The rest of the week has an intriguing lineup of keynoters and sessions.  We will be presenting some of the Learning Untethered results at a session near the end of the week: Friday at 12:00 noon, Pacific Time – please join us!

The conference is hosted by social networking pioneer, Steve Hargadon, whose Classroom 2.0 social network has been connecting educators for the past 5 years and whose  Future of Education interview series continually brings us  top thought leadership in education.

The conference is part of Connected Educator Month organized by the US Department of Education.  (Our thanks to the Department’s Office of EdTech for the twitter shout-out about our report!!)

Our approach was non-traditional: a collaborative exploration rather than formal research (we call it “guerilla research”).  Our results were counterintuitive: 10-year-olds are not automatically fans of mobile devices, nor do they instinctively know how to navigate all things digital, but the process of exploring with technology led them to unexpected levels of independence, agency, and competence.  Our report is informal: we share the good, the bad, and the ugly of implementing a mobile 1:1 program and we discuss our opinions and insights based on suggestive evidence as well as facts and conclusions that are more rigorous.

We spend a lot of ink communicating the context and “feel” of our experiences – in that way we hope to communicate not only our explicit learnings, but perhaps some of the tacit knowledge that we gained through this experience.  In our results, we focus largely on those things that we found to be surprising or counterintuitive as they catalyzed the greatest learning for us.

We hope that our experiences of this past year will be of some benefit to others who are contemplating mobile 1:1 projects.  Our report can be downloaded here.

Welcome to the new home of Learning Untethered, formerly Learning Un-Limited.

As of this writing, we have completed a full school year of putting Samsung Galaxy Tablets, enabled with 3G mobile data from Kajeet for Education, in the hands of 27 5th-graders and their teacher.   Over the course of the project, the following key themes/questions emerged:

• Are tablet devices, with their small screens and miniscule keyboards good enough to replace laptops for student work when they need to create content such as writing papers, creating presentations, etc?
• Are Android devices a viable alternative to the popular iOS devices for instructional use?
• Does student use of technology at home allow the teacher more face-to-face time at school for richer, more in-depth, or more complex learning activities?
• Are primary school students able to learn to behave as responsible citizens when given extensive Internet access?

We observed intriguing results in all these areas.  Below is an excerpt from the executive summary of our upcoming report describing some of our conclusions, observations, and opinions:

• Surprisingly, the quality of student writing on 7-inch tablets and on netbooks was essentially equivalent.  Student preferences, however, regarding which device to use for creating content varied.  In general, though, students prefer to use laptops for large projects (e.g. content that requires substantial editing) and mobile devices for quick notes (e.g. content that essentially no editing at the time it is created).
• For the purposes of writing, mobile devices share many of the limitations of writing with pencil and paper – it is linear and cumbersome to edit, though fairly straightforward to create.  Although mobile devices are great for capturing pictures, video, voice and even draft writing, laptops with their bigger screens and keyboards and mature software are at and advantage for editing and polishing large projects as well as at combining multiple media.
• Although Android devices have a number of desirable qualities including a lower cost and an open ecosystem for apps, the relative immaturity of the Android ecosystem prevents us from being able to recommend Android devices for school implementations at this time.  There is no guarantee of backward compatibility – that new apps will work on older devices.  This is also becoming true in the iOS ecosystem, though iOS devices have a much larger percentage of devices that currently run on the most recent version of the OS than Android devices do.  Also, since the operating system, the hardware, the vendors, and the communications providers are separate organizations, there is no single organization responsible for the whole system as sold, making it cumbersome for educational institutions to manage successfully on their own.
• Some of the concerns discussed regarding the use of mobile devices for students strike us as red herrings.  In practice, we found no need for device management software as students took ownership of their devices, their learning, and the management of their device images.  We found students became savvy and safe Internet users when exposed to authentic Internet user experiences (though social networking happened only within a secure, teacher-managed platform).  We found students quickly established a culture of responsible use of their devices, which seemed to enhance their learning rather than be distracted by it.  We noticed students becoming confident (and successful) debuggers of hardware and software obstacles, turning first to each other for support and generally finding answers within their classroom community or online.
• We observed an organic shift in educators’ approach to teaching, transitioning from primarily preparing and delivering content to the class to an environment where students independently seek out content and contribute it to ongoing classroom discussion. The outcome was a culture where the educator and students learned together, and from each other.  We believe that two conditions were essential for this shift: first, that each student had his or her own, connected device that they used for both personal purposes as well as their classroom learning; second, the classroom learning culture supported the students’ individual freedom (and responsibility) to explore and experiment, permitting them to decide how to best use the devices to support their learning in the 5th grade.
• We found that students independently chose to use their devices in “snippets of time” for math, spelling, word games, reading, and other educational uses that matched their interest, level, and pace.  In effect, the students essentially eliminated down time from their day while self-differentiating their learning.
• Over the course of the year, the students developed skills and habits in using the tools and resources available through their mobile devices.  In their culminating project, a presentation of a colonial trade, the implications of those skills became apparent in project work that was significantly richer, more complex, and more sophisticated than that of students in prior years.

Look for our report detailing the project implementation, results and recommendations here in August 2012.