Back to the Future . . . or at least the 1980's

Today (thanks to a colleague), I came across an interesting article from OpenCulture.com which included a series of short videos from the BBC Radio 4 and The Open University.  The collection featured in this article is titled "Has Technology Changed Us?" and includes 4 short animations narrated by Gillian Anderson (from cult tv show fame).  The X-Files link immediately grabbed my attention (I have two personal connections with the tv show, but those are different stories ;-), as did the title of the series.  These are well worth taking the few minutes to watch them in order, but the one that really spurred me to share is the first episode titled "Rewiring the Brain" (embedded below).

With our 1:1 Laptop Program, there is a lot of talk/discussion/inquiry/angst surrounding screen time, computer/gaming addiction, distractions, finding balance, multi-tasking and a general decline in student attention spans.  After watching this video this morning, I think it's time to revisit hosting an Unplugged Day in the HS again.  I did this two years ago (see the original blog posting here as well as the follow-up reflection posting here and a second reflection here) with mixed results, but it is time to come back to this idea of going without technology for a day to better understand its impact on our daily life, and how deep our "need to be connected" runs.  With HS students, I think discussions about total screen time in a day, and making home agreements about computer usage come into direct conflict with the realities of school life and the curricular requirements of programs like the IB DP.  My experience has been that some of our students today have little or no awareness of just how wired they really are, and unplugging them from the web/net is the only way to give them some perspective.

After my first Unplugged Day, I really thought that this is something that we all need to do as a community - both teachers and students across the board.  We all need to seek balance in our lives, especially when it comes to our technology use.  Some people are better at it than others, and some people are totally addicted to their devices and don't even know it.  One of my best friends is completely attached to his mobile (he frequently checks it while you are actively engaged in a conversation, or when eating a meal) but seemingly has no idea about how others perceive his mobile addiction.  How many others are totally addicted to their devices and don't even know it?

Last year and this year (right now during the month of March, actually), I have challenged students to participate in the UNICEF World TAP Project where people can raise clean drinking water for the needy by not using their mobile phones (click here to see my blog posting on this project too).  This project has been pretty successful within the school, but again, has been limited to those students and teachers who elect to engage with it and learn about themselves.  It needs to be pushed out to the entire community and done together, whether they think they need it or not.  So it's time to go back to 1984 but as an entire HS this time.

I just had an initial conversation  with my principal about doing a school-wide Unplugged Day either in April or May this year, and he is all for it.  After talking through the possibilities for the day, we decided that there are a number of learning outcomes associated with this project that will make it bigger and better, such as:

• Connecting the day to the IB Learner Profile, where April for us focuses on "Thinkers" (which is a perfect fit with "We use critical and creative thinking skills to analyse and take responsible action on complex problems.") 
• Digital Citizenship to generate staff/student self-awareness of their own tech usage
• Make this into a school wide Spirit Day, including an 80's dress-up, Unplugged Coffee House lunch time performances, Advisory competition, and other themed "touches" to give it life and to make it fun
• Get student leadership involved to make this into a CAS project
• Most importantly - have everyone in the school participate this time . . . we are all in this together!  Connect and reflect on the process through grade level Advisory classes.

Getting everyone on-board is the next step, so I had better get started with the planning and communication with the staff . . . I hope a month is enough advanced notice!  Or we will have to rebrand it as "1985 on 8/5" and move it to May . . . but that would leave out the seniors as they will be in the middle of exams.  Hope it doesn't come to that!  Have you ever hosted an Unplugged or Blackout Day in your school?  What made it successful?  What made it flop?  What kinds of learning and self-reflection took place as a result?

The Day After 1984 - A Short Jaunt in an Unplugged School

Well, our '84 on 8/4 Unplugged Day has come and gone - my original ideas and plans are mentioned in previous posts here and here.  Personally, I took the Unplugged Challenge and extended it to a full 24 hours of no technology that was not available back in 1984.  Yesterday was an interesting day for me as a result, with a few moments of frustration, disconnectedness, and the occasional lapse into boredom.  As I progressed through the day, I made some notes (on an old notepad with ink and paper!) about what I observed of myself, the faculty and the students, as follows:

1. Conducted a walkthrough of the entire HS - many classes were working with textbooks and working on paper (much more than usually can be seen)
2. Starting the day, there were only a handful of students who volunteered and registered to formally take on the Unplugged Challenge, but a bunch more signed up in the morning (much to my relief)
3. Some faculty members resorted to asking for TimeWarp posters during the day, as they could not fully plan all of their classes to be without technology in the end.  This led to my major transgression of the day, as I had to briefly go online to email the poster to these faculty members.  Funnily enough, I didn't know about these requests as I was unplugged all day, until someone asked me if I had seen their email!
4. It was hard for IB Diploma teachers to be truly unplugged with their classes, due to the nature of their courses, due to the time of year (the last day for seniors is very soon), and due to how their classwork is structured in a 1:1 laptop school.
5. The Spirit Day Dress-up (like it's 1984) component of the day was fun and students participated in their typical small but enthusiastic numbers.  In terms of developing school spirit, it was well worth the effort.  Here's some of student posers . . . hey, isn't that Madonna?!?
   
