Kurt Söser: My journey to a dedicated 1-to

Kurt Söser:
My journey to a dedicated 1-to-1 tablet class
From vision to reality
November, 21th 2012. I am standing in front of a big audience at my first ever Microsoft event in Vienna.
I am presenting nervously but also passionately my work with OneNote in my math lessons at my school
HAK Steyr. I have prepared this talk very carefully and I can “feel” and “hear” the audience’s “ah’s” und
“uh’s” about how I work with my students. Then I come to my closing words: “In five years from now I am
going to teach students within a 1-to-1 environment with stylus-based tablet PCs!”
That was my goal. And not to make my life as a teacher easier, but to empower students with the tools
and possibilities of 21st century technology to achieve more, and learn more.
Let’s switch to 2016. Since September 2015 there is a dedicated tablet-class in my school and 29 students
are using a Surface device for their daily learning. They are annotating their calculations in my maths
lessons, collecting resources for geography lessons or documenting their learning in economy class and
much more. They are using this device as a tool, as their own learning tool!
Although it has not taken 5 years it was a long and winding road to this “tablet PLUS” class at the business
college HAK Steyr.
My personal path
I have been working with OneNote and a
stylus-enabled device since 8 years now and all
my school work is organized and prepared
digitally since then. This is very convenient as I
have all things for my lessons in one place:
documents, pictures, screenshots, apps, files
and thanks to the digital pen I can even
document my handwriting in OneNote. (Just
have a look at the video I created (1)) The first
years of teaching this style, I just did it for me.
I tried to get organized and prepare lessons
very carefully, so I can rely on them and come
back
to
them
a
year
after.
1: Collecting all kind of information and content within OneNote
both form the analog and the digital world to have ONE place for
learning and teaching
But soon I realized the potential of sharing content.
So I invited my students with a read-only link to the so called “online school textbook” and they can reread,
what I have written and collected for them. This was quite useful for them, as students could concentrate
on the lessons and did not have to bother with collecting all the presented information. For me as a teacher
I was able to merge the best of both – analog and digital – worlds: I was able to show them visualizations
of mathematical concepts with my favorite mathematics app GeoGebra and I could make use of
handwritten notes as I think this is one of the most important things in mathematics education: to show
students the progress, the “evolving” of mathematical concepts, not just static answers.
It was only a year after I decided to share the OneNote notebooks to my students with editing rights. And
I started to collect their work within the Notebook too. It was just the start to collect some of their
homework and projects on a dedicated section, so I could easily correct them and in addition share their
work with the other students. Here is an example of a student’s work from that period:
And I started to use more and more features of
OneNote’s power. For example: I let the students
explain within and audio file his problem and so I
could literally hear if he has understood his problem.
The cool thing was, that 25 students did 25 different
problems and in the end we had a big collection of
solved problems and they could learn from each
other.
Although my students have access to desktop PCs in
school it was not that convenient as there were some
technical restrictions and working was not that
“smooth” like I wanted it to be. So I tried to promote
a BYOD-environment, but that did not work out very
well since it was very hard to get students into 2: student's work on analyzing a function. the power of
carrying their laptops into school just for the math embedded Audio files gives the possibility to hear your
students thinking
lessons.
From vision to plan
Going one step back I thought this kind of “working space” would perfectly fit into any subject and class,
so I sat down and developed a concept for a tablet-class. Inspired by lots of schools from all over the world
that have successfully established a 1-to-1 environment in their classes, I thought of changing the way we
use technology in our school. Thanks to the great Microsoft Innovative Educator community, I could easily
reach out to lots of experienced teachers and educators and seek and find inspiration, help and advice in
how to plan this project.
This project was planned to start in September 2015 and it took nearly two years of thinking and hard
work. BUT I was not starting from scratch. I could rely on strong and great concepts like for example the
“21 Steps to 21st Century Learning” by AALF (2) and MSNZ (3) and PIL Germany (4). And these resources
showed me once again that there is a lot more to think of than just buying tablets and give them into the
hands of students.
So I teamed up with my principal and some other colleagues and set the main aims for this tablet class. As
in our school every year there are 5 classes with up to thirty 14-years-old starting the first grade we decided
that one class will be called tablet PLUS class. The goal is/was to transform one class with a digital based
learning environment to help the students to achieve 21st century skills like collaboration and technology
use for their personal learning. We set the goal, that two thirds of the 30 hours/week-lessons the students
and teachers use a digital device to enhance learning and teaching. And in addition it would be great to
get rid of most of textbooks and booklets and binders.
The hardest part was to get 30 students and parents on board who are willing to pay for a high end tablet
device with stylus functionality. So we produced a promotion flyer, organized info-events and I was
interviewed by local newspapers to distribute the idea of our tablet PLUS class at the HAK Steyr to potential
new students.
