My idea of a good social experience for teachers

Posted by Bill in Personal ,  Teaching Diary on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 Permalink

This is a proposal I sent to our school social committee. I'm not sure what they will think about it!


I would like to have the first annual ASW Dungeons and Dragons game. The purpose of this game is to have fun and learn about a foundation of geek identity and culture, Dungeons and Dragons (version 4e). I imagine each game will take about 2 hours, with 5 to 6 players. I have already created the characters and settings, so gameplay should be fast. There is a a small bit of reading prior to each game, and ideally each player would watch one of the lord of the rings movies prior to playing.

The game would be classic D&D, "the hero's hack and slash to save the world kind-of-story". Players would choose a classic class such as fighters, barbarians, rogues, clerics, magic-users, wizards, archers, etc.. Players will have a chance to play the following races: human, elven, dwarven, goliath, and perhaps a dragon-born. They will in turn fight the classic monsters, including orcs, dire-wolves, skeletons, spiders, and perhaps even a beholder. I was thinking about the following dates:

Thursday, March 21 2013, from 1600 to 1800 in the board room
Thursday, March 28 2013, from 1600 to 1800 in the board room

Light snacks and drinks would be served (as is traditional for D&D games). I will handle all logistics, registration, total cost for one game would be less than 50 PLN for snacks.

Anyway, I know this is pretty far over on the "weird" scale, but it does strike me as a potentially fun and social experience for our community. I would especially welcome people who have never played Dungeons and Dragons before. My request is for you to think about this proposal and get back to me with your reaction. If enough of you think this should be a "go" I would ask that you talk it up with your various divisions.

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Stack Exchange: better questions and answers

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Support on Monday, February 25, 2013 Permalink

This post describes a neat site I've found and I wanted to share with you.

For as long as we've had the internet, we've had a place to ask questions and get answers. In fact, the very first internet spaces were called BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems). They were designed to facilitate questions and answers. Fast forward 30 years, and communities are still one of the most important parts of the internet. Asking, answering, and connecting are still at the heart of what it means to be online in 2013. However, most forums for communication are flat. Someone asks a question, and several people give different answers, only some of which may be right.
If only there was a way for us to interact with questions and answers that let the good stuff rise to the top. Enter Stack Exchange.  Stack Exchange has some pretty interesting features:
1. all questions are tagged. This means if you click on "structure" tag in the writing stack exchange, you will see all questions and answers related to structure;
2. all answers are voted on, and the top-rated answer is easily visible;
3. there is an ongoing comment stream for all questions. This gives you a sense to what isn't right about a question or answer;
4. you can contribute to answers or ask questions; 
5. all stack exchanges have an indicator if a question has been satisfactorily answered;
6. when someone asks a question on a Stack Exchange site, the community reviews, revises, and proposes answers to it;
7. answers are rated and ranked by the rest of the community;
8. members also vote for questions they find useful, or against those they see as unclear or unproductive. The more votes, the more visibility – so when you search, you get the best answer to the best question;
9.questions and answers can be edited by other members, Wikipedia-style. This lets the community continue to polish and update content even when the original authors aren't available.
(features 7, 8 and 9 are taken from this page)
Please take a moment or two to explore Stack Exchange. Stack exchange is an umbrella of many different areas of interest. Perhaps some of these may pique your curiosity:
Ask Different: a stack exchange for Apple users
English Language Usage: a stack exchange for serious linguists
Cooking: a stack exchange site about cooking
Photography: a stack exchange for questions and answers about photography
Physical fitness: a stack exchange about everything
Bicycles: you get the idea…
Math: for you know, math stuff
Biology: why did we evolve bladders, anyway?
German: questions about German language (or French if that is your thing)
Here's a list of all the different stack exchanges ordered by name.
I think Stack Exchange represents a modest but nice step forward in our quest to ask and answer questions about, well, anything online! Please let me know what you think, I'm curious to hear your reaction to this site.

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Minecraft with 7th graders

Posted by Bill in Games in education ,  Practical Advice on Sunday, June 10, 2012 Permalink

The tl;dr version:

Our 7th grade went on a field trip and re-created the visited city in Minecraft (learn about minecraft here). It didn't go as well as I hoped because I didn't plan well enough with all the teachers. Lots of awesome-sauce when kids started using the game (which is why we love games in education).

