Interview with Holland Christian Schools - Apple's 1 to 1 Learning Initiative
Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals, who are passionate about the future of Michigan education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast Studio by Glenn Vos and Tim Kamps. Both our guests are from Holland Christian Schools. Glenn Vos is the Superintendent and Tim Kamps is the Technology Director. The topic of our show today is the Apple's 1 to 1 Learning Initiatives.
Welcome Glenn and Tim! It's great to have you on the show.
Glen Vos: We are excited to be here, this is been a great adventure for Holland Christian and if we can share the things that we have learned with others, we are excited to do so.
Tim Kamps: Thanks, yeah, it's good to be here.
Rob Huisingh: Glen primarily and foundationally, what is the Apple 1 to 1 Learning Initiatives and what is it that Holland Christian Schools is hoping to accomplish?
Glen Vos: Well, I think the key for us in that sentence is learning. We have really looked at how students learn today, what it might take in terms of tools, and as we considered lots of possibilities looking out into the 21st century, the Apple Initiative just jumped out to us to say, this is probably the best way that we can do this. If we are going to really impact teaching and learning, putting laptop computer in the hands of students 24-7, is really the key, accessibility. We think that teaching probably is influenced when computers are available, but when they are really accessible to a student all the time, then I think learning takes up a whole new level and we are excited that that's what's happening for us.
Rob Huisingh: Could you help us to understand it, not everyone might be aware of, of exactly what this 1 to 1 Learning Initiative is. Tim, can you tell us little bit about what are the underpinnings of the program?
Tim Kamps: Sure. Every student 6th through 12th grade has a laptop, an Apple laptop that they use all throughout the school year. They use it at school; they take it home. All the teachers also have laptops. We try to really kind of breed this culture of anywhere anytime. So if I am a teacher, I am collaborating with other teachers. I can do that in a room anywhere because I have got all my stuff with me. I have got all my materials, everything is on that laptop. If I am a student and I am going from one class to another class or to home back to school. Everything I have, everything I need is on that laptop. So it really becomes kind of an immersive environment with a lot of flexibility for different ways of learning, different ways of teaching. Much more so than the traditional lab type of environment, where if a teacher wanted to teach a lesson and they needed technology, they would have to sign out the lab for today, and if the lab was available first and second hour great, but if I also needed it third and fourth hour and it wasn't available, I am probably not going to do two different lessons. I am probably going to go back to saying, well, I'll just do it the traditional way because I don't have that access.
The other thing that it really -- it's not that those laptops are open 45 minutes of every period, of every hour, every day, what it really gives a teacher is flexibility to choose when it's appropriate to use. So a teacher might be doing the lesson where they need five minutes to find out what these kids know already about a particular unit that they are covering or the lesson that they are doing that day, and they can do a five minute activity and determine these kids know this; they don't know this, this is what I need to focus my content on, prior to even starting that lesson or that unit. You would have never done that in the traditional lab environment, because I wouldn't have taken 30 minutes to go to the lab, sign in, do this, come back to the classroom. You just wouldn't do that. So there is so much flexibility this way.
Rob Huisingh: Now does this affect needing to have computers in labs at that point?
Tim Kamps: Sure, we have reduced -- at our middle school level we don't have computer labs anymore, at our high school level we still have a couple of labs for some of the more high-end kinds of things, CAD, Graphics, those kinds of things that either take a little more horsepower or you'd like to have a little more screen real estate to be able to work on those kinds of activities. Yeah we had five labs at our high schools; we are down to two labs for those primary two purposes.
Rob Huisingh: When did you start doing this?
Glen Vos: We actually started four years ago. We started with the pilot in 6th grade. We thought if we would begin at that level and those kids could manage it, we really felt moving it up was going to get easier and not more difficult. So we started with a pilot program at 6th grade, went into 7th and then 8th, and we had initially looked at a five or six year rollout, but we have completed that rollout over four years. Part of that was due to the fact that at high school, many combinations of classes exist where there are juniors and seniors in one class, freshman and sophomores are in one class. So to just rollout one class worth, it does not work as well, whereas the middle school they stay pretty much exclusively in their own group. So we found that as we went through the process we needed to accelerate just a bit more than what we thought we would.
