Teaching with Netbooks

written by Brad Flickinger

photographs by Zac Merritt

1st Edition - January 2010

Published by Brad Flickinger 3708 Observatory Dr. Fort Collins, CO 80528

E-mail: [email protected]

Author’s Website: www.BradFlickinger.com Book’s Website: www.TeachingWithNetbooks.com

Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN 978-0-557-16646-6

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 VISION FOR YOUR NETBOOKS ...... 5 BECOMING A NETBOOK TEACHER ...... 7 Netbooks are going to change everything...... 7 Outlining a Typical Day in a Netbook Classroom ...... 8 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT WITH NETBOOKS ...... 14 Student Contracts and Netbook Classroom Rules ...... 14 URL Support ...... 18 Identifying Classroom "Dead Zones" ...... 19 Student Troubleshooting ...... 20 EMBEDDING NETBOOKS INTO YOUR CURRENT CURRICULUM...... 21 Netbooks and Math ...... 21 Netbooks and Science ...... 22 Netbooks and Reading ...... 23 Netbooks and Writing ...... 24 NETBOOKS AND 21ST CENTURY SKILLS ...... 25 Creativity and Innovation ...... 25 Communication and Collaboration ...... 25 Research and Information Fluency ...... 26 Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making ...... 26 Digital Citizenship ...... 27 Technology Operations and Concepts ...... 27 PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE NETBOOK CLASSROOM ...... 29 Storing Netbooks and Their Components ...... 29 Your wireless classroom ...... 30 Printers ...... 31 Netbooks and USB Flash Drives ...... 31 Netbook Maintenance ...... 32 MOVING FORWARD WITH YOUR VISION – WHERE TO BEGIN? ...... 33 How to decide which netbooks to buy...... 33 Netbooks vs Notebook ...... 33 Windows vs Linux ...... 34 Keyboards ...... 34 Size ...... 35 Screen Resolution ...... 36 Processors, Hard Drives and Memory ...... 36 Batteries ...... 37 Applications ...... 38 Installing Applications ...... 38 Subscriptions ...... 39 Online Applications ...... 40 Optimizing a Netbook ...... 41 Near Paperless Teaching with Netbooks ...... 41 About the Author ...... 43 More Information ...... 43

INTRODUCTION The phrase 21st Century Skills is inescapable in education these days. Educators are continually told that students need to develop and acquire skills that include being creative, working well with others and being able to use technology as an effective communication tool. So how do we support our students in obtaining these much needed skills?

It has been my experience in working with students and technology that the biggest factor of whether or not students have gained 21st Century Skills is their time actually spent using technology. Not time learning about technology or just looking at technology, but the actual hands-on time using technology. The typical approach of sending students to a computer lab for computer class once a week is simply not adequate when it comes to the development of 21st Century Skills. Even when considering the rudimentary skill of keyboarding, a once per week approach is not sufﬁcient. In most school districts, students begin learning keyboarding skills in elementary school. However, how is a second grade student really going to learn to keyboard by just going to a computer lab one time per week and practicing for a few minutes? By the time a student returns again to the computer lab seven days later, they have almost forgotten everything they had practiced which results in rather slow progress towards their typing capabilities. Keyboarding is about muscle

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 1 memory and teaching your pinkie ﬁnger to reach up and press the "P" key without looking. But how is a student's little pinkie muscle supposed to remember with a week in between lessons?

It doesn't matter if we are talking about keyboarding or podcasting, as technology in schools needs to stop being taught as a separate subject and needs to become embedded into daily classroom instruction. 21st Century Skills need to be woven into the daily lessons that are taught in the classroom and not just in the computer lab.

So, if time using technology is one key factor to ensure the attainment of 21st Century Skills, how do we access more time? The answer is through the use of netbooks. Netbooks came along at the perfect time for students needing to attain 21st Century Skills. These newly developed netbooks are small, light and affordable and are the perfect size for elementary and middle school students. Because of their incredibly low price, schools and parents can now afford for each student to have their own computer. Netbooks allow students to have and use technology at their desks all day long. Netbooks give students the chance to research a subject, email ﬁndings to fellow students and their teachers, and update a blog. Without having to leave their desks, student are able to access, use and develop 21st Century Skills.

2 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger Let’s return to our original keyboarding dilemma in which students struggled to access the computer lab in a timely enough fashion to increase their typing speed. Instead, envision that old-fashioned problem with a modern day solution in which students with netbooks practice keyboarding everyday and then use those skills all day long as they continually use their netbooks. Students quickly obtain keyboarding skills that prove to be proﬁcient in a matter of weeks instead of years. Imagine the advantage that a student who transitions into middle school keyboarding at 60 words per minute has over a student that is struggling at typing 5 or 10 words per minute.