6. Our usual HS Assembly took on an 80's flavour with one of the student bands playing some 80's hard rock . . . nice touch!
7. Most of the faculty/staff had an interesting relationship with the Unplugged Challenge - they planned their lessons to be without technology as best as they could for the day (sending attendance down to the office on paper, bringing in a tv and vcr with an old tape, using an overhead projector, working from paper and textbooks) but very few actually took the challenge themselves (I only know of one other teacher out of 40+ other than myself who personally did the challenge).
8. I collected some student feedback and reflections the day after, which garnered some interesting quotes, such as:

• "I learnt that I'm not that addicted as I believe myself to be at times, and that I actually enjoy a break from technology at least in classes, where you are not forced to sit behind a screen, but I still have a habit of reaching for my phone or computer to check messages for what's going on."
• "The most difficult part was that whenever I was bored, I felt the urge to take out my phone and start playing on it."
• "Yes [I would do the challenge].  I think it was interesting to see how I would function and to see how drastically different life is without all of the [technology] things that we have available. I think it would be an eye-opening experience for my friends as well. "

Personally, I went 24 hours without using any tech over the course of a full day of school.  It was an interesting experience, being the tech person in the school who is disconnected for the entire day.  It made for a pretty big backlog of emails and jobs to do the next day, but it was worth it to support the student body and go through the same experience.  The experience confirmed for me that my role in the school is heavily dependent on technology in general, and on email in particular for communication - no surprises there.  The biggest surprise for me though, was the realization of just how bored I got at different times during the day, as I could not read any articles online, check how my hockey team did last night, or see what's happening with friends, family and colleagues on Facebook or LinkedIn.  This last bit got me thinking that it is somewhat different for me here as an expat living/working overseas, compared to if I was still back home in Canada - the digital links to your own personal world are stretched over greater distances, connect you with a group of people spread around the world in different time zones, and become more important to you as they are the means of maintaining your important relationships with people, places and things which are distant or remote.

Have you ever gone Unplugged for a day?  What were your takeaways or observations?  Was it a mandatory experience in your school, or voluntary?  I wonder if making a mandatory unplugged event would change the dynamic, as those who do not want to participate simply won't and will find ways around any attempts at enforcing a blackout - what has been your experience?

'84 on 8/4 Unplugged Challenge - Revisited

In a previous posting I talked about hosting an unplugged or blackout day in the HS, as a way to create student awareness of their own "wired" behaviours and to give them a sense of how "connected" they really need to be.  We are now at the end of a five week long buildup to our first ever Unplugged Day which happens next week on April 8th.  Throughout these five weeks I have been trying to engage and draw staff and students into participating in this event, using some "hooks" such as having 1984 related references and videos in assemblies and newsletters, running weekly trivia contests (grade level competitions for house/grade level points) for 5 weeks in a row, branding the Unplugged side of the event as being a student in 1984 (you can only use technology that was available back in the day), connecting a dress-up Spirit Day in the HS with the event, and building mashup movie posters with teachers from favourite movies of the 80's.

1984 Weekly Trivia

A major component of the buildup to the event has been the weekly trivia competition where the four grade levels compete for "house" points over the school year.  I used the 80's to theme all of the trivia questions - at first I did not even say what it was all about and let the student's natural curiosity build.  Over the last month, I have been asked a number of times about what all the 1984 references were all about.  In fact, the student council president had the idea to kick everything off by having the movie trailer for the movie "1984" mysteriously be shown during an assembly with no explanation at all - that got the students talking.

Fitting the trivia questions in with the theme of the 80's was simple.  The first week focussed on major events in '84 such as the famine in Ethiopia, and the recording of "Do they know it's Christmas" as a fundraiser.  The second week's questions turned to famous bands and movies from 1984, and the famous "1984" Apple television ad to launch the Macintosh to the world.  The third week raised the bar as students had to identify famous bands/songs, movies and television shows from 1984 based on video clues that I spliced together.  Here is one of the video clues that I put together, if you are interested . . .

Week four questions forced students to use primary sources, as I built the trivia questions around information about the school in 1984 (location, address and name of the director), and about the current faculty (Who graduated from high school in 1984?).  This was interesting to watch unfold as students could not just go online to figure out the answers.  They had to actually talk to one another and collaborate, talk to various people in the school beyond their immediate teachers, and figure out their own plan of attack.  This particular week's trivia was definitely the most difficult to answer, so it generated the fewest responses, but it was interesting to see how students were working together, talking with the students in their grade who have been at the school the longest, and trying to figure out how old their teachers are - some estimates were very far off in both directions!

