Taste of Tech

This year, like most, there were lots of sessions at the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference about new technologies. There was a definite theme to many of them: overcoming the taboos of technology. In our schools, cell phones have been governed by a variation on “don’t ask, don’t tell.” We know that nearly all of our middle- and high-school students have them. They bring them to school. We know that. They know we know that. They’re not allowed to use them. As long as we don’t see them, and they don’t cause a disruption, we don’t care if they have them.

Photo credit: chernobylBob on flickr

What can these phones do? They can certainly make phone calls and send and receive text messages. They all have digital cameras. Most of them can record audio and video. A few students have smartphones that can access the web, run applications, and do other amazing things. While they’re not a replacement for a computer, they are capable of doing a lot of useful things. Creating a student response system with them to get immediate feedback would be pretty easy to do. Having students using them for digital storytelling would be possible. And the processing power in even the most basic phone is many times more powerful than even the most advanced scientific (and, perhaps, graphing) calculators that we used when I was in school. In a school / political environment / economic situation where we’re not going to be able to provide laptops for every student in the near future, we should be taking every possible advantage of the technology they already have.

But cell phones have problems. When students send inappropriate pictures of themselves to one another, it’s a cause for concern. When they do it at school, it could be a potential liability. Having the ability to text and access the Internet has to change how we do assessment. And, unlike the school Internet connections, cell phones don’t have filtered Internet access. While the school is only legally required to filter Internet access on devices provided by the school, in practice few administrators and teachers would be happy with a solution that makes it trivial for students to access any online content at any time from school.

Likewise, we have the same problems with social networking tools. We know that it can be valuable for students to build relationships, connections, personal learning networks. We also know that social networks are primarily just that — social. In addition to being a useful communication tool, it can be an excellent time waster. And many school officials point out that they open up new avenues for cyberbullying, further distracting teachers and school leaders with discipline and student management issues that can be avoided by blocking access to such services.

It is possible to set up walled-garden versions of social networks. Both Buddypress and Elgg give students the opportunity to participate in a closed system, where only other people affiliated with the school can participate. This can help, because trying such systems to network accounts ensures accountability, and allows the school to make the students accountable for the choices they make when using such tools. But, again, it’s a path few schools are chosing to follow.

Even cloud computing resources, like web-based email and Google Apps accounts, can raise concerns. Giving students email accounts increases the liklihood that they’ll be accidentally exposed to inappropriate content. Once they start getting on spam lists, it’s almost certain that they’ll receive unsolicited messages, even with the best anti-spam software. Plus, both email and Google Docs give students a way to get inappropriate content into the school. A picture, video, or application could be emailed or uploaded to the Google account, and then accessed from school. I don’t know of any foolproof filtering solutions that would solve this problem.

The sessions at eTech that dealt with these technologies were much more optimistic. It was nice to hear about several schools that have successfully implemented these types of technologies. Mostly, success seems to depend on pre-planning, setting expectations, and enforcing the rules. Rather than relying on the technology to tell the students what they can or cannot do, they have to take a certain sense of responsibility. And there have to be consequences for making poor choices.

Overall, I’m optimistic that these technologies can have a place in the classroom. It’s just a matter of identifying how and where they’ll be most beneficial, and designing an implementation strategy to fit those needs.

Posted on February 4th, 2010 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page, Opinions, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Last weekend, I was struck by the difference in approach between ISTE and Educon. Last month, ISTE announced their “Top Ten in ‘10,” which identifies their ten priorities for boosting student achievement and closing the achievement gap.

They start off the list this way:

Establish technology in education as the backbone of school improvement. To truly improve our schools for the long term and ensure that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve in the 21st century, education technology must permeate every corner of the learning process.

The list goes on from there, and promotes the use of technology at the center of career readiness, professional development, pre-service teacher education, and assessment. They do, eventually, get to research and digitial citizenship. But the theme of the list is very clear: technology is the center of education. If we focus on the technology, everything else ties in to it and we can solve our education problems.

Granted, it’s ISTE’s mission to promote the use of technology in education. But it’s a mistake to make technology the focus of education. We’ve been talking for a while about getting away from the tools, and speding more time focusing on what we’re actually doing with the technology — how it changes the things students and teachers are doing, and how it affects the way they learn. But even the “technology integration” perspective is frequently misguided. Too often, it’s “hey, here’s this really cool gadget. I’m sure it has a lot of possible uses in education. We have to find some.” I myself have been guilty of that. Just yesterday, I said in my presentation that we have to find some relevant, useful, authentic ways to use these cell phones effectively in education. That, too, misses the point.