3: Promotional flyer for our tablet PLUS class at HAK Steyr
Another very important thing was to empower the colleagues to work with this new environment and the
new possibilities within this tablet class. I regularly held workshops and meetings where I showed my
colleagues what could be done with tablet devices in their lessons.
Software
4: For each subject there is a dedicated OneNote Class Notebook, where students find the same environment
OneNote and Office 365 was clearly our choice for establishing the software-environment as we are an
Office 365 school since 2011. Therefore it was very welcome that Microsoft released the OneNote Class
Notebook to all O365-schools in February 2014! So I planned to create a dedicated OneNote Class
Notebook for every subject (15 in the first grade) with the teachers. The idea behind that was, that the
students have exactly the same environment in every subject and so their learning curve is very steep and
they are very soon OneNote-“masters”. So I installed a OneNote Class Notebook with every teacher in the
class and showed them some basic handling, but did not get too far into their planning and organizing their
lessons, so they can freely optimize the Notebooks to their needs.
Hardware
On the hardware side we have a very good WiFi and internet connection school-wide. So syncing and
working with the cloud was/is no problem. One of the most important things are certainly the devices for
the students. And as we were planning to shift to a true 1-to-1 environment, where books and binders are
(nearly) obsolete, I was looking for pen-enabled devices. But we wanted the full feature Windows PCenvironment, as lots of apps and programs that are used in our business school are Windows based. We
also wanted to get powerful devices with keyboards and good specs, so that they can be used over the 5year-period of our school. It was very important to me, that the devices are owned by the students, so no
tablet-trolley or school-maintained devices. The students have to see the tablet as their personal working
tool and they customize it. And most important: the have the use it out of school as well!
The plan was to offer three different types of devices starting with a price tag at 400 € (Acer Switch), a
670€ device (Surface 3) and a 900€ device (Surface Pro 3). The parents/students choose one of the devices
and the project team will get them in a bulk order. One thought behind that, was that we want the students
to have similar devices with the pen input, but they can choose according to what they/their parents can
afford.
Getting started
So in July 2015 we had 45 interested students/parents to be part
of this new tablet PLUS class project and we had to make some
(organizational-based) decisions to reduce them to 29 students.
17 of them bought a Surface 3, 12 a Surface Pro 3. So that’s why I
call this class the “first Surface class in Austria” (as far as I know).
The order and purchase process was not that smooth as planned,
but finally in November 2015 every student had his or her Surface
device.
Soon after we made a “installation party” to get all the OneNote
Notebooks synchronized onto the devices and we made “tabletcharta”, where we worked on some kind of “rules” for the use of
the tablets in class. It was very important for, that the students 5: tablet charta with "rules" for the use of the
are involved in this process and can speak out loud their tablets
expectations and needs. I was astonished how deep and
understanding their thinking about using the tablets was.
I also started a “OneNote-challenge” (5) to show students more the possibilities of OneNote and how to
use this wonderful app on their devices. Some students are truly OneNote avengers and can therefore
help others AND teachers with OneNote and the use of it in their lessons!
So after the first phase of distraction and chaos the students has reached some kind of productivity and
working attitude and I see fantastic learning going on in many, many subjects. As we are all learners, the
project has to develop and everybody working in this classroom – teachers AND students) as to evolve,
but I see lots of mind-shifting going on, on how teaching AND learning takes place in a 21 st century
environment.
The future looks bright
So the first feedbacks (done with interviews
and polls) are very positive and it looks like
that we have started a trend: there are a lot
of interested future students, who want to
be part of the next tablet PLUS class starting
in September 2016.
If you want to know more about this project,
feel free to follow my blog at
www.kurtsoeser.at, (6) where I post
regularly about the development of my
dream that has started years ago in Vienna. 6: Austria's first Surfae Class at the business college HAK Steyr
Resources
1. Söser, Kurt. YouTube. OneNote + Tablets = Maths 2.1. [Online] 2012.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECBOAOa7dxI.
2. AALF. Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation. [Online] 2008.
http://www.aalf.org/cms/?page=AALF%20-%2021%20Steps%20to%2021st%20Century%20Learning.
3. MSNZ. Microsoft New Zealand. [Online] 2010. https://www.microsoft.com/nz/21steps/.
4. PIL Germany. Microsoft Partners in Learning Deutschland. [Online] 2012. https://www.partners-inlearning.de/Fuer_Schulen/1619_21_Schritte.htm.
5. Söser, Kurt. Passsion, Vision and Future NOW. OneNote Challenge. [Online] 2015.
http://www.kurtsoeser.at/2015/12/01/onenote-challenge/.
6. —. Passion, Vision and Future NOW. Website Kurt Söser. [Online] 2016. http://www.kurtsoeser.at.
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