The Open Schoolhouse Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students
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The Open Schoolhouse Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students Charlie Reisinger @charlie3 The Open Schoolhouse Building a Technology Program to Transform Learning and Empower Students http://theopenschoolhouse.com/ @OpenSchoolhouse Copyright © 2016 Charlie Reisinger This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Cover Design by Zach LeBar ISBN: 1537484052 ISBN-13: 978-1537484051 First Printing October 2016 Contents Introduction 1 1: A Brief Open Source Lesson 5 2: Beginnings and Foundations 16 3: An Open Technology Team 34 4: Linux is Elementary 45 5: Planning a One-to-One Program 61 6: Student Apprentices 78 7: Building the One-to-One Program 93 8: High School Laptops Launch 112 9: The Power of Open 123 Epilogue 141 Appendix: Software Resources 143 Acknowledgements 147 About Penn Manor School District 148 About the Author 149 Introduction To best prepare students for the future, we must think deeply and openly about our vision for school technology today. I believe every student, in every school, deserves equal and open access to computers. Students should have the freedom to explore and experiment with their school-issued devices. In an open schoolhouse, every student is trusted with learning technology and empowered to rewire and reshape the world. For many public schools, fiscal nightmares disrupt student technology dreams. An escalating multi-year budget crisis has pulverized education budgets in my home state of Pennsylvania. The scenario is similar in many states and countries. While legislators bicker over the politics of a spending plan, public schools struggle with inadequate funding and growing student needs. Technology purchase and support costs are pain points for school directors. Reliable technology infrastructure is as vital as electricity and plumbing, but these services are not cheap. Schools must also wrestle ongoing, yearly software costs. From classroom software to school-wide learning programs, the price of costly commercial software can choke school budgets. Worse than a scarcity of affordable technology is technology that’s locked down to young minds. School administrators often implement draconian restrictions on classroom computers. Students may not install software, examine code, or tinker with the underlying operating system. Restricted devices run only the apps and software school administrators say should run. Programming is out of reach, as if under glass. It’s hard to understand this closed attitude toward education—students are handed powerful learning devices and instructed not to lift the hood, not to explore what makes the device work, not to learn about computing. What can a student learn from a computer or tablet purposely configured to stop exploration? With the command line off-limits and programming tools sequestered, students become puppets on someone else’s code string. Locked-down technology is a symptom of an education model designed for student compliance and defined by the incessant measurement of learning. A factory-like school system values what a student has purportedly learned on a linear path, as demonstrated by a standardized test score. Technology device 1 restraints and restrictions lock students on the assessment assembly line, at the cost of a child’s curiosity and intellectual freedom. Computers were once the spark for a child's imagination. Now, they are a testing apparatus for legislative assessment monarchs. We must challenge those who believe computers exist solely for testing, Googling, and as electronic worksheets. Computer technology is powerful because it enables students to learn by building and creating. Tapping a tablet to practice multiplication may help a child memorize facts for a test, but it does nothing to ignite her drive to devise an invention the world has never before seen. The destructive confluence of decimated school budgets, neurotically locked-down technology, and lockstep assessment mandates is taking a toll on progressive educators—and disempowering students. Our students deserve better. I believe one of the solutions to transforming education is the open source model. The free and open source software movement is a philosophy and a practice born from the work of 20th century hackers and programmers. It’s much more than clever code and free software. Open source communities embrace principles of collaboration, participation, freedom, and trust. To work openly means to work cooperatively, to generously share knowledge, and to create a democratized culture where a diversity of contributions is encouraged and valued. Consider Mozilla, the software community behind the Firefox web browser. Their mission illustrates the spirit of open: “Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.” Like Mozilla, public schools aspire to cultivate shared learning communities where every student has opportunities for intellectual growth. But do open source principles work in the classroom? Can schools build successful 2 technology programs on open source software? When students are engaged co- creators and trusted apprentices, does a new school community emerge? The purpose of this book is to answer these questions. The stories draw from my 17 years serving as the Technology Director for Penn Manor School District, a public school system in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Open source software has been the heart of Penn Manor technology since 1999. Free and open source software helped our team build affordable and robust educational technology infrastructure. We’ve saved huge sums of district taxpayer money by trading expensive proprietary programs for open source counterparts. However, the budget is only part of the story. Over time, the open source model reshaped our students’ classroom experiences. The application of open source principles led to the development of a unique one-to-one learning program, in which we supplied thousands of middle and high school students with an unlocked laptop running free and open source software exclusively. Our efforts culminated with an internationally recognized high school student help desk program built on a foundation of collaboration, community, participation, and trust. We found that open classrooms look more like art studios and makerspaces, and nothing like factories. If you are a teacher, school administrator, technology director, or school board director seeking affordable and innovative technology ideas, this book is for you. You don’t need a degree in computer science to understand the concepts. I begin the first chapter with a lesson on open source software, reveal problems created by closed source software, and explain how the open source model offers solutions. We’ll briefly review the history of software freedom and touch on the virtues of hacking. In chapter two, I share how open source software like Moodle and WordPress saved our district several hundred thousand dollars. And I’ll explain how a few key learning projects became the foundation for our current student technology initiatives. In chapter three, you’ll meet Penn Manor’s technology team and take a behind-the-scenes tour of our open source communication systems and infrastructure. We move out of the server room and into the elementary classroom in chapter four, Linux is Elementary. The switch from Mac to Linux laptops was an inflection point for our schools. I’ll explain our urgency for cost savings, a rationale for the transition, and how we made it successful for elementary students and teachers. 3 The second half of the book documents how Penn Manor used the open source model to build a one-to-one technology learning program and unique student technology help desk. Even if your school decides not to go all-in with open source software, the Penn Manor story is loaded with cost-cutting tips, discussion points, and planning ideas that apply to most one-to-one device programs. Chapter five is a detailed account of the strategic planning that led to Penn Manor’s one-to-one initiative. I’ll discuss the district’s guiding principles, educational objects, and rationale for providing students administrator rights to laptops they can fully control. In chapter six, you’ll meet Penn Manor’s first student technology apprentices and read stories of their remarkable software creations and achievements. Chapter seven covers the one-to-one laptop pilot activities that helped us prepare for the start of the full program. I’ll discuss teacher professional development workshops and recount a few unexpected snags we encountered during the pilot. Penn Manor’s software development practices conclude the chapter. The one-to-one program takes flight in chapter eight. A concentrated three- week sprint unleashed 1,725 unlocked laptops into Penn Manor High School. When Penn Manor’s open technology project ended, our students’ new world of learning began. Student and teacher success stories steal the show in chapter nine, The Open Schoolhouse. With more than 4000