ASB Unplugged 2008

Attendees: Sam Liberto, Julie Lindsay, Beverley Stubbs, Mike Boulanger
Important links:

ASB Unplugged Conference website
American School of Bombay
Scott McLeod
- Website
- Blog: Dangerously Irrelevant
Laptop Institute

Overview

The ASB Unplugged conference was organized by the American School of Bombay in conjunction with the Laptop Institute. It's purpose was twofold: to share the development of 1:1 computing at ASB over the past 5 years; to encourage and help facilitate other schools wanting to move into a 1:1 environment. ASB is world renowned as a 1:1 Tablet PC school and has developed the program over the past 5-7 years. They now have all students in grade 6-12 carrying personally owned Tablet PCs. They also now have all students in grade 1-5 with 1:1 access to school-owned laptops (carts). To support this they have developed solutions for infrastructure (hardware and software including networking) support and professional development initiatives. This coming summer ASB are sending 30 teachers to the laptop Institute conference in the USA to further support curriculum integration of mobile computing.

The conference was based on three strands:

Administration: sessions on leadership and essential conditions for managing change within a school leading to a ubiquitous computing environment
Curriculum: Learning and teaching with mobile computing
Technical/Infrastructure: sessions on IT Support and requirements for hardware and software, how to build a support desk, how to implement a WLAN etc

There was also a schedule for classroom visits and student forums showing how technology is integrated across the curriculum at ASB.
A feature of the conference was the built in sessions for school teams to work together discussing how laptop/mobile computing could be implemented at their school and what needed to be put in place in order to plan for this to happen.

Artifacts

Interview/discussion with Dr Scott Mcleod at the end of the conference

Blog posts from E-Learning for Life Ning on conference sessions:

Building tech leadership.doc

Attached are brief notes from the Round table discussion by administrators at ASB Unplugged.
They responded to the questions:

What does leadership look like in your school? Shared and distributed? Topdown?
What is the role of the administrative team in a school that’s considering moving to a 1:1 model? What should the team be doing and thinking about?
What are the learning needs of leaders who are considering a 1:1 model?
What is the role of the administrative team in an established 1:1 laptop school? What is the team doing and thinking about?
What specific activities and actions need to occur to facilitate shared leadership of a 1:1 model by teachers
What specific activities and actions need to occur to facilitate shared leadership of a 1:1 model by students?
What is leadership role of parents in a 1:1 school?
How do administrators, teachers, and students know when laptops are being used successfully in the school? How do you know when what you aimed to do is now working