Balancing Choice and Control with a Half Million Apps- our App Selection Criteria and Process

Giving students a voice in their learning and their learning environment is very important and directly related to student engagement.  (Side note: see my colleague Sara White's post about The Diamond Ring of Instruction: Student Engagement).  In our iPad 1:1 program, we're working to balance student choice with teacher's desire for control.  We want students to use their iPads for learning, and we want them to be able to choose which tools to use and decide what works best for them.  Yet we also want students to be focused and not distracted by many of the available apps in the Apple store.

At the moment I write this, there are currently over a half million apps, much more than anyone could conceivably even try out in a lifetime.  Some of them are great, and of course, some are less than worthy of attention.   

I've seen opinions all over the spectrum when it comes to discussing whether a school's app environment should be under tight control or completely laissez faire, similar to some of the discussions that take place over Internet filtering. Multiple conversations I've had with educators and parents over the past few years have also helped me realize that there is a wide variety of opinions and comfort with this as well.  I've had some parents thank me for our current system, others tell me that it's too restrictive, and still others say it's too loose!

We believe our current system balances all needs quite well. Over the past few years as more schools with 1:1 iPad programs have become more common, some of our new hires have transferred from other districts where 1:1 iPads were also in use. They've shared many stories of frustration when describing what teaching was like when students had wide open access to anything in the App Store.  These stories, along with our own personal visits of other 1:1 schools, have reassured us that we have found a good middle ground. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, we have a new compliance procedure with white listed apps which students can download from the School App Store. We currently have about 160 available apps in our Minnetonka App Store (complete list).  This list is a compilation of suggestions and requests by staff and students over the past three plus years in our 1:1 iPad program. This list is not set in stone, in fact it is quite fluid. As teachers and students discover new apps that they want to use, they submit their notifications to us through the request form as pictured below. At least four times a year the instructional technology staff review these requests and new apps are added to our Minnetonka App Store. If there is an urgent need for an app to be made available for students when requested by a teacher, we certainly accommodate that need.

Our criteria for adding apps to our store includes: the educational purpose of the app, the price (free is preferred), the privacy policy (including COPPA under age 13 fine print), and making sure it is not redundant. For redundancy, we look to make sure that the app does not do the same thing that another one already available already does. We prefer not to add it unless it offers significantly better ways of doing a task. By eliminating overlap with redundant apps, we reduce the number of apps we need to test, support and troubleshoot technically, as well as the number of apps we focus on for our staff development.  

For example, there are many Screencasting apps, and we have selected two to make available: Educreations and Explain Everything. Educreations is free and pretty basic, great for quick recordings and simple projects. Explain Everything costs money and has a deep set of tools and features, better for complex tasks when something more than a basic screencast is needed. Students and staff focus do their screencasting work through these two apps, and get to know all of the features well. Students don't have to switch apps based on teacher preference, and teachers don't have to deal with trouble shooting student projects made in ten or more different applications.

Finally, I should point out that all of the apps in our Minnetonka App Store are rated for age 13 and under. There are many apps in the Apple App Store that are rated for age 17+, and our students cannot install any of these. By turning on this restriction through our Mobile Device Management Software (Airwatch) for everyone, the install button for these apps is removed completely from our students' iPads, helping to keep the inappropriate content away from students on school owned devices. We point out to parents frequently that these restrictions are also available on any Apple device through Settings, meaning that they could do the same on their child's iPod or iPhone.

Getting Rid of Hiccups

Getting Rid of Hiccups

Just a little over a month ago we started returning 3,000 iPads to students after collecting them on the last day of school.  It's not been easy month with so many things changing technically since last year. We have run into numerous hiccups.

First and foremost, Apple's new requirement for every student to have an Apple ID has not been easy to implement. We want students to be able to personalize their iPad. For example, using their own Apple ID allows them to have their music, photos streams, iCloud services, and more. However, relying on each individual to create an Apple ID dramatically increases the number of variables and problems (hiccups) that can happen.  Helping students verify Apple IDs, retrieve passwords, set up a new Apple ID, in some cases create a new email account and a second Apple ID, and more is frustrating for the students, their parents, and staff. Trying to troubleshoot problems has become quite a time-consuming process for a few cases.