A slightly more thoughtful description of the whole thing:

Our 7th grade recently visited Zamosc (wikipedia-linkage here). It was a great trip. Everything about this trip was wonderfully planned; the learning prior, the planned exploration and interdisciplinary questions when the kids were in Zamosc, and the post-trip learning and projects. In many ways, this trip was a text-book example of how to really make the most of a field trip.

One of the old post-trip activities was to build a cardboard building in the city. Here's the learning: Zamosc is a very rare (and is listed on UNESCO sites here) example of a perfectly planned and realized Renaissance town. The city was designed and built along the principals of the human body, with the brain or head being the palace, the heart being a cathedral, yadda yadda yadda - read more about Zamosc here).

After hearing me blather about games and education, one of the teachers approached me and asked if we could try minecraft instead of the cardboard paper towel rolls. This project was her idea, not mine. So we decided to try building a city in minecraft that echoed the principals that we learned about in Zamosc. The kids were given rubrics, parents were notified, pre-built minecraft servers were purchased (Hey multiplay, how about some love for educational and non-profit folks with some educational pricing?).
We bought user licenses (thank you, minecraft EDU), installed the clients on the kids computers, and set off!

This project was run with four 7th grades (2 teachers, 2 classes each). Immediately, I noticed one class was taking off whilst the other wasn't quite. Coincidentally, I spent much more time planning with one teacher, and barely any with the other. Related to this, I didn't spend enough time with the middle school technology coach to plan this activity (I am the director of technology at our school). The coach was very helpful, but again, without clear planning, the project had some holes in the boat from the start.

Right away we saw some some great stuff. In one class, kids learned very quickly, helped each other, and began building. Whenever we use computer games (or any game) in education, the enthusiasm and energy goes nuclear. Especially with our boys, their engagement and involvement was a wonderful thing to see. In the other class we ran into technical problems (I'll get to that in a moment), and some "what do we do now" questions.

The kids built their cities fairly well. Based on our criteria, it was clear they understood the principals of Renaissance city ideals and had lovingly built their cities to reflect the same. By that measure, this project was a fantastic success. Here are four screengrabs that don't do any justice to the hard work of our kids.

However, as noted above, I cant really walk away and hand anyone a trophy. Next year? Maybe. But this project had all the classic marks of a first-time run. In the interest of sharing our success and failures, here's the list-o-things-you-should-think-about:

1. Classic: plan, plan, plan. I walked this through with one teacher, and not the other. It showed. I also didn't include the technology coach enough. Big oops.

2. Superflat world worked well for us, we used creative mode.

3. Using a company that rents pre-setup servers was a win for us (all we worried about was bandwidth) BUT....

4. Better to have a separate server for each class - much easier to manage. So with four 7th grades, I should of had four separate servers.

5. The only plug-in's I used were noTNT and one that stopped lava.

6. I didn't whitelist, and I should have. We had some vandalism that took away from the fun.

7. Kids love games. like, REALLY love them. Watching the time, energy, and motivation they poured into this project was satisfying. If I had put even an hour of more planning time into this, it would of been a home run.

Other teachers noticed this project, I hope to have more takers next year!

Evaluating Technology Coaches with NETS-C

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Leadership on Tuesday, May 29, 2012 Permalink

How do we know technology integration is bettering student learning?

Evaluating the effectiveness of technology integration is tricky because many different forces influence effective integration. We must speak with teachers, talk with students, evaluate integrators, reflect on learning goals, and look at academic achievement. We must understand the context and culture of technology use in a school. Just as understanding teaching and learning is complex, so is understanding technology integration. My point? Evaluating technology integration is not a simple thing.

I have not seen a good instrument for evaluating technology coaches (formally called technology integrators). Commonly, teacher evaluation forms are used with technology coaches. Wholly inappropriate. Coaching is different than teaching, the aims are different, the process is different, our understanding of successful coaching is different than our understanding of successful teaching. Where teachers must demonstrate an improvement to student learning, coaches must demonstrate an improvement to student learning through an improvement to teaching practice.

Working with the technology coaches at the American School of Warsaw, we have created an instrument based on the NETS-C (http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-coaches.aspx). Please find the word version by clicking on this link, and feel free to use it. Please do include the attribution.

