Year four

Title sequence: 4Up. Four years of laptops. Year four.

Gemma: I couldn’t imagine high school without my laptop because when I got my laptop in Year 9 I was going into my electives and my senior years, everything became a lot more interactive which for me was a lot easier to connect with like what I’m learning in class kind of thing.

Victoria: High school would have been a lot more difficult without the laptops. Simply just having it there, having something that you can carry around with you that’s not very heavy, you can jot down all your ideas, have all your information, do your assignments on and it just makes things a lot easier when it comes to assignments and schoolwork. And I think I really do rely on my laptop for assignments and that kind of stuff and just having something there of your own that like you can, take pride in I guess and just having it all, all in like one little device, I suppose that really has helped my high schooling.

Voice Over: Over the last four years we’ve followed two schools through their laptop journey. Now they reflect on the story that was the Digital Education Revolution, a program that has seen over 270,000 laptops rolled out to schools across Australia.

Geoff (Principal): The history of the laptop and the DER program in Bathurst is an interesting one. We originally put our hands up to be a pilot school. I think that was a great decision by the whole school community. Then we became part of the regular roll out. I’d say when we started that we were ahead of the game but no one really knew what the game was and people quickly caught up with us.

Stacey (Principal): The DER program has meant that all students have had equitable access to technology. So, it’s done a couple of things. The first thing is that it’s really allowed teachers to embed elearning pedagogies into their teaching and learning because there hasn’t been the issue of some students having access and others not. It’s also required teachers to embrace that technology because once students start learning in that way in one class there’s an expectation coming from the students that other teachers will be using that technology. It’s really kind of opened up the classroom.

Teacher: OK guys what I want you to do is open up your One Note that we started last lesson..

Voice Over: For teachers it’s changed the way they consider pedagogy, while for students it’s changed the way they think about study all together.

Ruby: I think just the laptop, the whole laptop in itself with all the different, diverse programs on it means that you have the choice to decide what you want to use and what you want to use it for and the ability to work it out yourself if you want to use it. But I think for me the laptop as a whole has just been a really great experience.

Oki: The laptops have really changed how I’ve been doing my schoolwork. In primary school I was basically holed up in the library all the time that I could get, I had to borrow a computer to print off my work; I had to find books for research. Yeah, the laptops have basically allowed me to do the same thing but with a bit more ease.

Tyler: The laptops in later years you know you’ve developed organisation skills; everything’s compacted onto you know one sort of thing. Office work, like sending emails, getting replies, stuff like that. Also learning new technology, you know, learning a new program just tests you know how well you can learn things and you know later in life when you’re in a job you want to be a quick learner, you want to be on top of things so learning new programs is sort of like interrelated with going to university, picking things up.

Voice Over: A technological change such as this is no small feat and one that requires commitment and vision. How did schools embrace this challenge?

Geoff (Principal): We’ve had to keep on learning and keep on changing. As the laptops have rolled out it’s become embedded into the culture. So, now when you’ve got everyone from 9 through to 12 with laptops, it’s a very different picture that you’ve got four years down the track. What’s been interesting over the four years has been to watch individual teacher innovation occur. And so while we tried at the start to have a very, I guess, whole-school centred way that we did that, especially in terms of exchanging information, what’s happened is much better than that; that teacher innovation has led to teachers to look for opportunities.

Stacey (Principal):

The focus for us has really been around how technology can engage students and challenge students and enhance the quality of their learning. So, we’ve talked a lot for instance about Edmodo not being an online blackboard. You know the idea of just posting students’ work doesn’t actually change the pedagogy. It doesn’t change the type of learning that students are engaged in. So, we’ve had real discussions around how particular software applications can enhance the quality of teaching and can really move students forward. So the focus has really been around what does technology allow us to do that we weren’t able to do before?

Damien (Maths Teacher): And anything that we could put into real world, such as dividends and shares, we can graph as well. OK. Anything that is an equation, we can graph.

Voice Over: With the teething problems out of the way, teachers now focus on getting the most out of the laptops.

Damien (Maths Teacher): I think we’ve seen a lot more experimental work being done by teachers and a lot more delivery of teaching through use of more interactive materials; through the use of all the software that’s available we get to increase the amount of different ways that students can learn. We can see that students are more confident with using their laptops. I know that we have a lot more staff engaging with the professional learning that involves technology.

Gemma: Go!