For our older students, we have all asked them to use their personal Apple ID or create one, and this has worked well for most. Occasionally, some kids who made a brand-new Apple ID have run into issues when Apple requires a credit card for the set up process. The pattern of when this happens, whether it is using personal email address or their school Gmail account, has not been an easy one to figure out and prevent. For students under age 13, we have worked with parents to have them request an Apple ID for their child, yet even after verifying their ID online, some of those accounts still require a credit card. We created this Apple ID FAQ guide and are updating it continuously as we learn more.

Besides Apple ID issues, we've had other hiccups, too.  We're asking all students with the help of their teachers to complete checklist of steps to set up their iPad. Like our Apple ID FAQ page, this checklist is a Google doc which we can update live. All students have a web clip icon on their iPad which goes to this checklist so they always have the most current directions and instructions. August has been busy working with with lots of students as they pick up their iPad and work to set it up.

For our 1,600 seventh and eighth-grade students new to iPads, we began handing out devices last week and are continuing today and tomorrow. We distribute the iPads in a small group of two to three classes per hour as pictured above.  We spend about a 45 minutes walking students through the initial set up process, getting them enrolled in our MDM AirWatch system and making sure they successfully download a few apps. Over the next few days teacher will walk students through the remaining steps on the previously mentioned checklist. Each teacher will take a step or two per hour to make sure that the students have all successfully completed the steps and don't have hiccups.  At the high school, we are using the morning announcements to have daily items that teachers check, all with the goal of eliminating as many hiccups as possible.

Redesigning the Airplane in Flight

Image source: goo.gl/i79R1f
 

I often hear people talk about building the airplane as it's flying, usually in reference to creating things as we go. We certainly felt we were doing this during our first days, months and even year of our iPad 1:1 program. Everything was new, and we were working through all sorts of issues--from technical glitches to policies and procedures to training and instructional methods--all at once and for the first time. Each year since we've had the opportunity to build upon what we've learned from the past and modify it for the better. 

It's hard to believe that we're beginning our fourth year already. It has been quite a journey. Four years ago when we began in September 2011, we gave iPads out to half of our 700 freshman students in a controlled experiment in which we compared the students' grades, attendance, work completion, engagement, collaboration, communication, and many other metrics against our control group of students without iPads. (For much more information including videos about the Minnetonka Public Schools 1:1 iPad program, visit tinyurl.com/iPadTonka). After a successful pilot, the second half of the freshmen class received iPads in January 2012. The program added one or two grade levels each year and now will cover six grade levels of 1:1 iPad students. This means that all 4,500 grades 7 through 12 students and their 260 teachers will use an iPad daily. 

This year we are managing all of our iPads with a new mobile device management system called AirWatch. Our technology department hopes that it will provide us with more features and less technical problems than our previous program. After comparing notes and learning from Jeff Rotham, a principal in New York who visited our school during our Tenth Annual Technology Site Visit in May, we will be launching a New compliance procedure with white listed apps which students can download from the School App Store. This compliance procedure will put some security methods in place and add new reporting capabilities behind the scenes. It also allows us to block apps in the store that are rated ages 17+, helping to keep the inappropriate content away from students on school owned devices.

Now that students and teachers at all four grade levels at the high school will be in our 1:1 iPad program, we've added another teacher on special assignment for iPad instructional technology support at the high school.  The two teachers working to support the iPad program at the high school have a number of new plans under way to better meet the professional development needs of the high school iPad teachers. They have a wide variety of staff abilities and needs to meet; some of the teachers are beginning their very first year teaching students with iPads while others are starting their fourth! I'll describe their multifaceted differentiated plan in a future post.  At our two middle schools, the size of our iPad program doubles from one grade of students to two, so we've increased our support staff there as well.

This summer a number of our district leaders K-12 have formed a district digital citizenship task force. The group consists of principals, directors, counselors, media specialists, and classroom teachers.  The goals of the group are to plan a digital citizenship scope and sequence for curriculum for all students in the district, design ways to assist the parents of our students to better help them raise their children in today's high-tech world, and to inform and gather the support of the community in this process. This group has met four times this summer and will be something I can explain more in the future. 

So rather than just flying our plane now that it is been built or putting it on autopilot, it seems to me that we’re redesigning a new plane as we’re flying. As we’re improving the current one in flight and tinkering with parts of it to make it better, we’re also able to step back and look at new ways to put the parts of the plane together.  This process never ends, and I'm sure in a few more years if one were to be able to compare where we are then with where we were when we began, things would look radically different. Perhaps it wouldn't even seem possible for anyone to imagine that we are on the same plane we boarded four years ago.