Educon Wordle by Christopherl

Compare all of this to Educon. This conference had nearly all of the heavy hitters in educational technology. I briefly talked to David Warlick yesterday about his experience there. He admitted it was a little intimidating. When you look over your audience and see half of your blogroll sitting there, it can be a little unnerving. But despite the overwhelming support of Educon by the edtech leaders, they’re very clear that this isn’t a technology conference.

And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas — from the very practical to the big dreams.

David reflected that technology didn’t even come up most of the time. In his conversation, when they were plotting activities on his Daggett/Bloom grid, he asked them how they could adapt the activities to put them higher on the Bloom’s scale. They came up with more probing questions, better activities, and modified procedures. But instead of saying, for example, “the kids could blog about it,” they were more apt to say that “the kids could reflect about it in their journals.” It doesn’t matter if the journal is on a blog or on paper. The focus is on the teaching and learning.

At eTech, there seems to be a strong sense that we have all of this technology — we have these great resources. We have these wonderful tools. We have to find an innovative use for them in the classroom. Maybe we’re looking at it from the wrong side. If we spent more time focusing on the “what and how” of learning, we can plug the technology in where it’s most appropriate, and most productive. I wonder what would happen if this conference (and the ISTE conference) were more like Educon.

Posted on February 2nd, 2010 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page | 1 Comment »

The problem started because a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It was 1999. I had a new job. My predecessor had ordered a new server, which arrived after I did. I didn’t know the first thing about setting up or running a server. But I had web access, and I had some help, and before I knew it, the students and staff had accounts and storage space, we were hosting our own web site, and technology had become mission-critical.

Photo credit: Billie Hara on Flickr

Before that point, if the technology didn’t work, there was always a plan B. Teachers didn’t check email every day. We didn’t have computers in all of our classrooms. Students were almost never required to use computers, except in computer-specific classes.

It wasn’t long before I felt comfortable enough with the new server. It helped that it would break occasionally. Without any remaining consultant time and no budget, I learned to fix things. Eventually, we added another server. And then another. And then one for each building. And then backup servers and email servers and archive servers. Then, administrators started buying applications that required their own servers: online gradebooks, professional development packages, food service point of sale systems. Before I knew it, I had 30 servers.

And the mission-critical nature of most of them had become evident. If something was the matter, I’d hear about it quickly. And keeping everything running was proving harder and harder, especially with limited budgets and even more limited staff.

So, two years ago, I started looking at virtualization. If we could take one piece of hardware and run multiple virtual servers on it, that would be easier to manage. We’d have fewer physical devices. We’d save money. We’d save energy. The grass would be greener. The air would be cleaner. We’d all be smarter and happier.

At the same time, we were having a problem with disk storage. Not only were we out of space on many of the servers that held staff and student data, but we were also out of backup space.

So, last year, I added a new 30 TB storage array and virtual server to my infrastructure. It was wonderful. I made a pile of all of the old servers that we could now “retire.” Everything was in the array. Life was good.

It was Mark Twain (probably) who wrote, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.” Lately, we’ve been having trouble with the basket. Specifically, one of the hard drive controllers on the storage array has been a bit flaky. After countless hours of troubleshooting, support calls, and annoying reliability problems for my users, it appears to be working now. But I don’t have the confidence in it that I did a couple months ago.

Perhaps the worst part is that we now depend on it so much. It’s used by the early-riser teachers who are in at 6:00 AM. It’s used by the elementary school teachers who are still at school at 4:00 PM. It’s used by teachers and students working from home, sometimes until midnight or later. If I need to reboot it or pull a controller out to troubleshoot, it has to be done between about 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM. Since I get neither comp time nor overtime, that gets old quickly.

So, I’m pulling those old servers back off the shelf. After some hard drive upgrades, they’ll all become virtual servers, so I can move resources around more easily when something’s not working. But to really get the redundancy we should have, I’d need to invest a lot more money than we have in the budget, and a lot more time than I have.

We can have a lot of technology. We can have reliable technology. We can have inexpensive technology. But we can’t have all of those at the same time.

Posted on January 31st, 2010 by John Schinker
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