Taste of Tech

I’ve always been more in tune with the school year than the calendar year. I was born in the fall. In the northern hemisphere, school traditionally starts in the fall. We’ve had a bit of a rest. It’s not like January at all, where the new year comes as an afterthought to the frenzied Christmas season. January 1 is like that lone rogue firework shooting up a few seconds after the finale has ended. It’s the period at the end of the run-on sentence that is the holiday season.

No, the fall is different. We’re rested, and it’s time to get back to work. Not that we haven’t been working all summer or anything, but it’s a different mindset. It’s quieter. Work can be more focused, and less reactive. But with students coming back today, we’ve re-adopted the hectic schedules, the routines, and the academic work. Hopefully, we’ve rested enough over the last couple months to feel recharged about the coming year. There’s a sense of optimism — everyone is excited that school is starting.

From a technology perspective, a challenging year lies ahead. There are some holdover projects from the summer that didn’t quite get finished. We left the last school year with the goal of installing 136 Smartboards in classrooms over the summer, and we managed to get 117 of them done. The rest are coming soon; we hope to have them all done within the next few weeks. Last year’s 45 Smartboards had a dramatic — and totally unexpected — effect on the teachers. We have teachers who have not traditionally embraced technology. They’re not necessarily opposed to it, but they’ve never seen the value of using it in their teaching. These people are more excited about using new technology than they’ve ever been. One of our veteran teachers was very skeptical about getting a Smartboard last year, but threatened to quit this year if we took it away. I’m hoping that we see a similar reaction among the teachers who are getting them this year, which would have a tranformational effect on how teaching and learning happens in our schools.

On the hardware front, we’ve replaced more than 40 classroom computers in our middle school. In most cases, the six-year-old machines being replaced were unbearably slow. The good news is that the teachers now have new computers, and, thanks to nLite, the old ones are getting a new lease on life, too. As it turns out, there’s a lot of stuff in the Windows OS that we don’t use. By not installing those components, we can get fairly snappy performance out of these old machines. There are some limitations — I don’t think we’re going to be using them for CAD or video editing. But for 80% of what we do with computers (office productivity, web access, and email), they work great. This is good news, since we’ll have about 300 of these old computers in secondary-use environments by the end of this school year.

The instructional software front is always a minefield. We’re constantly inundated with vendors touting software solutions to student achievement problems. If you believe them, a computer can teach any kid to pass a proficiency test at a fraction of the cost of traditional instruction. But the research rarely backs this up. Most of the studies that report significant gains are funded by the software companies themselves, and the few independent studies available often have flawed research models. Since many schools don’t really look that closely at this stuff, a lot of money is spent on popular software that has little effect on student achievement.

One example popped up again this week on a listserv here in Ohio. Using an archipelagic metaphor, the program is marketed as a test-prep intervention tool. It doesn’t provide any instruction, and students don’t learn much from it beyond what they would get from taking the same test multiple times. When pressed, the sales people acknowledge that its main strength is in identifying student weaknesses (though you have to already know what the weaknesses are to test them). But still, schools all over the place are trying to use it to provide instruction in math and reading. I didn’t respond to the thread this time. I’ve already made this point at least twice on that list in the last year.

Our technology plan expires at the end of the school year, so we’ll be reviewing and revising it this year. In the past, I’ve been all over the map on this one. On one hand, if you’re making a substantial investment in technology, you need to have a plan. There has to be some goal that you’re reaching for, so you can make intelligent decisions to work toward that common end. On the other hand, if technology is truly integrated into everything we do, having a mandated “technology plan” makes about as much sense has having a “textbook plan” or a “school bus plan” that has to be approved by the state. And since we have to use the state’s format for creating the plan, which, in turn, includes the e-rate requirements, we frequently end up with a document that explains how we’re going to work toward meeting the bureaucrats’ goals for technology in the schools. That’s a lot less useful for us, so we end up with quite a bit of technology planning that isn’t actually in the plan. Still, we’ll take an honest look at what we have from the last three years, set some goals, and try to use the prescribed planning tools to come up with something that is useful for us while meeting all of the state’s requirements.

