The School at a Glance:

* Springbank Community High School is one of seven high schools in the Rocky View Schools, located in the areas west, north and east of the City of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

* Rocky View Schools is the fifth-largest school board in Alberta, employing more than 1000 teaching and 700 support staff and serving over 17,000 public school students K-12.

* Springbank Community High School has 753 students and 54 staff members (36 of them teachers).

* The school measures its success through a variety of student achievement indicators, including classroom-based assessments, satisfaction levels, scholarships, and completion rates. On all of these measures, scores are impressive, with a very low dropout rate and a large number of students going on to post-secondary education.

* As of September 2010, all students have been encouraged to bring their own laptops to school each day.

* The school’s wireless network has been upgraded to support 800+ simultaneous users.

* Laptops can be Macintosh or PCs that meet recommended requirements.

* Loaner laptops can be signed out one week at a time.

* Discounts are available to families from Mac and PC vendors.

* The Rocky View (district) web site.

* The Springbank Community High School web site, including

— The year one evaluation

— Minimum standards for laptops

— A white paper from the Partnership for 21st Century skills

— FAQ about the program

The mission of Springbank Community High School (SCHS), located in the Rocky View Schools in Alberta, Canada, is to prepare students to:

• Demonstrate leadership in civic, social and environmental concerns;
• Balance academic, athletic and creative endeavours;
• Demonstrate a commitment to life-long learning;
• Exhibit creative and critical thinking;
• Adapt to a continually changing information and media literate world;
• Become respectful and responsible adults;
• Be prepared for post-secondary endeavors.

As part of this mission, the school strives to engage students in: critically analyzing information; creating new knowledge; communicating what they have learned; and choosing tools that are appropriate for their task.

School leaders at SCHS believe strongly that technology has a crucial role to play in supporting these goals – which is why they are committed to a new ubiquitous computing program, built around student-owned technology. Now about to begin its second year, the school’s One-to-One program involves students bringing their own laptop computers to school on a daily basis. A loaner program is available for students who can’t purchase a computer or who need to borrow one while theirs is unavailable for repair or some other reason.

Leadership and Vision

As with any major initiative, effective leadership and planning are crucial to the success of Springbank’s new program. Before launching One-to-One in September, 2010, district and school leaders laid the groundwork with extensive planning aimed at exploring various facets of 21st century learning and teaching. As principal Leslie Collings put it in the Springbank Community High School newsletter at the start of the 2010-2011 school year, “All departments have spent a considerable amount of time and professional learning setting goals for purposeful integration of technology.”

As part of the preparation process, school leaders and faculty members examined research from a variety of sources, including the Partnership for 21st Century Schools, which describes 21st century learning environments as having five pillars: flexibility of time, flexibility of design, tools for learning, communities for learning, and policy for learning. Central to the concept of 21st century “tools for learning” is ubiquitous access to technology.

Funding and Infrastructure

Shifting the cost of equipment purchases to families, many of whom already owned laptops their high schoolers could use, freed the district to focus on funding the wireless infrastructure – and the loaner computers for those students who needed them. In the months leading up to the launch, two IT specialists, aided by others from Rocky View Schools, spent time on the creation of a wireless school network robust enough to support 800+ users at once. As the program was rolled out to the students, the specialists visited every class to help individuals connect to the network.

Families were given considerable leeway regarding which laptop to purchase as long as they conformed to the following minimum requirements:

• For Apple computers: Any Intel-based Mac laptop meets the minimum requirements for Springbank.

• For PCs: a Pentium 4 processor, 160 GB Hard Drive, 2GB RAM, wireless “g” or “n” capability (the “n” card has proven to be a better wireless device) and anti-virus software.

• Productivity Software: Every laptop must have a basic productivity suite that includes word processing, presentations and spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Office, Apple iWork (Mac only) or the open source Open Office software. PCs must also have a program for creating PDF documents.

• Multimedia (suggested, but not required): Tools for multimedia creation, such as iLife for the Mac, are recommended.

School leaders caution, however, that “as computing devices evolve, that minimum standard will change.”  The school web site also mentions that, “if specialized functions are required for a specific course, such as video editing and storage, a current student-owned computer may not be adequate. In such cases, the school will have available computers for these specific purposes.”

Mac and PC vendors offer special pricing to all grades through the school’s website portal and special informational meetings for families. Principal Collings reports that there have been no major technical problems in implementing a multiple-platform solution. With  the PCs, she says, several steps are involved in configuring the laptops to work with the school’s backbone network but, once this is done, things have fallen into place nicely.

In the coming year, Springbank plans to improve the student gathering area and library (now known as the Learning Commons) to offer more power outlets and give students a better place to work together. Loaners will continue to be available, although a majority of families have been able to provide computers for their children and the number of loaners needed in year one was quite small. After initially planning to have the loaners signed out on a daily basis, the school decided to allow students to sign out the laptops for one week at a time.

Professional Development and Support

With support staff available to help with technical problems, professional development for teachers in the One-to-one program has focused largely on how to use the Moodle learning management system to oversee student learning. Google Docs have also been used by teachers for collaboration.  A committee was established to oversee professional learning opportunities for parents.

In addition to the IT person on staff at SCHS, and the additional support resources offered by the district as needed, the school identifies students to serve as laptop mentors. These mentors offer technical assistance during lunch, breaks, and after school to peers who have questions about their computers.

Results

Springbank Community High School’s goals with the One-to-One program are to improve student’s academic performance, increase student motivation, increase competency, and continually improve the utilization of technology. To determine progress towards these goals, the school has implemented an evaluation process involving both quantitative and qualitative measures. The ongoing evaluation is based on a number of data points including: graduation rates, exam and achievement test results, surveys, and focus groups.

An extensive survey of students, teachers and parents, conducted towards the end of year one, showed a range of opinions regarding the program. Students expressed frustration with web filters that interfered with their ability to conduct research as well as with inconsistent implementation by teachers, some of whom were still quite hesitant to use the technology in class. Overall, however, while the students recognized the inherent difficulties with the launch of one-to-one, they were enthusiastic about the benefits – as were the majority of parents and teachers

According to Collings, the data from student surveys show that the students are engaged. “Technology can be a great motivator,” she says, “although initially we found that some students were distracted.  We knew that would be the case going into the project and, from data from [another school district], we also knew that it would get better as they understood how and when to use the technology.  That’s what happened in semester 2 as the students were learning how to handle the technology and teachers got better at working with the technology as a teaching tool.”

The success of the program will also be judged in terms of the school’s progress in enhancing its future challenges, as determined in the school’s annual report: 

• Enhancing the safe and caring atmosphere of the school.
• Improving opportunities for stakeholder decision making.
• Enhancing access to support for technology.
• Enhancing programming for students at risk.
• Ensuring professional learning for staff are focused on key improvement areas under consideration.

Collings has three tips for schools considering moving to one-to-one implementations that involve student-owned (“BYO”) technology:

#1:  Make sure you have the infrastructure before you go to this kind of environment.  Without the proper infrastructure, a one-to-one environment is a huge headache!! 

#2:  On-going professional learning should be focused on one or two things and should be connected to improving teaching and learning with the technology as a tool.

#3:  Be patient with the students, as well as with the teachers.  Moving to this kind of environment is a shift in thinking for everybody.