With netbooks it is finally possible for our students to develop the 21st Century Skills they need as they race into a global society and employment market that we can't even imagine or begin to understand. Later in this book we will look at the development of specific 21st Century Skills however let’s first “paint a picture” of how a netbook classroom could operate like.

Brad Flickinger Media Director/Technology Teacher Bethke Elementary, Timnath Colorado

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 3 4 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger VISION FOR YOUR NETBOOKS The initial question a teacher needs to ask is "What do I want a netbook to do in my classroom or for my students?" At ﬁrst, a teacher might think that the netbook should serve as a desktop computer -- and that's a great place to start. However, don’t let that be the end point of your netbook vision. In a true 1 to 1 environment where each student has their very own netbook, student interaction and netbook use should be completely different from how they were previously using a computer; such as when they were visiting the computer lab only once a week. A teacher’s netbook vision needs to be much more comprehensive than what was occurring during that weekly visit to a computer lab. Instead, a teacher needs to envision a tool that students use to gain fantastic and necessary 21st Century Skills to prepare them for a world we cannot even imagine right now.

Let's get back to the primary question: "What do I want a netbook to do in my classroom or for my students?" If your answer includes completing internet research, writing reports, practicing keyboarding and math skills and maybe even improving reading skills, then netbooks are perfect for you. If your answer includes video production, podcasting, music creation, burning DVDs, etc, then you might be better off looking at full-size laptops rather than netbooks. Although some of the faster netbooks can do things like video editing and podcasting it is not really what they were intended to do.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 5

6 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger BECOMING A NETBOOK TEACHER Netbooks are going to change everything. When a teacher receives a complete set of netbooks for his or her classroom, their teaching methods are going to dramatically change. I don't say this to be an alarmist or to be sensational, but I simply state it as a matter of fact from what I've witnessed in my trials of netbooks in classrooms. Imagine for a moment being a teacher in a one-to-one classroom where you stand at the front of the room looking over your students at their desks with their netbooks open ready to be instructed. What do you do? Before I go on, I must say that being a teacher in a one-to-one classroom does not mean that you've become the old-fashioned computer teacher, but rather a paradigm shift in education is about to occur. Instead, you need to become the teacher who provides instruction using a netbook as an educational tool. The following section illustrates this paradigm shift.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 7 Outlining a Typical Day in a Netbook Classroom Let's take a moment to look at what a typical day in a 1 to 1 environment might look like within a fourth-grade netbook classroom. As any successful teacher will tell you, having tasks for students to do immediately when they enter the classroom is one of the best classroom management strategies there is. In the days before netbooks, that assignment could include some reading, writing work, or math problems that had been posted on the board or copied onto a paper document for students to focus on. Envision instead a classroom with netbooks: Students would quietly come into the room to get their netbooks from the bins where they've been charging overnight, return with them to their desks, open their netbooks, log into the network and then check their e-mail to ﬁnd the assignment from their teacher that has been prepared the previous day. A typical beginning of the day classroom exercise might be as follows:

Students begin with 10 minutes of keyboarding followed by 10 minutes of practicing math skills such as fractions. Following this, they are then instructed to send an e-mail to the teacher that documents their high score from the fraction activity. This would be followed with an online lesson from AtomicLearning.com on creating spreadsheets. When students complete the spreadsheet lesson, they type up a few notes and email the document to

8 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger the teacher to be graded. Once they complete all their morning tasks, can then go to FunBrain.com and read "The Diary of a Wimpy Kid" online while they wait for the other students to ﬁnish.

This typical beginning of the day example outlines how a netbook might be integrated into daily instruction. Total time used is about 45 minutes of interaction with the netbooks and from my experience, I would recommend about that amount of time for a fourth-grade classroom.

Now let’s refocus and envision this same activity through the eyes of the teacher. The students have entered his or her room, picked up their netbooks, put on their headphones and have started to work. Seeing this in reality is absolutely amazing! When a entire classroom of students are completely engaged, there is nothing more exciting. The teacher now monitors the students by walking around the room and checking to make sure that students have their ﬁngers on the right keys and in the right positions during the keyboarding exercise. The teacher can also monitor student performance on netbook driven tasks using a quick formative check point or by working one-on-one with a student who needs a little extra help. Imagine starting each and every day with 45 minutes of instruction that fully engages students and allows teachers the ﬂexibility to intake formative assessment data,

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 9 work one-on-one with students or to get materials and structures in place to create a smooth transition to the next part of the day's lessons.

