In 2007 her principal recommended Jen as a teacher for a 1:1 laptop pilot program. “The funny thing though, is she didn’t check with me first. So, I just got this email asking me to participate and listing all of these requirements. I didn’t want to do it. I had a seven-month old baby and a five-year-old at home. I wrote back, telling them all the things that were wrong with their requirements and saying no.” Then the organizer called her and said they had changed their plans because of her feedback and talked her into participating.
It took six months to get the laptops into her classroom and when they arrived they were running a version of Linux without any of the Microsoft or Mac software she knew how to use. “When I found out they didn’t have Word I was frustrated. I teach English. What were my students supposed to use to write? Then Mary Lange told me, ‘There’s this thing called Google Docs,’ and invited me to a training.” She went, taking her student teacher along with her.
Jen and her students embraced Google tools. First just Docs, and then the Docs list morphed into Drive. She learned to use Sheets and Sheets included Forms. (Jen’s very first SDCUE session was about Google Forms in 2009.) “Very quickly my students and I found that Docs and Forms made our classroom more efficient. We figured out a way to use one Google Doc and keep adding the small assignments to the top. We drastically reduced the amount of paper we used. We experimented with things like having a group analyze a text together using just the chat window on the doc. The room was silent, but I could watch all their thinking in the comments.”
At the time Jen taught American Lit to juniors. “It was not AP. It was not even honors. This was regular American Lit and some of my students were not on track to graduate. When the laptops came in tough, something changed. We were the only classroom with laptops. My students felt really special and proud about it. Without knowing it, our first lessons were about digital citizenship when I had them set up gmail accounts with their real names. The laptops gave us access to write blogs, and post book reviews online. Research became a thing we did everyday, and not a special trip to the library.”
Thanks to a tweet she saw and her enthusiasm for using Google tools with her students, Jen applied to the Google Teacher Academy in 2011. “I didn’t know it was competitive. When one of the organizers told me how many people applied my jaw dropped and my imposter syndrome set in. The people in that room were brilliant.” At the time CUE organized the GTA in partnership with Google. “From there I was hooked. I went to spring CUE and met up with people I had met in Seattle. I started presenting more and blogging more. I couldn’t not share the things that were working in my classroom.”
Eventually, Jen and her co-author Diana Neebe wrote a book about teaching with 1:1. Power Up: Making the Shift to 1:1 Teaching and Learning is available from Stenhouse Publishers. “It’s a labor of love to support other teachers who are just getting started with their own 1:1 classrooms. I’ll never forget that I tried to say no, and had to get talked into letting laptops in my classroom. I know lots of other teachers are still hesitant, and I don’t blame them for being apprehensive. The book was our way to try to share what we learned and make the process easier for our colleagues.”
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