The final week of trivia was designed to hype next week's event, and to give students more information about what to expect that day.  To get more of the faculty involved and to help build some spirit into the event, I decided to put a ton of time and effort into making teacher mashup movie posters from the 80's.  Teachers simply had to send me their favourite movie from the 80's and I would insert them into the movie poster as one of the characters.  In some cases, the posters turned out much better when they took a self-portrait with their head at an angle to match what is in the original posters, which the staff were more than willing to do.  As I was doing all of the technical work to make the posters and staff just had to volunteer to be included, this turned out to be a massive hit with more than half of the faculty getting involved.  The final round of trivia was simple - students were shown in an assembly, a video with 22 different movie mashup posters and they had to name the teachers (in order) as they saw them . . . and it was tough but a whole lot of fun!  To hear the hooting and waves of hysterical laughter from the student body as they saw the posters made it all worth while.  After all, part of the event is all about school spirit!  Here are three posters that I made for the final trivia, as I could not help it (it was so much fun and I kept getting ideas for movies to use as examples) . . .



Spinoff or Collateral Learning

In preparing for our upcoming Unplugged Day, there has been a lot of spin-off learning amongst staff and students that has come up through the weekly quizzes.  Some of these outcomes I had hoped for, and some came as a surprise, but these are what make all of the time and effort really worth it.  Some of the collateral learning and positive outcomes which reach beyond technology, have been:

1. Development of student search online skills and working with primary sources
2. Student collaboration and communication, and working in self-forming teams or small groups
3. Building school spirit and involvement with both staff and students
4. Faculty developing new technology skills such as using Photoshop or other built-in tools on their new Macs like Photobooth and iMovie - there is nothing like "just in time" tech learning to move people's skills forward
5. Building currency and connections with the faculty that I work with in the high school
6. Faculty developing new project ideas and connections with their own curriculum through inquiry learning, using different media in class, and how visual and video media can be used in the classroom to study/analyze advertising and other concepts.

It will be interesting to see how our Unplugged Day works out tomorrow, but I will write a short follow up once our first attempt at this is complete.  It has been a fun build-up to the event, and I hope that staff and students gain at least a little insight into their habits and need to be connected - it's all about finding the right balance.  Have you hosted any school events which had collateral learning beyond technology or spin-off technology development?  What happened and how did it go?

A Day in the Life of a Student - TechXcursion to 1984

So I have been thinking about hosting a "tech blackout" or "unplugged" day in the HS for some time now.  For some, hearing the Technology Coach & Coordinator talking about not using any technology for a day at school seems out of place, strange, or warped.  Our current generation of teenagers that I see every day at school are very tech savvy, engaged and wired all of the time.  My school is awash with iPhones, iPods, tablets of varying lineage and laptops galore.  As a 1:1 laptop school, I expect there to be an abundance of technology in the students hands, everyday.  But as a technology department, we have never prescribed that technology/laptops need to be used all of the time, 24/7.  Technology should be used only where and when appropriate, where it enhances teaching and learning.

The problem that I see in our hallways, classrooms and around campus is our students' preoccupation with their technology - at all times of the day.  We have students who feel the urge to be connected so strongly, that they have turned on their mobile notifications for their favourite social networking sites, so they receive a constant stream of buzzing text messages of updates from their thousands of "friends".  Being an international school, most of these "digital friends" are spread around the world - this must mean that the buzzing updates go on day and night.  How is this level of connectedness healthy or happy?  Do any of us really need to be online and networked all of the time?

Mindfulness is a new buzzword that is floating around our school right now.  In the spirit of being more mindful, and connecting to the cyber-citizenry section of the ISTE NETS-S standards (which we have adopted for our student body), I think an "unplugged" day challenge for faculty and students would be an interesting way for students to reflect on their connected lives.  In our Digital Footprint student seminar, when I talk with HS students about how they perceive themselves and how deeply their need to be connected is, most seem to downplay how dependent they really are.  They either do not want to admit their addictions to themselves, or they just do not see it at all (it's all normal to them).  So how to raise student awareness, mindfulness and self-reflection?  I propose going back to 1984 for a day in the life of a student.

Remember these?  Who still has one lurking at home in a drawer?

What I have been formulating is '84 on 8/4 - having a full day at school where the theme is 1984, on April 8th (Europe goes by D/M format for dates).  In keeping with the 1984 theme, we could restrict participants from using any technology that did not exist in '84.  This would mean no laptops, no mobile phones, no mp3 players, no digital projectors, no interactive whiteboards and no internet.  Students (and faculty) could still use a landline phone, could watch tv when they get home, listen to music on a Walkman (if they can find one ;-) or could actually have a face-to-face conversation with a real person/friend/teacher/family member or pick up a book to read.  There will always be a contingent of staff and students who will object to such an exercise - how to engage and involve them all?  Do we make this an optional "challenge" or try to impose it on the school?  I don't actually know, as this is a complex problem.  There will always be some who will argue that their use of technology that particular day is unavoidable and crucial to their teaching or learning.  Perhaps involving everyone goes into the "too hard box" for now.  Perhaps getting the first try at such an event off of the ground as a staff/student challenge would be the best way forward . . . start small and grow it from there.  And I think the theme aspect of it is important for students.  I'm already working with student council on the idea and it can be turned into a spirit dress-up day and/or be connected with curriculum as well - what high school doesn't study Orwell, right?

Have you ever hosted an "unplugged" day or something like it?  What were your motivations for staging such an event?  What was kind of pushback was there from staff and/or students?  How did it work out?  What were the good and bad outcomes from the day?  Most importantly, would you do it again?