Taste of Tech

Last week, I showed a prototype of a thin client solution to my district tech team. This particular test was just to show proof of concept and to get some feedback from the team on whether this is worth pursuing. I installed the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project on an old 800 mhz P3 with two network cards. That’s nowhere near enough horsepower for a production server, but I just wanted to give everyone a feel for how the system would work.

Before the demonstration, I did a little hand-waving to make it appear to be a little more robust than it actually was. For starters, I copied the security files from our regular servers over to it. Suddenly, everyone had an account. I set up some nfs mounts, so they could see their home directories, and then they could log in. These are things that could be automated and improved, so I didn’t feel like I was misleading people too much.
I wanted to do some customization to the user interface. For example, I wanted to specify the proxy settings and default home page in Firefox. I know, I can do transparent proxying, and I will, eventually, but this was an easier way to go. I also wanted some shortcuts on the desktop, some items removed from the menus, and a few other little configuration things. So I made a customized user profile, and edited /etc/profile to copy these settings to the user’s home directory upon first login. This makes the first login take a little longer, but it ensures that everything is pre-configured and ready to go. I also added a post-it note to the default configuration welcoming the user and explaining what this is.
The most obvious choice for a pilot project for us is a middle school computer lab. Currently, we have three locations at the middle school where there are classroom sets of computers. The 7th grade computer lab is used by the 7th grade computer applications classes, and by a couple 6th grade classes taking keyboarding. The other computer lab was intended to be signed out by teachers for use with their classes, but several keyboarding classes in the lab make this nearly impossible. The third location is the media center, which is always busy. If we could take some old machines that are being replaced next year and use them as thin clients, we may be able to build a limited-purpose lab just for the keyboarding classes. This would take the pressure off the other two labs, and make it much easier for teachers to sign out labs to use with their students. Because the scope of the lab is also pretty limited, it would be a good way to start using LTSP without everything having to work all at once.

In order for this to fly, we would need the keyboarding software to work. I was surprised to find that the package (Ultrakey) works fairly well with the Wine Windows emulator. It also looks like Accelerated Reader will work. We do have some graphic artifact issues, but nothing that’s a dealbreaker. It was a little disheartening to find that the entire Wine installation, including all of the Windows applications, are stored in the user profile. After moving this to another location and creating symbolic links, it made the logins much faster and saved a lot of disk space.

It would be really helpful to have an office productivity suite, and the team was impressed by OpenOffice. We browsed public drives on the various building servers, and flawlessly opened random Word and Powerpoint files.

In the end, the things that I expected to be concerns weren’t. They didn’t care that the computers weren’t running Windows. They didn’t insist that we try to run MS Office in an emulator. They weren’t overly concerned about the lack of USB support, or local drives (CD, floppy, etc). I know that some of these problems can be overcome, but I told the team that local device support would be very limited. I’m more worried about USB flash drives not working than they are.
They were concerned about sound. I’m going to have to work on that. We also found that the machines we ended up using as clients (Dell Optiplex GX260’s, because they were handy) didn’t autodetect the graphics cards, so we were in 640×480. That won’t work, but it’s hopefully just a driver issue.

The next step is to put a prototype in place in the middle school. Let teachers and students play with it, and make a determination in early spring about whether we want to try this for next year. Then, we have to find a room to put it in.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how many classroom computers it takes to make a difference. When the Ohio SchoolNet Commission (now eTech|Ohio) started the SchoolNet Plus program in 1996, the goal was to have a 1:5 student to computer ratio in Ohio’s classrooms. Entitlement grants were provided to Ohio schools to buy computers to meet that goal. Significant strings were attached that stipulated which grades were targetted by each round, and that most of the computers had to be for classroom use (not labs, offices, libraries, etc).
Ten years later, the SchoolNet Plus program is now working its way through the eighth grade. The computers provided in the early rounds are obsolete now (and we’ve discarded most of them). Etech has just changed from a two-year cycle per grade level to a three-year cycle. So, if they stay on the current course, they will have met their goal in 2019. By that time, the first round of computers will be 23 years old. But whining about state funding isn’t going to get us anywhere.

On the Tech Coordinators’ Listserv last week, Antwerp technology coordinator Cathy Barnett asked whether schools are staying with the 1:5 model as they replace the older computers, or if they’re reducing that number or changing to lab-based computing. Several people responded that their districts are committed to the 1:5 ratio, and that they’ve been maintaining the hardware at that level. Others have switched to thin clients as a way to hold on to older hardware, keep it in service, and maintain the ratio in the classrooms.