With the geeky backend stuff, we’re working on some new things that (hopefully) no one will notice. One of these is the configuration of a new firewall, which should improve network security and take some of the load off our routers, which have been pulling double-duty for the last several years. We’re also improving our Internet filtering to close some of the loopholes that students have been exploiting to get around the filter. The expansion of wireless networking is forcing us to re-examine our wireless solution, and a more scalable approach to managing wireless devices is in the works. We’re also jumping into the world of server virtualization, with the hope of combining multiple physical servers into a single physical box. This should save money while improving our backup and failover capabilities.

We received a lot of good feedback on the summer technology classes held in June. Several teachers have launched new blogs. Some are considering the use of Moodle to put parts of their classes online. Many are excited about using Delicious to manage and share bookmarks. Others are just starting to realize the potential of RSS. We’ll be encouraging these teachers and helping them develop and refine those skills throughout the year. I’d like to see us starting to offer professional development opportunities in Moodle, and teaching teachers more about social networking applications that may be useful to them.

The bells are ringing again. The students are in the hall. There aren’t any parking spaces in the staff lot. They’re back. And we’re ready to go.

Have a great year.

There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.
Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?
– Gonzo

How is it we can know people we haven’t met yet? After nearly 20 years of doing this, I’m still amazed by that. I never met Lee. I can’t say that I knew her. I talked to her a few times. We worked on a couple projects together. I have seen a few things that she and her students accomplished.

But I knew her better than some of the people who live on my street, and some of the people who go to my church, and some of the people who work in my school. When Dave sent out a message to the EdTechTalk community last week that things weren’t looking good, many of us stopped what we were doing.

How do you react to a critical health situation involving a friend you only know online? None of us knew. We can’t very well show up at the house with a covered hot dish for the family. Ignoring the practical limitations of distance, we don’t know where she lives. We certainly don’t know her family. And they might be just a little freaked out if people they’ve never met or heard of started showing up.

Lisa started organizing a food effort. People could contribute via Paypal, and she’ll make arrangements for gift cards for local restaurants and grocery stores. Of course there will be flowers. And a donation to the cancer society. That’s all very-well-worn ground.

In the text chat that followed (12,000 words in the next 50 hours or so), the community invented ways to memorialize Lee. There was a webcast Friday night, so people could call in with Skype and share remembrances. A tribute page was created, so people could leave comments. And they have, with more comments posted on Lee’s page than we’ve seen in years. Someone put together a voicethread, so people could leave audio comments. Others started collecting and editing audio from webcasts, podcasts, and other discussions that Lee participated in. Tributes are planned in a number of EdTech webcasts over the next couple weeks. The family was contacted and condolences expressed. Several members of the community were able to speak with Lee’s husband and sister. As Jeff put it, it’s awkward online just like it’s awkward face-to-face. So you just do it.

The memorial service today won’t be webcast. And while I know that there are a couple dozen people who would watch it live online if they could, it’s probably better that way. The online community is developing new ways to memorialize, new ways to remember, new ways to say goodbye.

We’ll miss you, Lee.

“Umm…”

Conversations that start that way are never good ones. This was going to be no exception.

“No one can log in. Is something wrong with the server?”

Apparently, there was. It was late 2000, and I was pretty much on my own when it comes to technology in the district. My predecessor had hired a network consultant eighteen months earlier to set up the server. In the intervening time, I was hired, she quit, and my budget was cut to zero after a levy failure. There were no consultants, and no money to hire consultants. We were running Linux, and, as far as I know, we were the only school in the area doing so. I had learned the basics of account management, as well as a few simple diagnostic tools and command line utilities. But I really had no idea what I was doing.

Since it was me (and Google) against the world, there was really nothing else to do but figure out what the problem was and fix it. Basic stuff first. Can I access the server remotely? No. Can I log in locally at the console? Yes. Is it fixed yet? No. Are there any network problems that would affect connectivity? No. Can you tell me how much longer it’s going to be? No. Are there log entries that are out of the ordinary? Yes.  Do I understand them? Umm… no.

So it went. What could the problem be? How could I eliminate possibilities? I narrowed it down, tried things, documented what I was doing, and eventually found the solution. It was my fault (it always is). In hindsight, the problem was predictable and the solution obvious. But those are relative terms, aren’t they?

