Last week, I helped create a presentation for Grade 9 and 10 students to help them take care of their digital devices better. There has been a rise in damage in student laptops and students have also had issues with their laptops working optimally, so there have been a lot of visits to our Tech Help Desk.
Liz D and I created this presentation for ninth and tenth grade homeroom teachers to take their students through. I was lucky to be able to work closely with one of the tenth grade classes to really see how the presentation went and how the students interacted with the content and the “clean-up activities”.The beginning of the presentation started with a survey.
Following our recent PD with Naomi Nelson, I will follow the protocol for analyzing data, below:
1. Make Predictions. I predict that students will score on the low end of all the questions. I think that most students NEVER back-up their devices and rarely update their software/restart their computers – I would say monthly, at best.
2. Go Visual. Here are the responses:
3. Analyze the Data.
- Most G9 and G10 students have dropped their laptops. 41% of these drops have caused damage.
- 64% of students never back-up or only back-up their media and files once a year.
- 65% of students would be greatly impacted if their computers crashed tonight.
4. Infer/Make Assumptions and Generate Potential Causes.
- HS student are only recommended to use protective covers, whereas it is more enforced in the MS. HS students are allowed more freedom on campus and can use their laptops without supervision. The survey question regarding damage was not clear, and I’m not sure the data is clear either. Next time, I’d like to change this question for it to have options, like “visible dents, damaged ports/screens, damaged hard drive”. There was also no damage question regarding liquid spills, when I know this has also been an issue.
- Students don’t have the time to back-up. It is difficult to enforce at school, without an external drive.
- This last data point is directly related to the backing-up issue. Students are saving directly on to their hard drive and maybe just on their desktop, which makes organization an issue as well…
I’ve adapted the last two data processing protocols to suit my needs better.
5. What questions do I now have?
- Are students using cloud based storage for their school work?
- In what format do teachers expect work to be done in? Or where/how is work turned in?
- What can I do to improve the care of student devices?
- How can I collect more specific data from our Tech Help Desk?
- How can I better collect data and analyze tech use in the HS?
6. Now what?
I’m glad that it worked out that I led one of the sessions. I was able to quickly see that the students were so connected to their phones, so immediately I added a slide regarding the care of their phones as well. I’m not sure the damage/upkeep issues that students have with their phones, and they don’t use them too much for academic purposes, so I included information of issues/concerns that I see during Tech Talks – storage and updating.
1. I modified the presentation and posted it for the parents to see. I think that parents should be aware of what we are teaching and this was a valuable session to share that information. This can help promote the care of devices at home as well. Unfortunately, there have been only 19 view as of the time of this posting, so I need to share that more with parents.
2. MS students had a lot of this information reviewed with them when we went over the RUP at the beginning of the year, but I will also have an interactive session with them, hopefully once this semester and once second semester to give them time to “clean-up” their devices so they are effective learning and collaboration tools.
3. I need to talk to Sonny about how he collects data for students who visit him and see if we can easily obtain more specific data (without giving him a lot more work). I’d like to collect more specific data to look at the differences between HS/MS since they do have different device expectations. I’d like to collect more specific data on “frequent flyers” to the Tech Help Desk. I’d also like to create postcards to send home to parents when students visit the Tech Help Desk for damage or other chronic issues. I do realize that this is putting more work on Sonny, so I need to talk to him about this.
4. I want to continue to work with the whole secondary school and create a digital citizenship curriculum that branches through the high school as well. Many of them have competent tech skills due to their own inquiry, Design class and tech integration in some of their other courses, but digital citizenship has not been articulated through the upper grades well. An on-going issue with this is time and how will the content be delivered – just by me or by homeroom teachers during homeroom/block.
Julie Lemley 