Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

Educational Tech

In the formidable book IT Governance Policies & Procedures by Michael Wallace, Larry Webber, there are hundreds of pages devoted to the effective management of IT in the enterprise. 

The chapters are sound, well thought out, and concise.  Every important topic is covered - from patch management, to software development, hiring, policies and procedures, to authoring ISO documentation to surviving audits. The enclosed CD is a great resource - with all the forms and documents from all the chapters.

As I was looking through the book, I couldn’t help but notice the discrepancy between corporate IT, educational IT, the way IT should be done and the way I’ve seen IT run in a school.

In the enterprise, IT supports the business operations and mission. If your company makes plastic frogs, then everything about IT works towards that end - it’s singular, focused, and a convenient measuring stick. Because enterprise corporations seem to love process, procedures, and clear goals, their IT structure reflects that culture. 

In K - 12 schools, IT also supports the mission of the education. IT is also an end in and of itself. I’ve previously written how I see IT in schools; that essentially the 2 things IT does in schools is help make administrative life easier for our teachers and staff, and strengthens learning for kids - that these are 2 different, separate areas of IT in schools.

However, the ideal falls short in the face of the real. Ok, we should patch all our computers regularly to keep them healthy. We have 4 or 5 different versions of two or three operating systems. We have very old computers that can’t be updated. We don’t have the staff to go to each computer - and in some places we can’t get auto-update to work because of network problems.

We are short of support, short of money, and short of time. And in that sort of context, Wallace and Webber’s ideas fall to pot.

We try to do it by the book - but this kind of process takes time and organization that most schools simply don’t have.

However, we are not short of expertise, and we can be nimble. Unfortunately, 3 highly skilled IT people with 1500 users doesn’t fit into a “policy and procedure” kind of place. It’s fits into a barely managed chaos model. So IT spends time supporting existing systems, and it’s difficult to move forward. Teachers are understandably nervous about adopting technology for their classrooms (who would want to start something that might break and never get fixed). So it is difficult to move forward - but we manage.

PBS videos have come to iTunes. 

Free? Yup
Good? Check.
Available? Yes.
Accessible on a multitude of devices? Yarp

When people ask me “How does technology make a difference in the actual education of our kids?” I often stress multimedia.  That is, using multimedia enlivens and enriches ideas in a way normal media can’t. I’m aware of other multimedia sites, (you tube, this list, and of course google), but nothing beats PBS for sheer quality.

This is great, great news. 

I found a great podcast today and as I was listening, I heard a teacher talking about how a smartboards might not fit into his curriculum.  This raised 2 very interesting issues for me. The interesting value of smartboards, and how technology isn’t always the best choice.

I wrote a reply as a comment, but wanted to elaborate on it here.

I have an observation about smartboards. We have tons of smartboards in our school (23 of them, with another 14 coming soon). I understand it might not work for your particular discipline, but the interesting thing is what happens when you get technology close to your teachers. 

We found that having a projector / screen in the room, ready to go, makes using technology so easy, that even our low-tech teachers are using the smartboards.  It’s a real lesson in “if you make technology easy to use, and immediately accessible, teachers will use it!”. We are using the 600i series, so a teacher can use it to write notes, then easily save the notes, and upload them to a course management system. But basically, all a teacher needs to do is turn it on, and start writing. Very positive. Because our smartboards have speakers, teachers can plug in their ipods, dvd players, or vcr’s to show videos.

I also really respect your comment about how technology doesn’t fit into your teaching.  I know plenty of teachers who have thoughtfully considered using technology and decided it didn’t fit into their curriculum. This wasn’t a fear-based response, it was a result of carefully considering the technology, looking at the whole picture (support, pedagogy, student technology use, and budgetary issues) and then deciding it wasn’t for them.  We have a math teacher at our school who likes to use the entire board to write a formula, or work a problem through. She likes her students to see the entire problem, from start to finish across the board-space.  This particular boardwork wouldn’t fit on a smartboard, which uses a page-by-page style to display lots of information.

I suggest anyone who hasn’t heard of these folks subscribe to the blog linked above, and their podcast.

I got this question from a new instructional technology specialist - I think it’s a great question, and I wanted to share it with my readers!

Some teachers have asked me about bookmarking some websites that the children are using for research here in the lab. I have two questions:
1. Do you have a policy about bookmarking in your lab? It seems to me that over time there would be a ridiculous maze of websites favorited on each machine? Any suggestions or policies for me?

yup. we don’t allow it at all in the high school. In fact, we have software installed on our lab computers that, literally, re-formats the computers every evening and restores the computer to a nice clean pristine state. Please see my answer to #2 for an idea.

2. If I do place bookmarks on all the machines in the lab, is there an easy way to update all of them at once or do I have to place the bookmarks in each browser manually?

I would stay away from bookmarking websites on the kids browsers. instead, I would put only one bookmark, something to a shared bookmarking tool, like del.icio.us. This way, you can quickly update the links only once, and all the kids see the updated link. If I am not mistaken, I think this is how our math teacher manages his links - he has his own website, and the kids are sent to the website, where they can see the links.  The nice thing about del.ico.us is you can share the links and sites can have multiple tags - so a site for math could have “math”, “4th grade”, “shapes”, and maybe “geometry”. Our librarian in the High School, uses a blog, where he updates with an assignment or some links - so all the kids need to do is go on his site.

You could also start a blog, or make a google pages site, but I think something like del.icio.us would be a good place start. The other reason I like del.icio.us is because if something horrible happens to our computers, we are not in trouble, and the kids can access the sites from home Hope this helps.

Warmly,

Bill

Great article (pdf) in Salon entitled “What’s the matter with kids today?” - the byline, Nothing, actually. Aside from our panic that the Internet is melting their brains.

Some choice quotes:

“Teenagers today read and write for fun; it’s part of their social lives. We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool instead of meeting it with punishing pop quizzes and suspicion.”

“We need to start trusting our kids to communicate as they will online—even when that comes with the risk that they’ll spill the family secrets or campaign for a candidate who’s not ours.”

“Once we stop regarding the Internet as a villain, stop presenting it as the enemy of history and literature and worldly knowledge, then our teenagers have the potential to become the next great voices of America. One of them, 70 years from now, might even get up there to accept the very award Lessing did—and thank the Internet for making him or her a writer and a thinker.”

I’m reminded of course, that technology in education is a tool. It is a means to an end.  Technology extends learning, it doesn’t stifle it. This is the central argument I make on a daily basis - technology strengthens, deepens and broadens our learning. Of course at the end of the day, good education is about good teaching. 

Today I helped one of our technicians update some laptops. We don’t have a push server, so it’s a manual job - each laptop for 25 minutes. 

I have spoken about the importance of support before, and I suppose I just wanted to say it again. Technology is more than equipment and blinking lights (to be sure, that’s the fun part for me).  However, without technical, and in-class support for the teachers, it really won’t shine.