Cyberbullying Protocol

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech on Friday, March 30, 2012 Permalink

This PDF is a cyberbullying protocol I wrote with the help of many different people at my school. I ran a parent technology partnership meeting this morning where we talked about cyberbullying and thought this might be helpful for some other schools. We are encountering more chat-based cyberbullying, and issues around chat (and google does not give us fine grain control over email settings). For those not interested in downloading:

In summary:

1. become aware
2. communicate to the team
3. get the story straight
4. intervene appropriately
5. follow up

In depth:

TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. UNFORTUNATELY, CYBERBULLYING IS A "DROP EVERYTHING AND DEAL WITH IT" ISSUE.

1. When an adult in the school becomes aware of a cybullying issue, or an issue they think might be cyberbullying, they should immediately report the concern to their school principal, counselor, technology coach, or technology director. If the adult has access to any digital information at this time (i.e. websites, blogs, messages, etc.) then they should take the opportunity to gather evidence through digital photos, screenshots, forwarding messages, etc. whenever possible.

2. Once informed, a member of the school administration team should communicate to:

the building principal
the building counselor
the technology director


3. The team should designate a fact finder, who will develop a timeline of the incident with any additional evidence (screen shots, network access logs, etc). The fact finder is responsible for making sure the team has a very clear understanding of the timeline of events.

4. The team should reconvene, make sure everyone agrees and is on board with the timeline, and then hand-off intervention to the building principal.

5. The team should meet after the incident to:

briefly debrief and review the incident.
ensure appropriate steps are taken in a larger context to address the issue.

Defining Games in Education

Posted by Bill in Games in education on Thursday, March 29, 2012 Permalink

From a wonderful email asking to define serious games, comes this answer:

To the layperson, a game is a game is a game. However to those of us in educational technology (and those of us passionate about games in education) the difference between Math Rabbit and Spore are gargantuan. To define those both as "games" is akin to calling Shakespeare and William McGonagall [1] "writers".

An educational game (computer): aka: edutainment, is a deliberately structured and scaffolded learning activity, usually constructed with colorful, fun puzzles interspersed with learning activities. These games often require a set number of solved problems which are followed by a short animation, cutscene, or puzzle game. Learning activities are often framed within the game theme. For example, learners may be playing a bowling game where simple math problems are superimposed on each of the pins. As the player correctly answers the math problems, the pins are knocked down. When the player has knocked all the pins down, they may have an opportunity to virtually roll a bowling ball down the lane, and hit some pins, without needing to answer any math problems.

A serious game (computer): players controls a limited number of variables to effect an outcome in a specific scenario. They are usually web-based, they usually have a very specific theme (peace in the mideast, health care, politics), they are not meant to be in-depth simulations, they are meant to model the most important dynamics in a specific scenerio, they are short-term games, they are deliberately designed to teach, explain an issue, or clarify the dynamics of an issue, and the point is to simplify complex issues to players gain an understanding of this issue.

Although you didn't ask, there is one other category of games - I will give a very short definition:

COTS - commercial off the shelf games, where there is no pretense of education. These games are built solely for the purpose of entertainment. COTS games can cost tens of millions of dollars to produce [2] but hit titles can bring hundreds of millions of dollars [3]. When used in the context of good instructional design, COTS games can be powerful learning tools.

These definitions are mine. I give them to freely to use, but please attribute
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)


Please share your paper with me when you publish it!

Warmly,

Bill


[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall

[2]
http://uk.games.ign.com/articles/708/708972p1.html

[3]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/18/modern-warfare-2-records-775m

Getting Geeks Going

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Teaching Diary on Monday, March 26, 2012 Permalink

One of my favorite things about education technology is finding young geeks, and getting them started on a good road forward. I think my most professionally rewarding experiences have been helping kids with a nascent interest in computers or IT get their feet off the ground.

It's pretty easy to find the geeks, they hang out a lot in the computer lab or the networking center. The first thing I do is look for the kids who only want to game. I ask them questions that help me see if they are curious to learn more about computers and IT. If they don't seem interested, I let them be. But if they do seem interested, I try to see what area of computers and IT I can steer them into. This list of questions is a good start. If a kid lights up about one thing, we push into that area of IT. Fun stuff. Perhaps this will help someone else get their geeks going at their school.