Ashleigh (Performing Arts Teacher): I find now more teachers are looking at the ICT as a tool and using it effectively. So, there’s no point in including ICT if you’re not going to use it effectively, if it’s not going to change learning outcomes for students. There is no point; you might as well just go back to the way you used to do it. And I find that our students really like that, they like the fact that they can reflect on their work easily. They like the fact that it’s instant. That’s the way that they learn. So, these kids who get out their phones and take a picture of the work, they put it in, they read it, they extract from it. This is their learning age and I think we need to adapt to it and I think the laptops has really helped in that process. …Who’s the antagonist in this?

Gemma: OK. So in this section they’re working together as a couple. I’ve used like a remix tango song…

Damien (Maths Teacher): OK, we’ll come back to that later …

Voice Over: But for some it’s meant using tools they wouldn’t have considered before.

Damien (Maths Teacher): I haven’t really used a lot of video previously and haven’t thought it very handy or useful within a maths setting. But now that they’re portable and easy that they can carry it around we often incorporate that when we’re doing outside work or field work such as the trigonometry experiments or similar triangles experiments. It’s just a nice way for the students to then put their work together with images of them working out the problems. So, taking photos of constructing a right angle triangle and then working out the angles and the length of the hypotenuse and they can then put those images in their notes and hopefully, it’s a bit more of a trigger when they come to revise for their exams. And I think it has worked before that they seem to engage a bit more when they know it’s them in the photo and it’s their work that they’re researching rather than a textbook and a random picture of someone they’ve never seen.

Voice Over: Students have also been part of the discovery and it’s paved the way for new ways of relating to their teachers.

Tylar: We teach teachers as much as they teach us. For example in English if we’re doing something and like you know the teacher can’t really get something onto the SMART Board or she’s having difficulties like that, there’s always us younger ones who have interpreted technology so well that we can pick up on what she’s doing wrong and teach her in the way of how to do it right. You’ve got all these programs that teachers can teach us but then we can go off and teach other people. It’s like a cycle process.

Sumana (Head Teacher, English): How students have actually facilitated my own learning has been to really show me the skills that they know and that they can bring into the classroom experience itself, and to foster the learning with their peers because, you know, I absolutely acknowledge that they are experts in so many other ways. And for them to have that opportunity to give and to share back in the classroom is, I think, one of the most empowering experiences that a student can have.

Victoria: Over the last four years I feel like I definitely have improved my relationships with my teachers. That emailing, I guess, has definitely created a bond and I just think that it has definitely helped the relationship between the teachers and students. Relating to them has become easier and working with each other to work out all the new software and stuff has helped create, I guess, like a closeness between the teachers and students and it has meant that we’re kind of equal because we learn, and they learn. We’re constantly learning new things together, not just them teaching us things, we’re teaching them things when it comes to the laptops as well.

Voice Over: And the discovery doesn’t just happen in the classroom.

Geoff (Principal): I can remember really early in the piece we were talking about a piece of technology which I thought was just absolutely innovative and it was the ability of OneNote to share information with other computers. So, I’d been fiddling around and I’d found out ‘Oh, OneNote can share.’ And what a great way of sharing your information. So, if I’ve got a page of OneNote I can then get other students to critique it; all that sort of thing. So, I went into a class to talk to some students about it and they said ‘Sir, we’ve been doing that for months, we already knew.’ I said ‘How did you know?’ And they just found out themselves and they taught the teachers, some of the teachers, so then we had a professional learning afternoon where we actually got the teachers up to speed and they were amazed that students were sharing information with each other and their notes with each other through the OneNote program.

Voice Over: How have the laptops helped teachers consider individual needs of students?

Teacher: Once you’ve submitted it I get a breakdown …

Damien (Maths Teacher): Laptops are very useful tools when it comes to differentiating students’ abilities and preferred way of displaying their learning. And a lot of the assessment that I try and incorporate in my classroom involves options for the students. So, I might give them an assignment that they could either present as a presentation or even as an audio file. They could record straight to their laptop or they might do a video or they might just do your traditional written assignment and hand it in. So, I try and cater for different styles of learning by giving them different ways to show their learning through different assignment end products and the laptops have certainly allowed us to do this.

Sandra (Head Teacher, English): Often it takes away the feeling of being different because instead of having to walk around and say ‘You’re doing this task, but you’re doing a different one’, it’s emailed to them. Nobody need know if a student is having trouble with their literacy that they’re doing a slightly modified task in order to benefit their learning because they’ve got that different mode of delivery. It also means that extending students is something that you can do far more easily because there can be different levels of the task but there can also be different ways of approaching the presentation of a task that involves them demonstrating their higher order skills in the use of technology.

Ashleigh (Performing Arts Teacher): So if you could just watch it and then go and fix what needs to be fixed. It would be great. So, you can press ‘play’ when you’re ready.