It was a rough year. I was doing two jobs. Without a budget, I had to beg for ethernet patch cables and power strips. I was responsible for all technology in all six schools. But I learned a lot that year. I learned to prioritize, and to simplify, and to standardize. I learned that sometimes people will fix the simple stuff themselves if you give them enough time. I learned to conserve resources. But mostly, I learned that I have to solve my own problems.

Things are better now. I have a staff. I have a budget. I keep some consultants on call. I have a professional learning network. There are people and resources to help me solve my problems. But the attitude is still there. My first instinct when something goes wrong is to fix it. It’s not to call tech support. When I do have to call support, I try to learn as much about the product and the problem as I can, so I can fix things myself in the future. I’d much rather spend an hour learning about a problem and trying to resolve it than sitting on hold.

This attitude has had some remarkable benefits. I embrace open source technologies. We use Wordpress and Moodle and MRBS and Samba and a host of other applications that we don’t pay for. There are support forums and web resources, but there’s not really anyone to call when something goes wrong. I’ve never really seen that as a problem; I’m used to it.

But I’m finding that most schools aren’t like that. Increasingly, it seems like school tech people want out-of-the-box solutions that work all the time, with people to call when something goes wrong. They’re not interested in hosting their own web sites or managing their own servers or troubleshooting compatibility problems. The don’t care that their web-based products don’t authenticate against their existing user database, or that the products they’re using can’t be tailored to their own needs.

There’s nothing wrong with those expectations, but they’re expensive and inflexible. These schools pay many times more for their technology infrastructure than I do. And schools never have enough money to go around, especially in areas like technology. But until the mindset changes in these schools, they’re stuck.

Case in point: Moodle. For the uninitiated, Moodle is a learning management system. It’s intended for teaching online. It’s organized into courses, each of which can contain content, assignments, discussion forums, wikis, glossaries, and a host of other types of resources. Students typically participate by reading or watching or listening to the course content and interacting with the instructor and other participants.

Running a Moodle server is not a big deal. You uncompress the files into a folder on your web server, create an SQL database for it, run the installer, and set some configuration options. But if you’re used to someone doing that for you, it’s impossible. A fellow tech person was having problems with his new Moodle installation a couple days ago and posted about it on the listserv. Several people jumped in to help, and the questions they were asking were enlightening. Is php installed? Did you create an SQL database? These are pretty basic things, and I mentally rolled my eyes when I read them. It’s the equivalent of asking someone if they’ve plugged in their computer AND turned on the power strip. But the answers were equally telling. How do I know?

Though it’s a bit overused, maybe it’s a good time to quote Morpheus from The Matrix:

This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back. You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Take the blue pill and call a commercial company that will do everything for you. Stay in the box. Believe what you want to believe about what is possible and available and affordable. Or, take the red pill. But don’t take the red pill and try to set up a Moodle server. Take the red pill, find an old computer, and install Linux on it. See what you can do with it. Do a lot of reading. Do a lot of experimenting. Don’t be afraid to erase the hard drive and start over again. When you get something working, get a few brave souls to try it out. Build your confidence. Then start rolling it out to more people. But stop being so helpless.

I was a few minutes early picking up my daughter, so I parked my car on the street in the residential neighborhood and pulled out the eeePC. There were four wireless access points in range, only one of which was secure. It would have been easy to connect to the unsecured networks. If file sharing were enabled on any of the computers in the house, it probably wouldn’t have been difficult to access data on those computers. I could certainly anonymously download anything I wanted from the Internet, because any kind of tracking or logging would point back to the house with the open wireless network.

There’s actually a debate about whether you should secure your wireless network. Securty expert Bruce Schneier runs an open wireless network at his house. He contends that it’s just common courtesy for guests to his home. He also lets them use his heat, water, and electricity. Most people disagree, citing these points:

• An open wireless network allows anyone to use your Internet connection without your approval or supervision. So people can use it to pirate music and videos, send spam, or access child porn. When the feds come, guess who they’re going to want to talk to?
• An open wireless network opens your computers up to potential attack. If you’re using your wifi network to share files between computers in your house, people using your wireless network may be able to access those files. Plus, passwords that you send over the wireless network could be intercepted if there’s no security.
• An open wireless network violates your Internet provider’s terms of service. If your neighbor had a high speed Internet connection, and you could connect to it for free from your house, why would you sign up for your own connection? While enforcement is rare, the ISP could terminate your service and pursue legal action against you.