1. You have three computers at home, and you want to share files between the computers. All the computers can go online, and you can ping the computers IP address, but you can't seems to share files between them. You don't want to use dropbox, because you know an internal network is much (much) faster than dropbox. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

2. You are playing a multiplayer game and you notice latency. Interestingly, though, the latency seems random. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

3. You visit moodle for your classwork, google calendar for your events and appointments, and maybe gmail for some groupwork. you also spend some time looking at blogs and wiki's from your teachers class. You are tired of doing this, and you have decided to program a portal page that would slurp information from all these different sites into one page. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a program?

4. You want to write an application that would work on a iPhone or iPad. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a program?

5. You are pretty sure someone is hacking through your computer. You don't know why, but you think they are. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

6. You want to write a graphically-rich, hella-fun game. What steps do you take to implement the grand design of your game?

7. There is a cute girl in your science class, and you want to impress her by writing a highly complex formula in Excel. You have no idea if this will work, but hey, why not try?! You have an idea to write a formula that will instantly convert a currency amount into another currency using live exchange rates. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

8. You want to build a device that has an infrared sensor fixated on your door. When the door is opened, three things happen: 1. a light chime goes off, 2. your computer automatically goes to a random educational site, 3. a picture is taken of the person entering your room and emailed to your email account. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

9. You want to add a better graphics card and more RAM to your home computer. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

10. You want to setup an website. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

11. You want to setup a comlex website with membership modules, forums, file mangers, and stuff like that. What steps do you take to understand the problem and implement a fix?

CEESA Games in Education Notes

Posted by Bill in Games in education on Friday, March 16, 2012 Permalink

I just had an opportunity to present a games in education presentation at the 2012 CEESA conference (PDF here and link to google presentation here).

I continue my search and work around games in education. I marvel at the passion, energy, and enthusiasm kids throw into their games. It's amazing. I know we can use games successfully, and my experience informs the potential for success.

Project Management in Education

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Leadership on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 Permalink

Do tasks, milestones, resources, work-breakdown-structures, gantt charts, PERT charts, and TCQ belong in K-12 education?

As I grow in my role as a director of technology, the ability to effectively plan and organize has emerged as a key skill. Last year I realized I sucked, horribly, at large-scale project planning. I have just finished a project management course (not a certification course, thank you very much), and I am very excited about what I learned!

In a nutshell, I have learned to spend much more time planning, really getting clear about scope (and vision), deliverable tasks, milestones, and map resources. I presented this to the leadership team today, and I think it was well received; my essential message was "when you come to IT with a project, we are going to spend much more time getting really clear about what you want, mapping the time and resources, and delivering a high-quality solution for your team".

I am reading everything I can get my hands on. Here's the current list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware
http://books.google.pl/books/about/Project_Management_For_Dummies.html?id=f5AvtIprasYC&redir_esc=y
http://www.scottberkun.com/making-things-happen/
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-System-Network-Administration-Second/dp/0321492668

(this next one isn't quite related to project management)

http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Proof-God-Loves-ebook/dp/B00403MNSK

Just the idea of brainstorming every task related to a project and then scheduling those tasks makes me feel so much more relaxed. I also like the democratic nature of the planning. For example, we'll get everyone related to a project in a room, and they will think of every possible task needing to be addressed for a project. Then we will schedule the tasks (using sticky notes), identify resources, and finally slurp all that into a project management tool (we'll probably go with MS Project 2010 standard). This will then give us a clear picture of our project and tasks - and who is doing what. Moreover, we will have clarity about how long a project will take, what resources we will use, and even basic costs (if I do costs - I might not).

I don't have a clear vision for how we will assign and track tasks once the project commences. Our small team is very high functioning, and I dont need to manage a whole lot, but I am thinking a lot more about the "management" part of project management. It seems like many of the tools online (attask, wrike, 5pm, basecamp) are designed to monitor task performance - which is important - but for me, it is the planning that is uber-sexy.

I'll write more later.

domain name problems

Posted by Bill in Personal on Thursday, February 02, 2012 Permalink

hey readers!

