Drouin Secondary College
Rob Monk, Assistant Principal
Whenever we run a program in our school, we like to work out what are our success indicators. How are we going to know if this program has been successful in the end. With our 1-to-1 netbook program, we’ve looked at our success indicators. They key ones are student achievement and student engagement. We’ve been a little bit fortunate, in that we had a 1-on-1 notebook program sort of three years ago that started, that some students could opt into and some didn’t. So, we almost had a quasi control group / experimental group set up. So, over the last three years, I’ve been able to track the progress of students in the two different cohorts.
The data sets that we use to assess our 1-to-1 learning program are the ones that are already available – Naplan. Attitudes to school data, e-potential, internal surveys using survey monkey and anectodal records from our ICT captains. With our 1-on-1 classes, we have greater learning growth, particularly in the area of numeracy and reading and we have better student engagement. The kids are saying it’s a more stimulating environment in the 1-to-1 classroom, compared to the not 1-to-1 classroom.
With our laptop program, we had early adopters jump in there, so the teachers were really keen to use technology a lot, put up their hand to teach a 1-to-1 class. Some teachers, who were really reticent about it, you know, cynical and the late adopters, were ‘no, I don’t want … I can’t manage that. The kids will play games and, you know, I won’t be able to do this. I don’t believe a computer will make a difference’. So, they haven’t taken a 1-to-1 class in the first year. By the second year, we repped a few more people. We made sure the early adopters got out and spruiked the success, so share the success, show people in staff meetings – this is what the kids are doing in the 1-to-1 classes. This is how you run it. See how the homework’s online here. Notice how they’re logging in at 10 o’clock at night, doing their work. So, we’re able to create a vibe there, that people wanted to get involved so, in our second year of our program, we got more teachers involved.
The third year, which is this year, we’ve got 60% of our kids in 1-to-1 classes. The end result of that is, as a school, we’ve sort of said, ‘ok, that’s enough for us to think this is working well enough that it shouldn’t be select entry anymore. It should be everyone gets it’. So, from next year, every student in the school will have a personal learning device.
I think schools need to collect data because you need to know whether your program is working or not. If you say to me, ‘oh, I don’t think 1-to-1 learning is providing a more engaging environment than the traditional one’ and I’ll say, ‘well, that’s your opinion. Do you have any data to back that up?’ and I have. I’ve got some data around the fact that, yeah, from our limited population size, you can question my methodology and data all you like, but I’ve got some data there that says, no, it is. It is working better.