Some districts have shifted the focus from classroom computers to lab computers. James Conley wrote:

Having both a 1-5 classroom ratio and labs does allow me to speak to which provides the most value to the district…. Based on our use, computer labs have a great deal of value to a district both at the elementary and secondary level. We have reversed our replacement cycle based on this pattern. It is now computer lab –> teacher work station –> general classroom system. We refresh the computers in our labs about every two years.

That seems like a lot of equipment moving to me, but clearly the focus is on lab-based computing, with the older stuff going into the classrooms. That’s very similar to what we’ve been doing, except that the computers are at least six years old by the time they make it to the classrooms for student use.

Ryan Collins pointed us to a West Virginia study that compared computer-based basic skills instruction in labs versus classrooms, and concluded that “The students taught in the classroom pattern had higher gains in overall scores and in math. They also scored higher on the 1998 tests than did those in labs.”
James Conley noted that this is true for basic skills instruction, but when teachers are working with students on student-created projects, the labs are a better model because it allows the projects to be started at the same time, and finished within a reasonable time frame.

In a post that generated a little heat off-list, I said:

To answer the 1:5 question, we’ve moved away from it at the elementary level. It’s not sustainable for us. IMHO, 1:5 doesn’t give enough of a critical mass to have a transformative effect, anyway. There’s a huge difference between zero computers per classroom and one. After that, I think we need to be closer to 1:3 or 1:2 to really get teachers and students to take advantage of it. We went to labs (1:1) and improved media centers (1:2) instead.

While not disagreeing entirely, other tech people have pushed the ratio to 1:4 with successful results. In our elementary classrooms, that would mean six computers, where we currently have one. At K-3, this would cost us about $100,000 per year in additional hardware money. But looking at our teaching staff, I don’t think they’re all ready to have six computers in their classrooms. What if we targeted the technology to the places where it would be most used? If we only equipped 20% of the classrooms this way to start, and we used thin clients, we could probably do it for $10,000 per year. That’s a number that could be worked into the budget.

A lot of factors weigh in to this. Do we have adequate space and electrical capacity? How will we handle staff development? Can we come up with a thin client solution that will meet our needs? What about support? There are certainly a number of challenges to overcome. But it doesn’t seem quite as unattainable as it did a week ago.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to the EdTech Weekly podcast. The show is an informal roundup of news, links, resources, and ideas relating to technology in education. It’s hosted by Wordbridges veterans Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier, along with educational technologist Jennifer Maddrell.

In typical Worldbridges fashion, the show is webcast at 7:00 PM EST on Sundays. The three hosts go round-robin style though their lists of topics. At the same time, listeners can participate in an online chat on the the web site, and they can also conference in to the show using Skype.
I had tuned out of the Worldbridges podcasts for the last few months. It seemed like they weren’t breaking much new ground, and listening to the podcasts asynchronously instead of participating in real time left me a bit disconnected. This show is different because they always have new ideas and resources, and because it’s much more fast paced.

That left me with a problem. Since I do all of my podcast-listening in the car, it’s tough to take notes and write down URLs while driving. Fortunately, they use Delicious to organize their links, so I can just go here to see what they’re talking about.  At the moment, there are more than 200 items in the list. Now, I can just listen while driving, and then followup later on the items that interest me.

The Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School studies how music is perceived and processed by the brain. They’re investigating the use of music and music stimuli as therapudic and educational tools to aid in recovery from brain injury.

As part of his work there, Jake Mandell created a simple online test to screen for tonedeafness.  It’s a pretty good tool to measure overall pitch perception ability. Essentially, you hear 36 pairs of tone sequences. For each, you have to decide whether they are the same or different. When you’re done, it gives you immediate feedback. I scored a 78%.

With two children starting to take music theory, we’re finding that standard notebook paper doesn’t have nearly enough lines on it. Blank Sheet Music solves that problem. This free online tool lets you set all of the parameters for your sheet music, and then generates a page that you can print.

For example, I can start by choosing three staves per set. I drag and drop clefs onto each stave (no clef, treble, bass, alto, tenor, percussion, or one of several tabs). I select how many staves per sheet (1-7 in this example). I can choose to insert bar lines and brackets if I want them. When I select print, it generates the page I’ve selected and sends it to my printer.

While the tool doesn’t let you put notes on the paper, it is a quick, easy way to generate custom staff paper in just a couple minutes.

We’re reopening a discussion that was resolved years ago. When schools first started using the web, a prolonged debate followed regarding content filtering. On one side, we had to protect our children from the inappropriate content on the Internet while allowing them to take full advantage of the wealth of information available online. On the other side, whenever you’re “protecting” someone from information, some entity has to be responsible for making those decisions. In a democratic society with rights of free speech, deciding what someone else can or cannot access online is walking on very thin ice.