Continuing on with our day... After the students have completed their morning netbook driven tasks, they put their netbooks away and then go to library for 30 minutes. Following library time, they return to the classroom before going out to recess. Students come back from recess, get their netbooks and have them ready for note taking when their teacher starts a state history lesson. For the note taking process, the students are using Google Docs, which is an online word processor. In this particular lesson, students are sharing their state history notes with four other students within the classroom. Essentially, they are all collaborating on one document together, while working at their own desks. Their final product will consist of a document with notes from the teacher’s lesson containing five different perspectives. The teacher then directs the student groups to use the Internet to do some additional research on an identified topic related to the lesson. Groups then summarize their findings in their own words at the end of their Google Docs document. Since the teacher is also set up as a collaborator

10 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger on the same document, he or she is able to log-in and check the paper and give feedback or a grade.

By now it is time for lunch and the students return their netbooks back to the bins to be charged while they go to lunch.

Upon returning from lunch, the teacher spends a short time instructing students about a new reading strategy which students then practice for 20 minutes using an individualized online reading assignment. Reading is then followed by a writing exercise and then on to math. Since the students have already practiced the fraction activities from that morning, they are well prepared to continue their lesson on fractions.

Once the teacher directed math lesson is over, the students retrieve their netbooks from the bins again. The morning lesson on spreadsheets has prepared students to create their own spreadsheet in which they will organize environmental data that they had previously gathered with data probes attached to the netbooks. As a scaffolding support, students can revisit the morning’s online spreadsheet lesson using AtomicLearning.com. The ﬁnal

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 11 spreadsheet, which is created using Google Docs, is saved and the teacher can have access to it at any time, from any computer.

The teacher and students continue going back and forth between traditional teaching and netbook teaching as the afternoon rolls on. During one activity, a group of students use a netbook to video-chat with students in Alaska, whom they met through ePals.com. They chat about an environmental experiment that they are planning on doing together in a few weeks. The students in Alaska are going to collect the data and the students in Colorado are going to creating the podcast to present the team’s ﬁndings.

Since students crave “free time” on the netbooks -- an opportunity for them to do whatever they want, within the prescribed boundaries of the teacher -- they work hard so that they can have ﬂex time at the end of the day. Some students have earned 10 minutes of “free time”. One group works together on a podcast, while others ﬁnish some missed lessons, and others watch animations about nanotechnology.

12 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger The primary aspect that I want teachers to take away from this example of a typical netbook day is that netbooks should enhance traditional teaching and should not make it harder. Netbooks should provide ﬂexibility so that teachers can prepare lessons, implement formative assessments, differentiate for ability and learning style and work with individual or small groups of students. It is also important to note, that a netbook classroom is not a group of kids just plugged into computers like zombies. When implemented properly, netbooks allow students to interact, collaborate and work together on projects, self-direct and take ownership of their learning. Netbook teaching enhances traditional teaching. It does not replace it.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 13 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT WITH NETBOOKS Student Contracts and Netbook Classroom Rules When we learn from our experiences (and mistakes) we develop wisdom! I have included a few suggestions so that classroom management with netbooks will be easier. One recommendation that I would give to teachers is that before giving students their netbooks, students should sign a Netbook Contract. I have also asked their parents or guardians to sign that contract as well. I have included a website address at the end of the book so you can go online to view a sample contract. Feel free to edit it and use as you wish. The reason for the contract was to support the idea that it was very important to treat the netbooks with respect. I outlined a few simple rules and explained what the consequences were for breaking those rules. Consequently, everyone understood what the expectations were and what the consequences might be.

General netbook rules and consequences should be displayed on a few posters around the classroom so that the teacher can refer to them when different situations arise. For example, one rule is that students cannot play website or computer games without the teacher's

14 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger permission. If a teacher sees a student playing an unauthorized game, they can refer to the poster and then tell the student to put their netbook away for the rest of the day, while reminding the student of the rule on the poster. A good catchall rule is, "Always treat the netbook with respect and do not do anything inappropriate with it." Then, if you catch a student trying to stick a pencil into the microphone jack you could invoke the consequences to that rule.

Teachers with great classroom management skills can tell you about the power of the "preferred activity." The preferred activity is whatever the student wishes they were doing, instead of your lesson. The preferred activity for students with netbooks is "free time" with their netbook.

Please note that free time is not “game time.” I never allowed my students to play regular games on their netbooks. The only games that I permitted were educational games that allowed them to practice math or grammar and not the games that had students racing a truck through town shooting bunnies! If your students see the netbooks as gaming devices, you will spend most of your time monitoring them as the game police, and you'll hear every type of excuse. "Oh, I thought it was my free time," says the student you catch playing an arcade-type game. In my opinion, you should never allow regular games to be played on the netbooks.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 15 “Free time” with netbooks can include activities such as: sending email, making digital drawings, creating animations, playing educational games, etc. These activities are open-ended yet controlled time for students to interact with their netbook.

