Minnetonka's 1:1 iPad Student Training & Setup Checklist & Flipped Student PD

Grade 7 students learning the advanced features of
Notability's iPad App for a paperless classroom through Schoology. 

In two days last week, we distributed around 750 iPads to seventh grade students in their classrooms and walked them through the setup process in about 50 minutes (see our slideshow and checklist below). Today we did this with 350 sixth grade students, tomorrow we continue with another 350, and later this week and into next we begin with fifth graders at each of our six elementary schools. Rather than having 100-150 students in a room at once as in years past, we decided to do this in one classroom of students with two or three adults. We are finding this smaller group size allows for more personal attention and is a better and more effective way to get students set up. The amount of individual questions, password resets, confusion about which email address to use and when to enter in a student ID vs. an Apple IDs, etc., can better be addressed when you have less students in the first place. 

After this first day of initial setup, teachers in individual classrooms continue to work with their students in the days to follow. They show them how to use their iPad with apps like Notability and Schoology, completing what we call the "Digital Document Cycle" to do their assignments without paper. They will learn to use other core apps like Explain Everything, iMovie, and more. To lead this instruction, we have recorded a series of videos that our teachers show their students in a "Flipped Student PD Model" so the classroom teachers themselves do not have to be the experts in all the apps and their features.

This is Minnetonka's fifth year of a 1:1 iPad program. We added fifth and sixth graders to the program this year, so we will now have 6,260 students in grades 5-12 with an iPad. Rather than collecting iPads from our grade 8 through 11 students at the end of last year, we decided to have them hang on to their iPads for the summer, and are thankful we did. We had no reason to collect every device and had recently added an enterprise web content filter on student iPads that offered the same level of filtering off campus as students have at school. Not having to collect, touch, sort, and redistribute  the iPads for four grades of students was a great timesaver. We collected the four year old iPad2s of our 750 graduating senior and reused them for a fifth year in a row by redistributing them to this year's grade five students. We have been very pleased with the functionality of these iPad2s, originally planning to just get three years of use out of them. 

Related: Tip #1 for a Successful 1:1 Implementation: Execute the Rollout Carefully and Deliberately and more about Minnetonka's 1:1 iPad Program

Related: Tip #1 for a Successful 1:1 Implementation: Execute the Rollout Carefully and Deliberately and more about Minnetonka's 1:1 iPad Program