I’m in the midst of trying to resolve some domain name problems. Fortunately, I’ve been mirroring, so if mackenty.org goes down, poke around here: http://97.107.132.124/index.php

oh, and how do any Directors of Technology have time to blog?!?

The Digital Citenzship Opportunity

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Leadership on Monday, December 12, 2011 Permalink

Digital Citizenship has always been a nebulous idea for me. I always appreciated and referred people to Zen and the art of the internet when understanding "how to be" on the internet.

At my current school digital citizenship is not at the front of our ship right now; however, I do see evidence of digital citizenship infused into our curriculum in the form of "laptop drivers licenses", AUP's, (and RUP's), and we also have a very well defined cyberbullying protocol which is sadly used more than I'd like to. Our middle school employs a monitoring tool to support students to make good choices. We had our very first "red-card" situation this week in the MS, where two boys were playing games after being warned repeatedly. We have a pretty good system to support abuses, and we have an excellent system to communicate with parents (not just about digital citizenship, but everything else related to technology).

Perhaps the best opportunity we have to help our community understand digital citizenship is when there is a problem. We had a case last year where, literally, 2 days after a 3 week digital citizenship course some kids made a gossip-girl-style facebook group with extraordinary hurtful things on it. This after an intensive course! The real teaching and learning happened at that moment of opportunity, parents, students, and teachers were all hot about this issue, and that is when we saw real change and awareness in student thinking about digital citizenship. I've found the cyberbullying protocol to be especially effective in resolving specific issues.

CEESA Minecrafting

Posted by Bill in Games in education on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 Permalink

Amazing, The Central Eastern European School Association (CEESA) has created a Minecraft server that schools from across Central Europe are playing in. The server, located in Moscow, is available for students at any CEESA school. I ran my video-game club through our first trial of minecraft yesterday afternoon, and we had a neat time. This project has just started, but with many schools involved, it is enormously exciting. I am hopeful for a bright future. Here's our experiences, and some reflections about this experience and learning.

Initial expectation about the experience.

For many players in our video game club, there really is nothing better than killing your friend in the most imaginative way possible. In gamer terms, this is known as griefing. We reviewed a prezi made by a student in Moscow with the rules, which offered common-sense suggestions like not destroying each others buildings, killing other players, and generally being rude. The members of my video game club were shocked and let-down when they realized this wouldn't be part of their minecraft experience.

When they saw no zombies, spiders, and explody-thingies, they were again disappointed. There was an intelligent conversation about the "essence" of minecraft - what made it a game, what makes it fun, why people come back. There seemed to be a general consensus that with a common enemy (mobs) players would have a reason to visit the game more often. We are going to suggest adding in PvE (or perhaps, just a part of the world can be PvE).

But then, there is that whole "game" thing going on.

Despite their concerns, they were very quickly immersed in the world. We saw the center of the world and set off to build the Polish section of the world. We built a big Polish flag, and started building a platform. There is an idea to build a very big train system linking the different districts, and the center district. Last night, still learning about Minecraft, I started building The Wieliczka Salt Mines.

I was reminded again why I am drawn to games as a powerful tools for learning. The students excitement, motivation, and energy was palpable. They were pointing at the screen, shouting and yelling, impassioned. And then, they started building; trying to make the most beautiful buildings they could. There were complaints about student players being 'ops'. I promised them I would investigate (I think the server is set up for creative mode).

As my readers may know, I am an enthusiastic proponent of Dr. Richard Bartle's player types - which basically states people play games for different reasons (explorer, socializer, achiever, and griefer) there are other types, but you get the idea. I saw my student quickly adapt their playing styles to the confines of this world, and just love it.

Learnings and further steps

1. We have an opportunity to learn, discuss and reflect on online behavior, ethics, and community. This server offers a lens for us to participate in a virtual community - and learn much in the process. These kids don't know each other - there is very little glue to keep them together.

2. There is an amazing opportunity to build important cultural buildings and places here - why not a famous church in Croatia, the famous metro system in Moscow (or Red Square), old town in Kracow, beautiful sites in Helsinki, etc... Why not create a microcosm of Europe on a minecraft server? Here we see a place where students can virtually represent anything.