I used “free time” as both a classroom and individual motivator. As a classroom motivator, I identiﬁed 10 minutes of free time on the front white board. As the class progressed throughout the day, I either subtracted or added time depending on behavior and completion of tasks. For example, I would reward students for walking back from the art room quietly by letting them know they had earned one additional minute of free time that day. Consequently, I could also subtract their free time if I learned that they had been disrespectful or off-task during the art time.

For individual students, I used free time as a motivator to complete their lessons. I would often tell students that once they had their rough draft ready and shared with me in Google Docs, then I would check it. If they saw the comment of READY on their document then they knew that they could start their free time activities. This motivated students to ﬁnish projects quickly and accurately since they knew that I would be checking it. Racing through an assignment just to complete it didn’t allow them to start their free time activities.

16 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger Students were also require to meet the standards that were expected and outlined in my project rubric.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 17 SCAFFOLDING FOR STUDENT NETBOOK USE There are some immediate structures which you can put into place to support a successful netbook classroom environment.

URL Support When it comes to teaching older students who were typing in website addresses, I have tried many different strategies. The biggest challenge I met with was that students make multiple spelling mistakes when they typed in a website address (URL). One solution that I developed was to have a teacher's website that had the most commonly used websites as links so that all students had to do was to get to the teacher's website and then click on the website that they needed. While this solved the initial challenge of students not typing the correct URL, this method however, does not teach the older students how to type in website addresses correctly nor do the students learn to memorize these addresses. The same goes for having bookmarked websites.

The best solution that I have found is to make a poster that has all of my most commonly used website addresses on it. In my classroom, I have a poster displayed that has the website addresses for my website, their e-mail address, subscription websites like AtomicLearning.com,

18 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger etc. By having a few posters displayed around the room, students will learn that they have to type in the website addresses correctly and after a few weeks they won't even be looking at the poster anymore, which means that they have memorized the website addresses. When students have websites memorized, they can easily sit down at any computer anywhere in the world and get to where they need or want to go. Contrast that with a student who has been checking his or her e-mail at school for three years by way of a link or bookmark and is at a loss when confronted with a non-school computer.

Identifying Classroom "Dead Zones" It is helpful for the teacher to use a Wi-Fi sniffer when setting up a wireless netbook classroom. A Wi-Fi sniffer is a small handheld device that will tell you the signal strength of the wireless network in your classroom at speciﬁc locations. There will always be a few dead zones where the wireless strength is too weak to maintain a consistent Internet connection. There sometimes is no rhyme nor reason why these dead zones exist but noting where they are will make desks rearrangement much more important. When I initially plan my classroom desk settings, I place masking tape on the ﬂoor around the dead zones so that I can make sure that each netbook will be able to connect when students are working. Please note that while most dead zones are stationary, there are a few dead zones that can move around.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 19 Student Troubleshooting A troubleshooting poster can be a real time saver in a netbook classroom. On this poster you identify the most common troubles that you are having with netbooks in your classroom. My troubleshooting poster covered everything from netbooks that froze, to log-in problems, to what to do if your netbook screen goes dark, etc.

Returning to the challenge of “wandering” dead zones, in one classroom I found that there were three dead zones when it came to the Wi-Fi in the classroom. However, one of these dead zones continually moved around. When a student with a netbook would experience a dead zone, their netbook would drop their Wi-Fi connection. Through trial and error, I found that if the student forced this netbook model to “sleep” and then “woke it up” again, it would reconnect to the Wi-Fi in a new location. I included those types of instructions and hints on my troubleshooting poster and I never had to walk students through those step-by-step instructions every time. Initially, when a student lost connection with the internet, they would panic but by using the troubleshooting poster for support, they were able to locate their problem, follow the steps and ﬁnd the solution on their own instead of using teacher assistance. The posters scaffolded students through their own troubleshooting solutions saving me valuable time.

20 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger EMBEDDING NETBOOKS INTO YOUR CURRENT CURRICULUM. Teaching with netbooks is easy if you invest a little time and energy in redesigning your lessons. The payoff you and your students receive is far greater than the initial investment.

Netbooks and Math Most math teachers would agree that students develop math skills by practicing over and over again once they understand the fundamental mathematical concept. Let’s consider the addition of fractions as an example. In a conventional classroom, students are provided with direct instruction and then asked to work on problems from a textbook or worksheet to demonstrate their understanding of that concept. When all students have completed the assignment, the teacher reviews the answers with the class so that students know if they worked the problems correctly. The students who didn't “get it” are now looking at multiple wrong answers and they don’t understand what they did incorrectly. These students have just wasted all this time because they didn’t understand what they were doing, but were forced to work through all the problems regardless. After the fact, the teacher provides additional direct instruction to help those students, but now those student who did “get it” and answered the problems correctly, have to sit through an addition lesson about something they already

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 21 understand. Precious instructional time is being used on reteaching struggling students.

