8th grade teachers will be working with students who already have a full year of learning in a technology rich environment.
In addition, next year all the teachers in grades 6-8 will have their own wireless laptops and access to the Internet, as well as the tools and software available in the building. The 7th grade teachers and the unified arts teachers already have a full semester of experience under their belts.
It occurred to me that perhaps the early release day could be a time for half the staff to simply share some of the things they've learned with the other half. While thinking about this, the idea of getting together and sharing gifts as a group came to mind.
I thought of the concept of a potlatch. Potlatch comes from the Northwest Native American Tribes. A Potlatch is an event where the host bestows lavish gifts to the whole village, sometimes to excess. The word literally means the giving of gifts. So I thought we would have a technology potlatch for ourselves.
Gifts of experience
I emailed the staff with the idea and asked people what they thought they could contribute to the potlatch and what they might want to receive from others. There were some great replies from all subject areas, grade levels, and even some offers to share hobbies such as digital photography, shopping, and travel.
One of the 7th grade social studies teachers offered some digital movies of presentations his students made in class during an ancient history unit. About a dozen teachers watched, asked questions, and talked about how they might integrate iMovies in their curriculum. A language arts teacher and a special education teacher shared a multimedia slide show they made about Pakistan to introduce students to the book Shabanu. The slideshow included music, images relating to the natural environment, marketplaces, cities, men, women, and children, religion, and animals. Most interesting to me was the fact that all of the images were recent, although it seemed they could have been taken a long long time ago. The teachers used this timeless aspect in their discussions with students about the persistence of traditions and practices. Shabanu may seem to take place in the distant past but is actually a contemporary story about a young Pakistani girl. One of the math teachers showed us how he has used the laptops to work with students on advanced graphing concepts. Using a program called Chipmunk Basic, he used equations that allowed students to plug in values. The program would then graph the results with spectacular results of bright spiraling colors and geometric shapes. I don't understand the mathematics myself, but I could clearly see that it mattered what values were plugged into the equations. For those who are not mathematically challenged the images were generated from equations called Mandelbrot sets and Julia Sets. Our tech ed. teacher worked with a group of teachers who wanted to learn how to insert color images into word processing documents. For nearly 2 hours a half dozen teachers were engaged in taking pictures with digital cameras, saving them onto their hard discs, editing them, and pasting them into documents. They also learned how to search for images on the Internet, save them, and use them in documents. One very small, but interesting, piece of information was shared by a science teacher. She showed us a website that allowed us to identify the flight number of an airplane and visually track its progress online. We actually logged on to the site and followed the last few minutes of a flight from Chicago to Orlando. Of course we were all jealous when the flight landed in Florida, since it was 5 degrees with a -20 degree wind-chill that day in Maine. The Technology Potlatch was a good way to validate the hard work and progress made by the teachers. It also helped those who may be worried about whether they will be able to adapt to a technology rich teaching and learning environment.