3. Teachers have an opportunity to learn how to teach and work with other schools in CEESA. Our athletics department might be able to give us some advice - how do you work with CEESA kids you don't really know? I would like to begin offering online / blended courses in Warsaw to other students throughout CEESA. This server is a great place for us to fall flat on our faces as we learn to virtually interact with each other.

For further steps, I suggest we:

1. Build a collaborative vision of our minecraft server - At some point, we need to be able to answer the "why are we doing this" question.

2. Institute a "uservoice" type service so the different schools can agree on what sorts of features they would want in the game (http://uservoice.com/feedback). Basically, uservoice allows users to vote on a feature request, and it is very easy to quickly see what your community thinks is important.

3. Maybe have a guiding question or idea in the moodle forum each week. We can then focus our efforts in the game towards answering this question or exploring this idea.

One last thought - games are educational in very different ways; please don't think "playing minecraft will make their math skills stronger". Take a quick peek here for some summaries and thoughts about games and learning I've written over the last 5 or 6 years.

Game on!

In response to the classroom of the future…

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech ,  Design ,  Leadership ,  Support on Monday, September 05, 2011 Permalink

We start here: In the Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores. It may help if you review the usual snarky and intelligent discussion about this here on slashdot.

The New York Times has published a story by Matt Richtel has written a piece which discusses technology-rich schools not fairing so well on standardized tests. I’m sure the article is factually correct; the impression I am left with is that any use of technology in a school is suspect. I would say the main point of this article is we are spending scads of money an educational technology, and we don’t know if it works.

Fair question, good article. I have several responses, in no particular order. FYI: I’m the director of technology at a major international school, and I’ve been in the educational technology world for more than 10 years.

1. If you teach with technology the same way you taught without it, you are missing the point. I’ve seen many teachers use an interactive whiteboard the exact same way as a normal whiteboard. What’s the point? Technology is a cognitive tool that enables collaboration, constructivist learning, and truly differentiated teaching and learning. But if we don’t change the way we teach to support those ends, we will not reach them.

2. There is something transformational happening in our world. I point to the Arab Spring, and the use of social networking as concrete evidence of this transformation. I also appeal to common sense; that a student can pick up a smartphone, and answer any question, any time, anywhere is simply astounding. Augmented reality again points to a future where we can know anything, anytime, anywhere. The real question (and one I'm not sure Mr. Richtel answered) is "what does the transformation of communication and ubiquitous knowledge mean for education?". I think he observed and wrote a plain truth; schools don't "get" tech. Especially in the context of standardized test scores, the kind of deep learning we know works doesn't happen. My bias in learning is deep knowledge is better than broad knowledge. I see students able to "hang" new experiences onto something they already know.

3. I'm currently teaching a SUNY Buffalo graduate course, ED603 Technology: Best Practice as a Catalyst for Learning. Just last Saturday, we culled through some research which essentially said "the efficacy of technology really depends how you use it". There are very clear studies which show that if you are lecturing in a room full of laptops, technology actually inhibits learning; mainly through distraction (and a zone of distraction which flows from behind the student). The big problem I see in ed tech is technology (as a noun) is simply thrown into a classroom without any real effort to realize the verbs - how will teaching and learning be better? What about professional development?

4. There is a difference between using technology to help students learn and using technology to help teachers teach. Ideally, both things are happening. If a teacher has an online component to their classroom (like a moodle course, or a class-blog, or a class website) that is great! They are communicating with parents, perhaps they are posting assignments, or even class notes. This is great, but how is it helping students learn? If a teacher changes the way they are using their online classroom (like peer editing module, or portfolio module, or wiki module) then we start seeing how technology is changing the way our students learn. We see the same thing with interactive whiteboards. If a teacher is simply substituting a whiteboard for an interactive whiteboard, then it doesn't make much sense to use an interactive board. However, a small change in behavior on the part of the teacher can have wonderful value-add. If a teacher starts save their notes electronically, and then post them online, we see accessibility and availability increase. If we see a teacher ask students to start creating lessons for their peers, then we really start to see this tool work. If a teacher incorporates videos, polls and other interactive elements in their teaching, then that interactive whiteboard starts to be more than just an expensive whiteboard. It is this question we must concern ourselves with; how is technology making learning better?