In contrast, a classroom with netbooks embedded within the math curriculum would look quite differently. Students could initially watch an online animated movie about fractions. The teacher supports this learning by providing examples on the board and clarifying the mathematical strategies. An assignment could be given that has students practicing the skills with an online game or activity. If a student answers a problem incorrectly, the game or activity would give him or her instant feedback and instruct the student on how to obtain the right answer. All students are receiving instant feedback however that feedback is differentiated depending on whether students are typing in the correct answer or not.

Netbooks and Science Science websites and online software are now full of incredible animations and simulations to help students understand science in ways that a few years ago we couldn't have even dreamed about. With a netbook students can then go from the simulated world to the real world by using data probes. Students can take the netbooks all over the classroom and even outside to collect and record data. Students are encouraged to use their critical thinking skills to solve complex problems by way of the netbook. Students in our netbook test

22 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger classroom made animations to show alternative fuel ideas as part of their science fair projects.

ExploreLearning.com offers a huge library of interactive online simulations for math and science education for grades 3-12. They call their simulations Gizmos, all you need to do is check out a few Gizmos and you will see the power of each student being able to understand and interact for themselves as they learn new concepts. These simulations are done in ways that make concepts come alive for students making complex ideas easier to understand. Check out the 30 day free trial and you’ll see what I mean.

Netbooks and Reading Okay, let's be honest, reading on a screen is nowhere near a good as the printed paper page. However, since we are being so honest, you cannot deny that the print world is going digital, the web is full of text, kids can do so much great reading with a netbook; current news, research topics, ebooks, etc.

For example, Raz-Kids.com is an online interactive library that provides fun and interesting ways to motivate and improve reading literacy in students in K-8. The online reading library has a collection of “listen-to” and “read-only” books. As students read or listen to

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 23 books their vocabulary is increased. The website is built with automatic assessment to measure comprehension.

Netbooks and Writing Word processing has been shown to have a very positive effect on the development of student writing skills. If you choose to have your students write using Google Docs with their netbooks, it allows the teacher to observe a student’s writing work as they progress through an assignment. You can provide feedback as they are working on the project, all without printing one page. One of the new features of Google Docs is that it allows you to add comments to a document. You can add something like "Timmy, you need to develop the topic sentence a little more," in a comment area, which the student will see on his netbook seconds after you enter it on your computer. I also like using Google Docs for peer review from classmates through online collaboration. Another feature in Google Docs that students like is Word Count, which also shows number of paragraphs, and sentences, plus average sentences per paragraph, average words per sentence, and average characters per word which allows students to set goals to improve their writing. A feature that I have just started to use more shows the Flesch Reading Ease Index and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level to help students understand their level of writing better.

24 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger NETBOOKS AND 21ST CENTURY SKILLS Let's look at each skill and how netbooks can help students obtain these important skills. As we mentioned in the introduction of this book, the best way to develop these skills in students is to embed them into your instruction. In one of our netbook test classroom, we challenged teachers to embed 21st Century Skills into a book report assignment. Here is what they came up with for each of the skill areas:

Creativity and Innovation Students were asked to create a book report video, where they acted out the favorite part of the book they had just read. They worked in teams of two and took turns in front of and behind the camera. A handwritten rough draft was then typed in to Google Docs as a ﬁnal script, which was approved by the teacher before they picked up a video camera.

Communication and Collaboration Students worked with other teams in the class to ensure that everyone did not report on the same part of the book. The ﬁnal videos were uploaded to the school server so that other students using the library could have access the video book reports.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 25 Research and Information Fluency Students had to research and develop an outline to guide the video book report. Each outline had to cover background information on the author and information about any other books the author had written.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making Questions were added to the video book report project to encourage students to think deeper about the book they reported on. Questions such as, "If you were the author, how would you have written this story differently?" or "What would have happened to the main character if he or she would have chosen a different path to follow?"

26 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger Digital Citizenship Students made sure that they used proper citation for all quotes and images in their report. They also obtained a signed parent or guardian release form so that they could post their videos on the Internet. As part of the project, students ﬁlled out an Internet Risk Report, which helps students establish safe Internet practices.