The debate was ultimately settled in the US by the Children’s Internet Protection Act in 2000. This law mandates filtered and monitored Internet access in schools for everyone receiving e-rate funding. Since schools rely on e-rate money to offset telecommunications costs, the debate was over.

In our district, Internet access is provided by our Information Technology Center, a consortium of school districts that provides technology services to its member districts. As part of the Internet access service, our ITC includes web filtering. This has made it very easy for us to ignore the problems inherent in filtering. Some sites are blocked that probably shouldn’t be. Others are not blocked and probably should be. But we don’t control the filtering. The ITC contracts with a company to provide that service, and we can’t override their decisions.

This has worked reasonably well for the last several years, but last spring, the filters were upgraded. The new filters are much more conservative than the old ones, and we’re finding that the filtering is getting in the way of our productivity. For example, if we go to Google and perform a web search, we get a list of search results. In the upper-left corner is the Google logo. Because this logo is on “images.google.com,” it gets blocked by the filter.

Other blocked sites are more disruptive. We use the Pinnacle gradebook system at the high school. Our support comes from our reseller, TNT Systems. Their web site is blocked. Two months ago, our special ed teachers went to a training session, only to find that the web resources they were trained to use are inaccessible at school. Our music department can no longer access the site they use to order sheet music. The list keeps getting longer.

To combat this, our ITC has configured a management account that allows our district to specify individual sites that can be blocked or unblocked to override the standard filter settings. So, if we want to, we can unblock these sites for our district, or block others that we don’t want our students to access.

This brings the responsibility for filtering back into the district. Now, we can’t just blindly say that it’s out of our hands. With the power comes the responsibility. It’s clear that we’re going to have to be a lot more specific in our policy about what we can and cannot access. Here’s what we currently have in policy:

The district will employ reasonable technology solutions, including Internet filtering software, to restrict access to objectionable material. Internet access by students will be monitored by staff or software at all times….

Network users must be aware that there are materials on the Internet that may be defamatory, abusive, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, racially or sexually offensive, or illegal. These materials include graphics, sounds, digital film clips, text, and other forms of media. Users of the Brecksville-Broadview Heights City Schools network agree not to use school district resources to download, copy, upload, transmit, forward, or display any such materials.

Network access is provided to support the curriculum and operations of our district. Any other use, including use of the network for personal, political, or commercial purposes is prohibited.

Our policy says that we won’t use the network for political or commercial purposes. Does that mean we should restrict access to these types of web sites? What about nudity? In many cases, it is sexually oriented, but that’s not necessarily always the case. What about sites that help students cheat in school? Are online games, or software download sites, or file sharing resources to be restricted?

Then, there is the category of sites I classify as “shooting the messenger.” We currently block access to web-based email. Why? Because we can’t control the content of email messages. Students could receive email that contains inappropriate material (or possibly sent it to themselves from home). This material could be accessible at school, so we block the tool. The same is true with online chat, messaging, online storage, and other sites that make the web interactive. Anonymizers and redirectors would help students defeat the filtering technology. As such, these sites are not illegal, and don’t violate the policy, but they would allow students to easily circumvent the security measures in place.

I’m trying to be more formal about how we should approach web filtering. The procedure for requesting an override will be specific and detailed. The decision to override the default filter settings will rest with more than one person, and those people will represent the various age levels of our students. I’ll certainly be soliciting the input of administrators, tech team members, media specialists, teachers, and you. But here’s where I’m starting:

General Filtering Philosophy:

• Internet filtering is designed to prevent students from mistakenly or accidentally accessing Web content that is inappropriate for school.
• Because of the changing nature of the Internet, no filtering solution can be 100% effective in blocking access to inappropriate content.
• Student supervision and student responsibility are key components of responsible Internet use.
• Decisions on blocking or not blocking individual web sites should be consistent with the web filter’s default settings unless there is overwhelming evidence that the decision is inappropriate or inapplicable for our schools.
• When there is indecision about whether a particular site should be blocked or not blocked, preference should be given to the more conservative practice of blocking the site.

Guiding Questions:

• Does the site contain objectionable content, as defined by policy and guidelines?
• Is the site likely to contain objectionable content in the foreseeable future?
• Does the site make it possible to access objectionable content that would otherwise be inaccessible?
• Is the educational value of the content greater than the risk of inappropriate content being accessible?

This isn’t a challenge I’m looking forward to, but I think having the guidelines nailed down in advance will make it a manageable process.