Out of that experience, it became clear that 1:1 computing is often quite misunderstood. It’s not about teaching technology but about keeping students engaged. Disengagement is probably the biggest problem facing K12 education in the US, and nobody’s talking about it. We have a huge drop-out problem in this country. Dropping-out is the last phase of disengagement. You can’t fix the drop-out problem in high school. You have to keep every student engaged in learning starting in kindergarten and maintain a high level of engagement through graduation from high school. The disengagement problem starts early.

Learning is a lot like bricklaying, you build on what you’ve already done. You learn to recognize the alphabet, then you learn how to make words out of letters, and then sentences, then paragraphs, and if you’re really good at it, you eventually start writing best selling novels and epic poems. The same thing for other subjects, first you learn to count, then….

…OK, so you see what I mean. The critical point to grasp is that learning takes place along a continuum, but at any given moment, for any given subject, it only happens at the boundary between what you know, and what you don’t know. For each individual, that “learning point” on the continuum is at least slightly different from anyone else’s learning point.

The difficulty with our current system is that we put disparate collections of students into a single class, and then ask our teachers to be the “sage on the stage” and convey information in the form of a lecture. No matter how skilled the teacher, that lecture is targeted at a single point on the continuum.

The best a teacher can do is target that lecture at the point on the continuum that is closest to where largest number of students are at the moment. Inevitably, many students are either considerably behind, or ahead of, that point. Students who are behind the teaching point get frustrated because they do not have the framework of prior knowledge to support what they’re trying to learn. In the worst case, they disengage and simply stop learning. At the other end of the spectrum, students who have long since mastered the material in the lesson get bored and disengage.

So how does a well implemented 1:1 computing program solve the engagement problem? Quite simply, it keeps each student working at his or her learning point. The dynamics of a 1:1 classroom are entirely different from those of a traditional classroom. The teacher assigns lessons individually to each student. Those assignments are targeted to keep the student engaged by teaching at that student’s learning point on the continuum. Freed from being the primary content delivery medium, the teacher is now able to do what teachers so best, work with students on a one-to-one basis helping them over the stumbling blocks that inhibit learning. In some cases it may be simple review of a lesson, and in others it may be selecting additional curriculum content for a particular student to better match that student’s inherent learning style.

So can we solve the dropout problem by simply providing a network-connected device for every student? Probably not. Just dropping hundreds or even thousands of computers on the loading dock at a school district won’t affect educational outcomes. Even well-intentioned 1:1 programs sometimes fail. The biggest reasons for those failures are

• Failure to provide adequate professional development for teachers before putting computers in the classroom. Teachers who don’t have adequate training won’t use technology in their classrooms. They will continue to teach as they have for decades, and students will continue to disengage.
• Failure to budget for support. 1:1 programs are often funded through grants. It’s possible to write a grant and get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy computers for the classroom. Finding a funding mechanism to provide $10 or $20 per month on an ongoing basis is a much harder problem for a K12 district. To have a functioning 1:1 program in a classroom, the teacher needs to have all of the student machines running all of the time. Support response times measured in minutes are necessary. This can be achieved by maintaining an adequate spares inventory, but this is seldom done.

Even good 1:1 programs could be considerably improved by an integrated learning management system with capabilities beyond today’s LMS systems. What’s needed is an improvement in the feedback loops between assessment systems and the systems that select curriculum content for presentation to the student. A true “educational ecosystem controller”, would gather information about where the student is on the learning continuum for each subject, and provide a steady stream of appropriate content to keep the student engaged and learning.

This ecosystem controller would communicate with the other data systems already in place in the district and provide true integration of the entire learning process. So called “Business Intelligence Systems” serve similar functions in some corporations, and those platforms could be a logical starting point for a true educational ecosystem controller. Anyone interested in such an undertaking, please contact me.