Month: March 2020

I have been conducting my observations at the Hawken School. The technology department is made up of ten adult members as well as a student staff of about 15 currently active students. The three main contacts in the tech office include Ryan Wooley, Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Directors of Technology Rick Bartel and Dave Solema. There is also Rennie Greenfield and John Guinan who are charged with Technology, Library and Media Services. I have spoken with all of the above members about working with technology both in and out of the classroom as well as availability from off campus.

There is a plethora of different technology available to the students at Hawken. All students are provided with a Lenovo Yoga for the duration of their schooling beginning in the seventh grade and prior to those years, students have access to tablets in each classroom. All employees are given a Lenovo Yoga as well. All members of the community (students, faculty, and staff) have access to projectors, sound systems, Adobe programs, Microsoft Office Suite and many other options for programming. There is an entire multi-media center in the building where students have a green screen or white screen and can create original content for projects. Everything created from the lap top can be shared to the cloud (Hawknet) where students and teachers have access to data. There is a lot a 3D printing studio and a Fab Lab where students can build and create using technology. There are projectors in every classroom that students have wireless access to from their school issued lap tops. In the athletics building for human performance classes, students have access to pedometers and heartrate monitors. Their progress is automatically sent to an app on any smart mobile device so they can keep track of their physical well-being. All of these features are at no extra cost to the students or family.

If students are having any issues with their devices, there is a tech office staffed with three adults as well as their student staff at all times. They have loaners available for students if they can’t figure out the problem quickly.

In an interview I conducted with John Guinan, he stated that the technology department (for application level firewalls), can block specific applications to each individual device depending on whom has control of the device. “Rules are created to allow or deny entire application and can even allow a certain application, while blocking individual features of the app. For instance, many schools block such applications such as snapchat or YouTube.” He also admitted that the firewall is pretty easy to get around. Students have figured out that they can connect to their mobile phone’s hotspot in order to get around the firewall that the schools server uses. Hawken also uses VPN or the Tor Browser to help with safety and security for its users. 

A systems admin, or other IT professional is in control of the firewall and its’ settings. All five members of the tech team listed above have been extremely helpful in understanding the technology that is available at Hawken. They are all extremely knowledgeable and willing to talk about how to progress with technology in the classroom setting.

The students that I am observing are currently taking a Human Performance 101 class at Hawken. In this class they are required to use heart rate monitors and pedometers during the class period to better understand their physical activity.

The students all are given their technological equipment at the beginning of the class and are required to wear it for the full hour. In the corner of the gymnasium is a large television screen hooked up to a laptop that displays a program so they can see each student from the classes progress in regards to their heart rate and steps taken. The heart rate data is color coded, so green is comfortable, yellow is pushing your heart rate and red means it is high. The students are learning which levels their heartrate needs to be at and how long the heart rate needs to remain there in order to achieve the results they are looking for.

At the beginning of class, the teacher takes the students through a warm up before their main activity and this week’s activity was kickball. During the warm up I observed a lot of students checking their heartrate monitor or pedometer to see where they are at with their data. Following the warm up, more than half of the class would approach the larger screen and discuss their data with their peers. The students also have access to this information on their personal lap tops that are distributed by the school to each student. The teacher provided the students with multiple scenarios and had them working in small groups to decide where the heart rate should be in order to obtain the goals.

When talking to the students about using this type of technology outside of the classroom, 12 of the 15 students stated that they track their steps or heart rates. Many of them use their apple watch while others use a fit bit or other tracking device. On their apple watch they can monitor their heart rate throughout the day, check the amount of steps they have taken as well as how many calories they have burned. I also talked to the students about social media and if they think it could be helpful in the classroom setting. Most students feel that technology and different applications are such a large part of their lives, it would be helpful to learn how to use them in regard to academics. The students felt that using their current surroundings and updated technology only improves their understanding of the knowledge the teachers are trying to pass along.

The final thing that I discussed with the students was how the use of technology in a physical education/human performance class enhanced their experience. Some of the students who have no interest in physical activity said they actually enjoyed this class now because there is an element of statistics that they can analyze after they complete their goal.