Technology Operations and Concepts Student had to learn about editing and shooting video, as well as, script writing to complete the project. They simply followed the step- by-step tutorials on AtomicLearning.com to learn these new skills. By following an online lessons, each team could work at their own pace. This also proved helpful when it came to sharing resources like the video camera since each team needed to use it at different times rather than at the same time.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 27 28 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE NETBOOK CLASSROOM Storing Netbooks and Their Components This book was developed with a “one to one” school initiative in mind (i.e. every student in the class has their own netbook). This does not include the idea that netbooks are shared among classrooms or grade- levels via a portable cart. In a one to one vision, netbooks are stored in a classroom. Therefore, the teacher needs to choose a location that is convenient for his or her students to get to multiple times per day. There also needs to be a power outlet in close proximity so that all the chargers can be plugged in. Sufﬁcient room to store the headphones also needs to be considered.

We have found the most affordable and easy way to store netbooks is in plastic bins or tubs on a set of shelves or a cart. We drilled holes in the back of the bins and marked each hole with the corresponding number to match the netbooks. We then put the charger cords through the holes then plugged all the chargers in to power strips and we were ready to go. Most netbooks come with a storage sleeve which we have the students put the netbooks back into when they put them in the bins and attach them to the chargers.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 29 The best solution, if you can afford it, would be cubbies. In this setup, every cubby could hold a netbook and headphones. There would of course have to be a charger cord in each cubby. The cubbies should also be lockable so that the netbooks are secure.

There is no doubt that 24-30 chargers can make a spaghetti mess of electrical wires behind the bins. Try to wrap the wires to make them and the bricks as neat and compact as possible. Splitting the netbooks into two locations is a good idea since one electrical circuit might not be enough to handle all the chargers.

The headphones we got came with 7 foot cords. This required us to tie a knot into each cord, turning them into three-foot cords instead. The best solution for headphone storage is to either have the students put them in their desks, or have a wall of hooks that they can hang their headphones on. The headphones should be numbered and assigned to a speciﬁc student.

Your wireless classroom You do not want to have network wires running to every netbook, instead you need Wi-Fi in your classroom. This is something that I'm sure your district has policies for, if not plans for doing in the immediate future if it is not already installed. Most schools around the country are being converted to have Wi-Fi networks. If your school

30 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger does not have Wi-Fi, talk to your district IT department about how to make it possible. It might be as easy as plugging in a $100 Wi-Fi hub into your current network jack in your classroom.

Printers Although we will talk later on about running a near paperless netbook classroom you will always need to have a printer in your classroom. We recommend a black and white network laser printer. Make sure it is a network printer. These typically cost around $300.

Netbooks and USB Flash Drives Students and flash drives drive me crazy, that is because students loose and wreck these little drives so easily. I have heard everything from, “My dog chewed it,” to, “It went through the washer and dryer and now it doesn't work.” It is my suggestion that you stay away from flash drives. Instead, have the students save their files to a school server or an external Internet storage location. If your students are using Google Docs, then all of their documents (like reports, presentations and spreadsheets) are already stored online.

A company called Adrive.com provides 50 GB of online storage for free, which is so much more space than a 2 GB losable flash drive. When my students work on big files like movies, they keep all the files on the netbook while they are working on it, and then when they are

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 31 done they export it as a smaller ﬁle and store the ﬁnal copy on their Adrive account.

Netbook Maintenance Each month our students follow a maintenance checklist to keep their netbooks in optimal running condition. They check for damage, blow out the ports, and clean the netbook. We have found that having the students maintain their own netbooks really gives them ownership and responsibility for it. Furthermore it saves us from having to pay a tech from the IT department to do it.

32 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger MOVING FORWARD WITH YOUR VISION – WHERE TO BEGIN? How to decide which netbooks to buy. When it comes to netbooks it seems that every computer manufacturer is getting in on the action. All the big players such as Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Intel are now making netbooks, which explains why netbooks are one of the top selling computers. The speciﬁcations on these netbooks from these different companies and the differences between models can make it very confusing for the average teacher or school to pick the netbook that is right for their students. The following items are some things to consider to help you choose the best netbook for your school or classroom.

Netbooks vs Notebook There are some people who argue that with the cost of some netbooks being around $350 that schools should just buy a full-size notebook computer for about $100 more. However, price isn’t the only criteria to consider when buying a netbook. Size of the netbook is a critical component of success in the classroom. Smaller sized elementary students seem to ﬁt the netbooks a lot better than a full-sized laptop. An additional plus for the smaller sized netbooks is that the netbook ﬁts on student desks with greater ease. With a netbook on a desk there is still plenty of room for a textbook, but if you have a full-size

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 33 notebook computer, there is really only room for the computer and nothing else.

Windows vs Linux Netbooks that we tested usually came in two ﬂavors: Windows or Linux operating systems. We chose the Windows system for two major reasons: compatibility with existing software and the current Wi-Fi system. One aspect to consider is how many educational software titles exist within each operating system.

