Edina Digital Age Learning

Yesterday, I had a chance to help some of our 6th grade students set up folders in Google Drive and share those folders with their teacher. It took a bit longer than I expected, but for the most part, the kids did a great job. Still, when I was done, I felt like I had survived this scene from one of my favorite movies! In The Princess Bride , Wesley and Buttercup learned three lessons on how to survive in "The Fire Swamp." Hopefully, surviving in a classroom isn't like surviving the Fire Swamp, but here were the lessons I learned that may help you when teaching in a BYOD classroom with Google Apps for Education ! Lesson 1: Students Didn't Bring Their Device Fortunately, we have a supply of laptops and Chromebooks available for students to check out for the day if they come unprepared. Our goal is to help students come prepared every day with a fully charged device, but some days, they forget. Having extras allows them to still take part in Digital Age...

Recently teachers in my One to One Learning Community of Practice presented lessons they had created to incorporate ubiquitous computing. I streamed the session on Mogulus , and Mike Dronen , the Technology Coordinator from Stillwater, Minnesota listened in. After all had presented, he asked via the chat: "Do any of these lessons require one to one access?" After some reflection, we thought that only one would not be possible without 1:1 access. The others could be done in a lab, or without each student needing access to a computer. The goal of the cohort was to create an integrated lesson or unit that took advantage of One to One access. Our plan is to use these lessons with students in the fall. While doing research on one to one lessons, we found information, developed by Ruben Puentedura outlining levels of technology integration. While Dronen's question was comparing a lesson in a one to one environment vs. a lesson in a classroom without one to one, I think the ch...