Dear St. Luke’s Families,
I want to let you know about a very important curricular decision that the school has made regarding the role of technology and digital learning in our program.
Since the summer, two faculty committees have been carefully evaluating the integration of digital learning into our curriculum, and the hardware that is required to allow us to meet our intellectual goals.
Michael Zeigler, our Director of Technology and a very gifted teacher in his own right, has chaired a small group of teachers and administrators who have exhaustively researched computer usage in a wide range of schools across the country. In particular, they focused on the following schools and programs:
The iPad program at the Spence School in New York City
The MacBook laptop program at Hockaday in Dallas
The PC Tablet program at Cincinnati Country Day School
The MacBook program at the Shelton School in Dallas
The BYOD program (bring your own device to school) at St. Martin’s Episcopal School in New Orleans.
Based upon the unanimous recommendation of the faculty committee, the school has decided to implement a 1-to-1 laptop program in middle school (grades 5 – 8 ) for the next academic year. A 1-to-1 program requires all relevant students to acquire the designated laptop for use during the school day and also at home. Our laptop of choice is the MacBook Air. We will be the first private school in San Antonio to establish such a program. Two versions of the MacBook Air are available for you to inspect and play with at Ms. Becky’s desk.
It is the faculty’s considered opinion that this 1-to-1 laptop program is necessary to ensure that our middle school students can produce a range of intellectually substantive and creative assignments. The choice of the MacBook Air was driven by our desire to maximize student production of knowledge and new understanding, as opposed to the mere reception and manipulation of data and information.
A letter from Michael Zeigler and Chuck Kremer, the Associate Head for Middle School, will follow shortly that will give you more details on the practical aspects of the program. In particular we want to give our parents as much warning as possible: please do not buy a new student laptop at this time. More program announcements will be forthcoming in early spring. Purchasing through the school will benefit families both in terms of price, and in terms of maintenance and repair.
I am going to write a good deal over the next few months about the role of technology and digital learning in education, but today I want to explain the principles and values that have guided St. Luke’s in our evaluative process.
To be sure we are living in interesting times in the education business, perhaps even revolutionary times. Our 7th graders were studying the October Revolution in Russia yesterday, and I have no doubt that they will tell you that revolutions are exciting, but to say the least, they can also get mighty sticky.
On-line learning has already radically transformed our world. Education, to invoke an analogy with the textile industry of 18th century England, has always been a cottage industry. That cottage might have been as small as a tutor and a single student in an Oxford tutorial, or as large as a lecturer and 200 students in one of those college freshman Introduction-to-Something-that Everyone-needs-to-Know courses, but it has been a cottage business nonetheless, limited in time and space.
Now on-line learning provides the education business with economies of scale that mean one teacher can reach an infinite number of students anywhere in the world there is a computer or iPhone or iPad. In the same way, the invention of the Spinning Jenny, and later refinements to that machine, lead to the building of unprecedentedly vast textile factories on what had formerly been Lancashire farmland, within the span of a single generation.
I have posted on our “21st Century Education Debate” portion of the website an article by Washington Post business columnist, Steven Pearlstein, that gives one view of the nature of this educational revolution.
St. Luke’s has not made the decision to introduce a 1-to-1 laptop program in pursuit of fashion.
We have done so because our educational mission demands it. The faculty looked hard at the signature of a St. Luke’s classroom: close interaction with a challenging and supportive teacher, learning that is driven by critical thinking, and a curriculum that incites the students to be creative problem-solvers.
We believe there are 21st century tools that we must employ in our classrooms to sustain and enrich our classical emphasis upon education as an act of inquiry. Mastery of technology alone is not our goal and computers will not be teachers at St. Luke’s. We are not interested in the celerity and impatience of search engine learning, which leaves the student shallow, and remarkably unacquainted with thinking as a process of question and answer.
This 1-to-1 laptop program will mean that all our students, from first grade on, have individual access to what we regard as age-appropriate technology. We understand that the most respected research shows that technology has no impact, or even has a negative impact on student learning, if well-supported teachers do not integrate it thoughtfully into the curriculum. In later letters I will speak more of our implementation plans.
I hope that you will join me in thanking the members of the committee that worked so hard in researching best practices across the country, and in thinking through what would be best for St. Luke’s:
Chair: Michael Zeigler
Members: Chuck Kremer, Amie Mathews, Ashley DeLong and Alison Urbanowski
Yours Sincerely,
Dr. Q. Mark Reford
Head of School