Keyboards All netbooks have smaller keyboards than regular sized laptop computers however, this doesn’t mean that all netbook keyboards are the same. For example, the Asus models have very small keys with some of the keys in different locations and different sizes than a traditional keyboard. On one Asus model, the right shift key was about half the size compared to what it traditionally would be, plus the keys were so small that a regular-sized adult hand could not effectively type on this size of keyboard. These netbooks were designed for young students, who by the way, get used to the small keyboard quite quickly. Within a week or two, elementary students didn’t even notice the size of the keys and this smaller size did not affect their typing speed. If you are considering netbooks for an elementary school, small keyboard size might not be an issue. However, if you are looking at

34 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger netbooks for a middle school, this would deﬁnitely be an area of concern since there are several students in the eighth grade that are just as big as an adult and have adult-sized hands. In our opinion, the best keyboards for larger middle-school sized hands were the Dell, Intel, Acer, and HP models with a slight preference for HP. I even found myself easily adjusting to the slightly smaller keyboards of these models and students were not even phased when coming from a full- size keyboard to a netbook keyboard on these models.

Size The size of netbooks vary a little from manufacturer to manufacturer and from model to model. Basically there are 7 inch netbooks, 9 inch netbooks, and 10 inch netbooks. The sizes refer to the diagonal measurement of the screen of the netbook. The best size netbooks for schools are the 10 inch models. Keep in mind, the actual total size of one 10 inch screen netbook may be different from another 10 inch screen netbook. For example, the 10 inch Acer Netbook is about an inch wider than the Asus. So even though both models might be 10 inches diagonally at the screen, the Acer netbook is bigger. A larger sized netbook means that you have a larger keyboard which in turn makes all the difference in the world when you compare these two models.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 35 Screen Resolution When choosing netbook software, one important aspect to remember is that almost every netbook has the screen resolution of 1024 by 600. There are some software programs that simply will not work on these smaller sized screens. Double check before buying any software.

Processors, Hard Drives and Memory Processors are the speed at which your Netbook performs. I would not recommend that you buy a netbook that has a processor speed less than a 1.6 GHz. When we have tested models with processors speeds at less than 1.6 GHz’s, they were simply not worth the savings in money. However, netbooks that operated at 1.6 GHz seemed to be acceptable. We tested the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor and the netbook literally operated at the same speed as most laptops. Most adult testers didn’t notice a speed difference between their regular laptops and the test netbooks.

Since netbooks were supposed to be "network notebooks," many early manufacturers only put small solid state drives (SSD) in their netbooks instead of a real hard drive (HD). This was done to save money and because it was thought that netbooks would only be used to perform online tasks. While SSDs are fast and great for holding an operating system, they do not provide much room for anything else. In many instances, you may want to put more things on your netbook,

36 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger including Google Earth and some photos for a project. Because of this need, I recommend selecting an HD that is at least 100 GB. By having this much space, students can temporarily store photos, music and videos on the netbook HD and transfer them to Adrive or a server when they are done.

Batteries The question to answer when asking which batteries to buy is how will the netbooks be used on a daily basis within the classroom? There are two basic types of batteries; the three cell battery and the six cell battery. The three cell battery will give you about 2 and a half hours of operating time and the six cell battery will give you nearly 6 hours. Since most schools are open for six hours a day people tend to think that they need the six cell battery. However, students will rarely need to use their netbooks continually for six hours during the day. With just a little planning, most schools can operate using the three cell battery with no impact on instruction. To clarify this rationale, refer back to the typical netbook day to see how many times the netbooks were returned to their chargers during the day. By purchasing the three cell model instead of the six cell model, schools will save money on the overall price per netbook resulting in substantial saving. This means that school could purchase more netbooks with the savings.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 37 Applications Typically, most districts will not allow teachers or principals to buy netbooks personally and bring them directly into the classrooms to be used. Instead, netbooks will probably have to be taken to your IT department where they will make an "image" of the perfect netbook computer. This image is then copied to all the rest of the netbooks for your school. Teachers will want to think carefully about what they want included on that image. The image includes everything from installed software to the settings in Windows. Each school and district is a little different so teachers will have to spend some time considering this. Preplanning will be critical at this stage since if your school has already paid for a license to a particular math program, you will want that program installed on the original image. Remember, netbooks do not have a CD drive.

Installing Applications Installing applications on a netbook can be rather tricky since it does not have a CD drive. The easiest solution is to just buy an external USB CD drive to use for installations. Another option is to just buy the digital downloadable version of an application instead of the CD version. This way you just download the install ﬁle to the netbook and continue with the install process. Some IT techs install directly from a district server and others install from USB ﬂash drives that they have

38 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger copied the application install ﬁle to. Installing applications is usually something that needs to be pre-approved through most IT departments so check before continuing with this activity.

