Site Visit to Westerly School

Today I had the opportunity to visit Westerly School in Long Beach, California. Westerly is in their first year of implementing a 1:1 Tablet PC program for middle school students. I met with Dr. Victoria Lovejoy, the Director of Differentiated Learning Solutions (love that title!) for the school. She explained that the program was a gradual evolution. Five years ago the school had a cart of laptops and two years ago they added a second cart. Last year the technology committee started visioning a 1:1 program.

We visited a guided studies class where students were doing homework. Many of the students were using their tablets and were eager to share how they use them. When I visit schools to see how students are using technology, one of the most common uses I typically see is students surfing the Internet to do research on a topic. One of the unique things about the tablet is that students can write and draw on it and their handwriting can even be turned into text. When I asked Dr. Lovejoy why they chose tablets over a traditional laptop, she said that they felt that the tablets would give students more options and would be a better tool for meeting diverse learning styles. In this class I saw very little of students using the Internet and far more of students using their tablets to help them do authentic work. I saw them illustrating concepts that they were learning about in ink art, or animating their drawings to show cell mitosis using Flash, or creating graphs in Excel for presentations they were making.

Teachers and students talked about how the tablets were allowing them to become more paperless. For example, in class students will bring up their homework assignments. They will go over the answers and the teachers will ask them to use their stylus to “correct” their work. Students can circle things, highlight key things, and make notes to themselves. The emphasis is less on getting a perfect paper, but to show the process and to show what you’ve learned. Teachers also encourage students to use these techniques when taking notes so that they are more actively engaged in higher order thinking during the note-taking process.

The school also has its own online portal. Students have access to private folders that only they and their teacher have access to. They also have pen pals in another country that they can upload their letter to inside the portal. Teachers can also use the portal to post their homework assignments.

One of the things I was most impressed with was how well the tablet program the supported the mission of the school. The school focuses on the “whole” child. In their mission statement which is posted throughout the school it listed 21^st century skills such as digital literacy and creativity. This fits a lot of the research I’ve been reading about how some teaching learning environments, such as the one at Westerly, are much more conducive to 1:1 programs than more didactic skill based environments.

When I asked a group of eighth graders what would happen if the laptops went away, they replied, “I would have to write everything”… “everything would take twice as long”… “I would die!”.