Voice Over: Performing Arts teacher Ashleigh has seen the laptops create a common ground for teachers and students.

Ashleigh (Performing Arts Teacher): I think technology has been a really good equaliser. It’s put us all here because we’re learning together and that’s what the real world is like. When you go online and ask someone how to do something the ‘How to’ video can be created by a seventeen year old kid who just happens to know really well how to edit film. And so that sharing that knowledge and understanding that we’re all on the same kind of playing field. And I think building the relationship where the students know that I just want to help them, that’s what I’m all about and I think the technology helps me do that. I think I have grown more as a teacher in these last four years because of the program than I think I would have without it. I think I’d be still reciting the same old stuff, doing the same old thing, wearing the same old hat, playing the same old role. And I don’t think I would have grown.

Voice Over: While for Sumana, it’s the collaboration in her English classes that’s impressed her.

Sumana (Head Teacher, English): When you log on I’d like you to respond and post your own ideas about the words throughout the entire poem that are either related to art or artifice. We still want students to engage in higher order thinking processes. We still want them to work out and try to solve or experiment and play with ideas and solve problems. But the way that they’re using technology to do that now is fostering collaborative work. So I’d like someone to come up here, and the class can help, and all you need to do is to point and drag where you think the actual poetic technique, OK, should go ...

Stacey (Principal): One of the nice things about the DER program has been that teachers have really reflected on their learning and have sought new ways to engage and challenge students. And I think that change in culture will continue. I think there hasn’t been as big a challenge for educators as there has been for them to embrace technology with so many students in such a short period of time. And so I think that culture of embracing change and looking for new ways to engage and challenge learners absolutely will continue.

Sumana (Head Teacher, English) Which words don’t you understand?

Voice Over: How do things look different four years down the track?

Sumana (Head Teacher, English): My teaching has changed over the last four years through the program to become one that I believe is much more dynamic and enriching and absolutely much more fulfilling for myself and the students. And the reason for that I suppose is because by using the DER laptops and all the various programs and tools of the technology it’s really allowed us to engage in a much different way in the classroom. And so the learning process and the learning experiences are ones that I find again much more fulfilling because I can see the results of the students’ improvement in their learning and engagement in the learning process.

Stacey (Principal): When you walk from classroom to classroom what learning looks like is quite different. So, if I’m in classrooms I can see students who were all doing different but comparable things in the classroom on their laptops. I’ve seen students working in groups with their laptops collaborating, sending information to each other, working on shared documents where you know as one student contributes it’s coming up on everyone else’s screen but that kind of nature of collaboration has been authentic.

Sandra (Head Teacher, English): In the last four years I think that I’ve managed to get a lot more variety into my teaching. I mean we always had a wide variety of tools available to us in the classroom but the arrival of the DER laptops and the technology that goes with them, the access in the classroom to the web has just added to that variety of tools and allowed us to really look at how we can cater for different learning styles, cater for individual needs and really look at broadening the styles of learning that we deliver.

Voice Over: How has access to the internet changed the learning landscape?

Ruby: Well, with the internet I mean anything is possible really. For things like schoolwork you’ve got some great kind of forum sites that you can go onto and you know, talk about your work to, which is great because they’re students just like you except they might be from Portugal or Brazil or something who know exactly what you’re going through. It just gives you such a wide variety of places that you can go to for help. But the whole kind of international community on the web and also teachers, you know, last minute things. You don’t have to go through an awkward conversation of getting their phone number and calling them up at midnight. You can just email them and they’ll send back what you need to do. So, that’s really great.

Ashleigh (Performing Arts Teacher): The 21st Century skills that I’m trying to teach my students are problem solving skills, project-based solving skills, working with people because the internet, you’re not an island, you may feel like one because there’s no one around you physically, but in terms of opening up a social world, the fact that you can have a conversation with someone who’s sitting over in America or sitting in Europe via the technology means that there is a massive collaborative process there. Information is what it is, it’s ever changing. And if I can teach my students to take from it what they will and form their own opinions and then apply that, I think that’s what I’d like my students to be able to do.

Sumana (Head Teacher, English): Our students are really engaging in sustained processes of self-assessment and peer evaluation. They’re having those conversations online, they’re refining their work through various digital mediums and they’re producing amazing work as a result of it.

Nethanel: I’m glad that we did get the laptop because I think we have a better opportunity than say past people have in being able to get a better mark. It may not be showing yet but hopefully it will; that this extra technology is helping us get where we want to go.

Voice Over: For principals it’s inspired a new way of sharing.