So four years and we have learned an awful lot in those four years.
Rob Huisingh: Financially, you are trading, not having labs but you are giving a laptop computer to every single student. How is that accomplished?
Tim Kamps: Obviously there is some startup money involved in that and we did go out to some donors and they kind of gave us the seed money to get started, and then we do charged like a technology fee or a use fee or a lease rental kind of situations with the parents. So the goal was to have the seed money get us implemented and then as with a lot of the school districts, technology wasn't always part of the regular budget. Public school situation, they have bonds or in a private school situation, they have fund raisers or things to try the incorporate technology, but it's hard to sustain that, if you are dependent on bonds or fund raisers every so often. So districts have really been trying to move towards -- look technology is just like lights and water and all the other staples that we can't do school without, and so that really should built into the budget. So we have got some dollars that are set aside into the budget for the laptop initiative and then the use fee or the technology fee that parents are charged, then also helps covers those costs.
Rob Huisingh: And is this impacting -- we had a guest on earlier, Liz Kolb, who was talking about the use of cell phones in classrooms. The concept was that you could actually have people take tests and quizzes and get real time responses. Is this something that you are building into?
Tim Kamps: Sure, definitely. We use a course management software called Moodle, which is an open source piece of software, it would be an equivalent commercial product, would be like Blackboard, for managing our courses. So all of our courses 6th through 12th grade have a Moodle course that's set up for that, and so they can do those kinds of things like, I want to do a quick assessment like I mentioned earlier -- just a five minute thing, I want to see what these kids know. We are going to do some review quizzes or even testing, and then you get that real time feedback allowing kids to go back and say okay what I have missed, now I need to relearn that material. Go back take it again, because really learning is the goal of it, and if we can have tools that allow us to get that immediate feedback that a student is not waiting a week to get a test back and figure out what I did or didn't know and it's too late at that point for the teacher really go back and reteach. So you really get those kinds of real-time immediate feedback. I can put that back into the loop of instruction and say, okay, now I need to focus on water cycle because they just didn't get water cycle or whatever the content is.
Glen Vos: I think we are just starting to touch the potential of what this could mean for us. Even financially in cost saving. Textbook companies have not started to break their textbooks down, at least cost effectively, into units or chapters or even books available at a reasonable subscription cost for us to move in that direction, but I think it will happen when the critical mass of users becomes large enough. Also paperless as Tim mentioned, it is certainly one of the things that we advocate and we now can do, which is good green thinking as well as cost saving. So we see that there is a lot of potential that we are just starting to move into and the area of communication between the teacher and a parent, a teacher and a student, all I think are growing daily by using this vehicle.
Rob Huisingh: Parental response. How has it been?
Glen Vos: It's been very positive. Obviously they have a role to play. It would be inappropriate for them to just assume that this is something kids can just take off on their own and do all good things. So we really expect and want our parents to be very involved in this project so that they are monitoring their students, when they are not at school and we also have a responsibility in that arena.
I know that tech folks have done a lot of things to try to safe guard, but kids are pretty clever today. So we constantly have to be on our full attention of saying how are kids using these and are they appropriate. May be Tim can give you some clues of how it operates for us?
Tim Kamps: Yeah, one of the big questions for parents when we first started talking about this was the whole issue of filtering, because they understood that when the kid went into the lab at school, those computers were filtered and they were protected from inappropriate materials, but now you are giving them this laptop and what if they are at the coffee shop, what if they are over at a friend's house, how do I always monitor what's going on. So we do talk about that first level being the monitoring. We supervise your kids when they are at school we would expect you would do that same sort of supervision at home, but we put some things in place so that the filtering that we have at school is applied to those laptops, wherever that laptop is.