Subscriptions Having the right subscription with your netbooks increases their value exponentially. I know that is a bold statement but there is incredible curriculum subscriptions for netbooks that has changed our way of viewing netbooks as student's tools for learning. Here is an example of one subscription services that was critical to the success of our netbooks within classrooms.

Atomic Learning provides video step-by-step tutorials for just in time training. Imagine being a teacher who has now been thrown into the world of netbooks computers and is having to be a part-time tech teacher to all their netbook students. Many questions can arise such as “How do you make a graph in Excel?”, “How do you make a bullet point list in Word?” and “How do I save this document in a different format?”

With Atomic Learning, all we had to do is log in and then ﬁnd the short video tutorial (usually under 3 minutes) to show exactly what to do. We could even display the video up on the LCD projector for our students to follow along. Atomic Learning has literally thousands

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 39 upon thousands of video tutorials. The video tutorials can be “assigned” to students, so that they can learn at their own time and pace.

Atomic Learning also provides something called Lesson Accelerators which are pre-made lessons about using technology in the classroom. Teachers that were wanting to accelerated their students’ 21st Century Skills assigned these lessons to students to increase their capacity. Atomic Learning has also recently added an entire section dedicated to teaching and embedding 21st Century Skills in the classroom.

Online Applications The concept of a netbook is that you use it online -- all the time. Which means that many applications that used to be installed on our computers now live online in the “cloud.” This is why Google Docs is used so much in a netbook classroom, but what about other applications? Let’s says, for example that you need to edit a photo. Just go to a free photo editing website like www.Picnik.com and upload your photo, edit it, and then download it back to your netbook, done. That is cloud computing, see my website link at the end of this book for more examples of this.

40 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger Optimizing a Netbook There are a few tricks to optimize your netbook to meet the needs of students. Regarding the track pad on the netbooks, we disabled the tap feature that allows students to tap their track pad rather than clicking the button. We found that tapping the track pad was very confusing to elementary school students so we disabled it. We also slowed down the speed of the pointer and the double-click speed. We made changes to the Internet Explorer so that it had minimal menus as screen real estate is such a premium on a netbook you do not need to waste it on things like a Google bar or tabs. As a bonus, the new Internet Explorer does have a full screen option (F11) which allows students to see a lot more of a website by going to full screen mode. It also includes a zoom feature, so if students need to they can zoom out to see the entire web page. Mind you, on a netbook screen, the text will now appear very tiny. Another way to increase screen capacity on the small netbooks is to set the task-bar at the bottom to auto hide.

Near Paperless Teaching with Netbooks By using Google Docs and emails, a teacher can almost teach without printing documents. Teaching students about having an environmentally responsible classroom is just one aspect of being a 21st Century student. As educators, it is very easy to print reams and reams of paper. Instead of printing projects to turn in, a netbook classroom teacher can check student work on a screen.

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 41 Let’s see how a nearly paperless assignment might continue. Let’s say that the student’s assignment was to gather information about the red-eyed tree frog. The teacher starts off by sending an email to all the students (a distribution list set up in his or her email program) which sends all the students to a Google Doc worksheet. This worksheet asks the students questions about the frog that they need to research on the Internet. This document also contains the list of tasks that the student is to complete such as obtaining three photos and a map showing where the frog’s habitat is and a short video about the frog which is found on SchoolTube.com. Since the teacher is set up on each student's worksheet as a collaborator, there is nothing to turn in and revisions can be done as many times as needed. When the student is done, they add the word "ﬁnal" to their ﬁle name and the teacher will know that the grading can begin. To conclude the project, the teacher uses a Google Docs “form” to test for retention (i.e. a quiz without paper).

42 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger About the Author Brad Flickinger has been an elementary, middle, and high school teacher, as well as a district tech coordinator which gives him a perspective of teaching all ages of students and what it is like at both the classroom and district levels. He focuses on designing technology curriculum for students from kindergarten to 5th grade. Brad is an educational futurist who specializes in teaching 21st Century Skills to students, teachers and administrators by showing simple and easy tricks to incorporate and integrate technology into everyday lessons. He works with schools to inspire teachers to use these 21st Century Skills to energize and engage students. In addition, he is a consultant and speaker who gives workshops, seminars and conferences to educators on how to do what he does.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife and two children and teaches technology at a local elementary school.

More Information Please visit the companion website to this book for updated information and links to the documents and websites referred to in this book. www.TeachingWithNetbooks.com

Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger 43 44 Teaching with Netbooks by Brad Flickinger