5. I believe, all things being equal, it is better to not use technology if you are not changing the way you teach, and students learn. If you plan on merely substituting teaching and learning with the same tool, you will realize some benefits, but not a "real learning awakening". This goes to the heart of success in educational technology, how is learning going to be different? This requires real visioning, training, support and most importantly, changing the way we imagine learning and teaching.

I'll enjoy the comments and conversation.

How do you evaluate technology coaches?

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Leadership ,  Teaching Diary on Monday, August 01, 2011 Permalink

How should we formally evaluate technology integrators? You know, the folks in the classrooms, meeting with teachers, holding workshops, coordinating trainings, hand holding, pushing, shoving, cajoling, and generally doing everything they can to move technology forward. Saints, the lot of them.

We have a special opportunity this year to create a formal evaluation for these folks. As technology director, I'll be formally co-evaluating the technology coaches with the building principals. These evaluations will be "official-in-the-personnel-file" evaluations. So what should be on them?

Some of them are pretty easy:

communication skills
organization and planning
contribution to the work environment

But what about the meat and potatoes? How do we point to a technology coach and say "yup, that is effective technology coaching". Do I look at teachers that have worked with the technology coach? Do I look at the students who are in the classes? Artifact research? I see many technology coaches using project-based integration. Maybe we should just look at projects and base evaluation on their projects - that seems a bit thin to me, though. The purpose of evaluating a technology coach is to evaluate if this person is improving student learning in our school through the effective use of technology.

I'm wondering:

Are the coaches available for teachers?
Are the presentation of training differentiated?
Are the coaches working to change building culture?
Do we see teachers using technology effectively and progressing with coaches?
Are coaches using differentiated instructions for their teachers?
Are coaches partnering?

Ultimately, I think the smart thing to do is let the coaches build their own evaluation instrument. Of course, we will include goal statements and all that other normal stuff, but I think they all know best.

What are your thoughts? What do you use to evaluate technology coaches?

The 10 moms doctrine

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech ,  Design ,  Security ,  Support ,  Teaching Diary on Thursday, July 28, 2011 Permalink

If you ask 10 different moms what they would do in a given scenario, you will get 10 different answers. Especially related to computer use, filtering, and behavioral standards. Last year our school had a strong parent technology partnership program (I intend to build on it this year). One of our activities was to present a scenario and ask parents what they would do (this was led by the indomitable Nick Kwan). One of the questions was "what would you do if you walked into your child's workspace and they quickly minimized a window?". The answers ranged from "nothing" to "take the computer away for a week".

Our school has a one to one laptop program. The school owns the laptops and the students take the computers home with them. We use open dns for filtering. The students have admin access to their laptops (which is a topic for another blog post - I love it).

We got several (well-placed) criticisms last year which stated students were coming home with laptops, and parents had no way to control this device. I considered this complaint fair, because there really are a wide range of parental attitudes and beliefs to technology use. I tend to be fairly liberal and open about tech use, but many parents are not - they are conservative and very careful about technology use. Is it fair to send kids home with no way for parents to control their device? Of course we talk about social contracts, and talking with your child, and trust - but some parents have strong beliefs that a computer should be locked down (the 10 moms doctrine).

The obvious choice is to install filtering software and teach parents how to use it (or teach them to use open dns). It's an option. If parents want to activate filtering, we tell them how to do it. If they don't want to activate filtering, then they don't. We are clear that there is to be no filtering during school time, only at home (from 3:00pm to 7:00am). We also talk about parenting advice and tips and offer parents a venue to discuss technology issues and share solutions to problems with each other. We talk about the technical weakness of filtering, that filtering alone can't solve many problems, and that at the end of the day, there has to be some kind of involvement with parents and their child's technology.

tl;dr: people have different values, ed tech should do what they can to respect and support those values.

More on learning HTML 5

Posted by Bill in Personal ,  Teaching Diary on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 Permalink

I have encountered a wonderful resource for learning HTML 5, Dive into HTML 5 by Mark Pilgrim. Not sure which adjectives to use, so I'll just use the always-helpful-but-not-really-because-it-is-overused, "awesome".

Everything about this online book is great - I even (finally) got educated about unicode and character sets. His links for further reading are great. I've spent about 4 hours just reading and digesting - I'll certainly come back to this as I learn more and start implementing an HTML 5 site.