So if the laptop is at home, it's still going through our filter; if the laptop is at a friend's house, it's still going through our filter; if they are at a coffee shop, still going through our filter. So that we gave them some peace of mind that said, okay, there is that first level of basic coverage, and then we really do talk about that supervision and things like, if you wouldn't let your student have unlimited access to all the channels on television in their bedroom, then you probably also wouldn't want them sitting in the bedroom with the door closed with their laptop. So come up with some ground rules for the appropriateness for your student and their level of responsibility and all those kinds of things that you as a parent can figure out what works in your situation, but we do try to give some suggestions there.
Rob Huisingh: So ultimately, the PowerBooks, is that what they are?
Tim Kamps: MacBooks. Currently, yeah.
Rob Huisingh: They are the property of the school and they are put in the possession of the student and then the parents pay a usage insurance fee for using that. Do you mind telling me approximately how much that fee is per book?
Tim Kamps: The laptops fee is in the neighborhood of about a $150 a year and then there is a $15 insurance fee that's paid in that. We do self insurance, so if there is breakage of damage, there is a $200 deductible that the family would be responsible for and then the school with our self insurance fund picks up the balance of that.
Glen Vos: We are finding that parents in the setting appreciate the fact that their child is getting a very powerful tool, supported by the school, including the software, including a bag to carry that machine, and the support that they need when things are not working. So they see that it is a pretty good bargain. If you think of someone having that for three years for $450, you couldn't go out and buy that machine or even support it for that kind of money.
Rob Huisingh: No absolutely not.
Tim Kamps: Our rollout works so that in 6th grade, they would get a new laptop, they would use that through 9th grade and then in 10th grade they would get a new laptop again and use that through there senior year. And what we try to do is build in that ownership, so that the laptop I give you as a sixth grader, when you come back as a seventh grader, you are going to get that same laptop again. So there is ownership that's built in and that says, you know, if I mess up this laptop, I am the one who pays the price for it, and we even talk about that in terms of the deductible with the parents. That's a lot of mowing lawns and shoveling driveways and all that you are build in that responsibility that says, don't just cover these things for your kid, but kind of build that as a partnership that they assume some of that responsibility.
Rob Huisingh: You have been doing this for four years and I am sure that there were some things that were easier than you expected, and some things that were harder than what you expected. What was harder?
Glen Vos: I think the challenge for us was staff development and to keep that paste ahead of the kids, we just find that to be almost impossible. These kids are natives to this environment and teachers -- and it's really not a function of age; it's really a function of interest and their ability to be intuitive and interested. That really has determined in how fast it's incorporated in the classroom. I think we are starting to see those benchmarks move up and every classroom initially you always have some eagles and you have some robins and some sparrows, and we are moving into, I think, pretty much a very similar kinds of technique in each classroom. I don't thing there is huge gaps within that. So that was a huge challenge for us just to bring the staff on board.
Rob Huisingh: What was easier?
Glen Vos: Nothing.
Tim Kamps: On the technology side, there are always challenges. I think that it's like every year you kind of have that September time frame when things are just crazy and you kind of get through that and you go, oh! This isn't so bad, the network is working now and the wireless is all working. There are definitely some challenges with bandwidth issues that you have to look at, if you are looking at this kind of thing, because it's very different than having a few hundred lab computers on using periodically throughout the day, versus I could have 800 or 900 devices in my high school on all at the same time, all using and trying to access those same type of resources. So there are some network infrastructure kinds of things and bandwidth things that you have to make sure that you have got those things lined up correctly, because it always will use whatever is available and want more.
Glen Vos: Probably the most exciting part that has come in the last two years has been the renovation of space. The high school, we have done entirely renovation of a 1968 building and the question was really what does a 21st century classroom, a media center, just a school in general, what is it need to look like when every student is carrying a laptop? So we have had the privilege of saying what should a classroom look like? What should be the tools in that classroom? I think that's probably been one of the most exciting parts of this adventure is now matching space education space with what we are doing in the classroom. We really have noticed the power of it moving up considerably when the spaces are designed appropriately.