Geoff (Principal): In the school it’s also about having distributed leadership, not just leadership focused on me. So, that leadership can come from the teacher-mentor, it can come from the head teachers, it can come from the deputies, it can come from a teacher in Art who sees something really creative and has the opportunity to share it with everybody. So, it’s about the school embracing those opportunities and then it’s my role to make sure that if we do recognise an opportunity, then we pursue it as a whole staff. But I think that distributed leadership is crucial.

Stacey (Principal): I guess the challenge for principals is really keeping the eye on the main game, that really strong focus on leading learning and that instructional leadership, and not being swamped by the kind of administration and the other whole-school roles that, you know, take up so much of our time.

Voice Over: One thing’s for sure – there’s no turning back.

Stacey (Principal): Our long-term vision is that we haven’t got students in classrooms who are doing the same thing at the same time, that we would have these dynamic learning spaces where students are doing, you know, one particular type of activity in one corner of the room, it might be a little technology hub, and then other students might be working on something more individual. It’s not about working just within the confines of that classroom for the fifty minutes or an hour where students are in that particular period or subject. It’s a kind of continuum so students are continuing to learn probably online, outside of the time that they’ve got face-to-face time with their teacher and their teacher’s supporting them in that learning.

Sumana (Head Teacher, English): I think the foundations that have been laid are very much based on our, of course, core syllabus outcomes, and because we’re also shifting into the national curriculum mode, there again, there is a core emphasis on ICT and developing those skills and developing the understanding of ICT in English. But I think the other foundations, I think the core foundation is our awareness and our acceptance that we are very much in the 21st Century and we are not going to be able to escape. Whether the laptops continue being given to our Year 9 students or not, the world is, for our students, going to be requiring them to be adept at, confident in and able to use creatively, technology.

Voice Over: Schools now consider where to from here?

Geoff (Principal): We’ve got to look at how the community and how the school can combine together for different sorts of devices to be used in a classroom. And that might be a lot of students have their own devices; now we’re seeing iPhones, we’re seeing tablets becoming very widespread in the student population. The other aspect of that which was always a problem before the laptops was the equity aspect and that’s where there has to be investment from the community. There’s no way across the whole school we’ll be able to do what DER has done, so we’ll have to be very clever, very strategic in the way forward. But, I think if we use as the bottom line that teachers need access to that technology flexibly so that they can respond to the learning needs of their students, then that’s, I guess, the mantra that we’re going to live by in the future and we’ll see where we go with that.

Stacey (Principal): The DER program hasn’t been without its challenges but I think as a school we’ve worked really hard to overcome them and beyond a shadow of a doubt it’s been a really amazing change for us in terms of the way that students learn. And we’ve learnt a lot about how we can use technology more effectively to engage and challenge our students. And we’ll continue to do that whether we have devices or not. We hope that we do but if we don’t then we’re going to come up with work arounds because the shift has been significant and it’s been positive and we want to maintain that kind of movement in that direction.

Voice Over: While students reflect on their learning with the laptops.

Gemma: Laptops have made everything more interactive and fun so I found that in my senior years it’s easier to engage in my learning so I think it’s made everything that little bit better to go to class or looking forward to class. So, I think in that sense it’s made my education improve.

Jake: Having all the tools in the one place was just easy for me to get on top of all the things that I was organising. Just in general working with the teachers being able to have that one on one with the computers, I did get a lot out of it.

Victoria: I kind of feel that these laptops were like that chapter of my life that’s my high school life. It’s just meant that there’s a whole new range of opportunities and a whole new way of learning when it comes to technology. I definitely think that the laptops have helped when it comes to our learning.

Nethanel: It has definitely made learning more efficient so I can get the best of my potential.

Ruby: I think the last four years of laptops have been about the choice to use whatever you want, whenever you want which is an awesome thing.

Oki: There have been a lot of good experiences, a lot of learning, of growing as a person, making friends. Yeah, I think I’m going to remember it quite nicely.

Tylar: Over the four years with having the laptops my learning patterns have definitely changed, you know, so, just looking at how four years of having such a little laptop has really changed the aspects of later life. It’s just going to grow and everyone’s just going to grow and see what’s going to happen in the future.

Final sequence: Music. Credits.

Thanks to the staff and students of Denison Secondary College, Bathurst High Campus and Campbelltown Performing Arts High School.

Thanks to the family and friends of Nethanel, Ruby, Victoria, Oki, Gemma, Jake and Tylar.

Title music composed by H. Kemp. Performed by H. Kemp and T. Symes from Winmalee High School.

Additional music composed by Rhys D. Webb.

Produced by the NSW Curriculum and Learning Innovation Centre as part of the Digital Education Revolution – NSW.