Regardless of where you fall in this debate, the one thing you shouldn’t do is leave your wireless network open simply because you don’t know any better. That’s what this post is about.

How do you make your wireless network secure? The first thing you need to do is log in to your wireless router. In most cases, you can do this through a web browser by typing in the IP address. My router’s address is 192.168.1.1, so I’d just type “http://192.168.1.1″ in the address bar of by browser, and it connects to my router. If you don’t know your router’s address, you can check this list to find out what the default should be. Your router should request a username and password. If you have never changed it, check the same list to find the default and use it to log in.

I can’t give you step-by-step instructions here, because all routers are different. This is all menu driven software though, and if you poke around a little you should be able to find everything.  I can tell you what to look for, though:

Router Password
The first thing you want to do is change the password for your router. If you leave it as the default, anybody can just find a list of passwords on the Internet and log in to your router. You definitely don’t want people doing that.

Encryption
You want to encrypt the data that is moving between your wireless router and your wireless computers. Remember, these things are sent over radio waves. Anyone can “listen” to them and intercept the data. You want to make sure that the data is encoded in a way that only allows the right device to understand them. Your options here will probably be WEP or WPA. IF possible, you want to use WPA, because it’s the most secure. A network protected by WEP can now be hacked in less than sixty seconds, and a network without either doesn’t need to be hacked, because the traffic is already accessible.

WPA works like this: you define a “key” that is used to encrypt the data. The same key must be installed on the wireless router and all devices that are going to connect to your wireless network. The password on my network is a random string of characters from Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passswords page. We keep in in a text file on a thumb drive, and copy and paste it whenever we need to configure a new computer to use the network.

Basically, you need to put the same key in the configurations on both the wireless router and the computer. Don’t forget that once you change the configuration on the router, you won’t be able to connect to it until you set up the computer. So make sure you do it in the right order On the computer, you want to find the settings for your wireless network connection. The location of this control panel is going to be different depending on your operating system and version.

SSID
Your SSID (Service Set IDentifier) is the “name” of your router. This name is broadcast by the router, which is basically saying, “Hey, my name is Linksys and I’m over here. Come connect to me!” When your computer searches for wireless networks, it’s the SSID that shows up identifying your network. Changing the name makes it harder for people to identify what kind of router you have. You can also hide the SSID, which means you’ll have to type it in on the computer to connect to your network. Most experts agree that this offers little protection, though, because there are other ways to find your SSID.

Universal Plug & Play
One of the benefits of having a router is that it protects your computers from the Internet. Because it uses network address translation (NAT), computers scanning the Internet for security vulnerabilities can only see your router, not the computers that are connected to it.

In some cases, you may want people on the Internet to be able to traverse your router and access some resource on your internal network. In my house, for example, I run a web server. So my router is configured to forward web traffic to that server. I deliberately set up this configuration to allow people access to that resource.

Universal Plug and Play makes it easier to set up these kinds of connections by opening ports on your router as needed by applications running on your network. While UP&P may have some uses on an internal network if there aren’t any security holes in its implementation, you probably don’t want it automatically setting up connections between computers on your internal network and other devices out on the Internet. Find the setting on your router, and disable it.

MAC Address Filtering
Another thing you can to to protect your wireless network is to use MAC address filtering. A MAC address is unique identifier built into your network card. Theoretically, every network device has its own MAC address. Your router probably has a configuration setting that allows you to restrict which MAC addresses can connect to your network. You could enter the addresses from your wireless devices, and then those would be the only devices your router will talk to.

While this is a good idea in theory, it’s actually trivial to change the MAC address for a network card. So all an attacker would need to do is to capture some traffic, find the MAC address of an allowed device, and then configure his computer to use that address. While MAC address filtering would add another layer of security, the minimal protection provided probably isn’t worth the trouble of setting it up.