Rob Huisingh: So it does, even though you are four years into this, you are relatively in advance of most schools but it does seem to me that you are just starting.
Glen Vos: Absolutely, I think that will always be the case. This is going to be a project in process the rest of, we hope, our lives and I think it's going to be how we do business. It is not something that is just sort of interjected and it's kind of a cool fad. This is how we have committed to doing business. I think we are just starting to look at the potential of online classes. How we can create a hybrid experience for kids who might have a portion of their class in seats and a portion of the class online and what that might mean and even the efficiencies that we can start to look at as a school if a teacher is teaching students in a different way.
Rob Huisingh: Very interesting. Anything that you would speak. Obviously people listening to this show are rather superintendents, other technology directors, what would you tell them?
Tim Kamps: One of the big things I would say, you need to find partners who can help you to be successful, whether that are software partners that are providing software solutions; hardware vendors that are more than just selling you boxes. That was one of the things that really attracted us to Apple was that we really felt like they weren't just going to sell computers to us and then walk away, but that they had education as one of their pillars and that their focus on creating tools that kind of let the technology get out of the way and let the teaching and learning happen. So you got to find those people who can come alongside you and partner with you and not just sell you stuff, because I think the lure or going out and finding the cheapest this or the cheapest that, you really need partners who are going to stay with you for the long term and who have a vested interest of making sure that what you are doing is working and changing what's happening in the classroom.
Glen Vos: I think superintendents and boards you need to really question whether this is your mission. Is this what you really want to do? Don't just do it because it would be something, as I said, kind of cool to do. You have to be committed to say, this is how we want to do education. This is way too big of a step to sort of do it part time. This becomes a real way of acknowledging that education is going to happen in this way in Holland Christian. I think we crossed that bridge so to speak a couple of years ago when we really discovered how parents and kids responded and teachers responded to their opportunity to have a computer with them. They came and made some presentations to our board, to our education committees, to our staff and the enthusiasm just went out the roof, and that's what I think it really takes. It also takes a deep commitment to put people in place. I can tell you Holland Christian would not have this initiative if Tim Kamps was not part of our staff. He believes this, he works unbelievable hours to make it happen. So there is a sacrifice so to speak by many, and you have to be committed to making it staffed correctly or it will not be successful.
Rob Huisingh: Tim I understand you have recently -- you are going to be taking on a new position with the non-profit side of things.
Tim Kamps: I have been really fortunate to be the part of the MACUL Organization and we have got about 3500 and 4000 members in the state of Michigan, representing administrators and teachers and tech directors and all the kinds of folks in school that are associated with using technology in education. So I have been privileged to be on the board for the last number of years and was recently elected as President-Elect. So next spring I will be taking over for my term as President and that's pretty exciting for me and pretty humbling to be able to deal with all the great people that I get to deal with in the state of Michigan.
Rob Huisingh: And that in addition to a full time job.
Glen Vos: Absolutely.
Rob Huisingh: Or more than a full time job as some people would say.
Tim Kamps: But you know when you do what you love and you get to just enjoy doing those kinds of things, you don't mind putting in extra time.
Rob Huisingh: No, I agree.
Well Glenn and Tim I want to thank you both for being on this show. It's been great to have you here and the wealth of knowledge and I appreciate your help and you'll join us again sometime.
Glen Vos: Thank you for the invitation.
Tim Kamps: Thank you.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to learn more about Holland Christian Schools or you have a question you would like to ask to Tim or Glenn, you can find both of their contact information on their website. Their URL is www.hollandchristian.org again that URL is www.hollandchristian.org.
You have a story, something that's interesting and that concerns Michigan Education, well if you do, I invite you to share your thoughts with us. You can find us online at www.insidemieducation.com.
Until next week this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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