1:1 iPads in Elementary Part 1 – An Unexpected Journey

Today I handed out 100 iPads to teachers that will shortly be in the hands of students.

This is huge, and so my job has just become bigger and more interesting than I entirely anticipated when I became an elementary school Instructional Technology Specialist.

In the hopes of making something of this journey, I’m going to do my best to document as much of what I’m doing this year as I possibly can.

Before I get there, though, I’d like to take a look back at how I made it from fresh on the job to running a 1:1 pilot for my district.

A whole year and a half ago, I wrote up a five part blog series about how I got to use a set of 20 iPads for two weeks. It was a phenomenal two weeks. I made this video with the footage I shot:

Needless to say, it made me hungry for more. Fortunately, the documentation I did helped convince the Powers That Be that giving us in the elementary school a bunch of iPads would be a good idea.

The following school year, every student in the high school got an iPad. I got 60. Hey, it was a start.

I took plenty of time last year to try lots of different things with the iPads in all grade levels, from centers at the youngest grades to whole-class creation projects with students at a variety of grade levels. I documented a lot of the creation stuff we did in my ePub collection.

Getting a good feeling about the way things were headed, and potential increases in device numbers, I started talking with my principal and some of my staff about the possibility of going 1:1. Hearing positive things, I then worked with my librarian, Laura D’Elia, to put together a proposal for launching a pilot 1:1 program. Here it is, minus a few details like specific device numbers:

I was pretty excited to find out the proposal was accepted, with us going 1:1 this year with all of our fourth and fifth grade classes.

This summer, Laura and I then ran a couple of days of professional development for those teachers to start preparing them for the year ahead.

That brings us up until last week, when I received the iPads. Next post in the series I’ll document the prep work I did to get the devices ready for he students and talk about how we’re managing them this year. Spoiler alert: Configurator made it way easier than when I did it last year.