Remember to restart your router after setting all of these things, to ensure that the changes take effect. You will probably need to reconnect to your network after that. Then, you can rest easy knowing that those people sitting in the car across the street are using your neighbor’s wireless network.

For the last 20 years, I’ve had this love-hate relationship with computer programming. I took a high school programming course at the suggestion of a math teacher, and found that I enjoyed it and was relatively good at it. I liked the idea of controlling the machine — deciding what I want it to do, and giving it the commands to do it. I was the puppeteer. I was pulling the strings.

This led to taking a structured programming class as an elective my first year in college, which led to my adding “computer science education” as a major.

Unfortunately, at that time, nobody really had any idea what a computer science education major should know, so they basically just told me to get a minor in systems analysis. I took data structures. That was kind of fun. I learned about stacks and queues and linked lists and trees and all sorts of things I don’t understand anymore. I learned Cobol (why?) and Fortran (why?) before finding out that I had inadvertently skipped the first class and had to go back and learn BASIC. Then it was on to IBM mainframe assembly language.

None of this had any real relevance in the world of education. No schools had IBM mainframes. I might get to teach a little BASIC and Pascal. If I was really fortunate, I could teach C (which, oddly, was about the only language that wasn’t required). The college of education predicted that we were going to leave the university and get jobs teaching high school computer science, where we’d be using the only computers schools had available — the Apple IIe. So in our methods courses, we learned 6502 Assembler, how to build analog-to-digital converts to interface with the Apple II, and how to program in LOGO. (The programming part of LOGO, not just the turtle graphics stuff).

By the end of all this, I had had enough of programming. I got a job teaching middle school computer applications. I was teaching students to use productivity applications. The closest I got to programming was writing spreadsheet formulas. Two years later I switched jobs, and inherited another middle school course that had previously been a programming class. “Irrelevant,” I declared. “The kids don’t need to know this stuff.” I taught productivity tools, some Internet basics, and the concept of hypermedia. The closest I got to programming was teaching them HTML from scratch. Now that I look back on it, I’m amazed at what those kids could do, simply because they didn’t know it was supposed to be hard.

I eventually did get a job teaching high school programming. I taught Visual Basic for two years. I always felt it was an awkward language, and that it doesn’t serve the students very well. I’ve been disappointed twice that they’ve kept the same language in place when revising the courses of study. While I can’t say I didn’t like teaching programming, I also wasn’t too sad when my duties shifted into other directions.

I’ve always advocated for teaching kids to use technology to be productive in non-technical ways. Use email and the Internet as communication tools. Use word processors to make your writing better, to simplify editing, and to make professional-looking documents. Use spreadsheets to organize data, answer “what-if” questions, and draw conclusions based on the numbers. Use presentation tools to augment the message you’re delivering in the presentation. There have been many variations on this theme, but I’ve never strongly advocated for learning about the machine for its own sake. So I’ve never really pushed programming.

Apparently, I’m not alone. According to Carnegie Mellon University, the number of computer science majors declined by more than 60% between 2000 and 20004. In the same time period, the number of females majoring in computer science declined by 80%. Some point to the lack of emphasis on the more technical side of computing as a major contributor to this decline. People like me are de-emphasizing how computers work in favor of an emphasis on how we work with computers.

Two recent projects are aiming to change this. Scratch is a programming environment designed for 8- to 16-year-old students by the MIT Media Lab. In it, kids combine graphics, pictures, video, and audio in new, innovative ways. At the same time, they can snap programming blocks together to control how the elements are displayed, or how the computer user can interact with them. Windows and Mac versions of the free program are available on the project web site. There are also lots of teacher resources and an envrionment for students to share their creations.

For older students, Carnegie Mellon has developed the Alice environment. It can be used to create 3-D animated worlds, with characters that move around and interact. It’s a great way to tell a story, create an interactive game, or make a video to share online. It’s targeted especially toward the middle school and high school crowd, with an emphasis on attracting girls. Like Scratch, it’s easy to use, allowing you to drag and drop the various elements to determine how they interact on the screen.

The thing that’s striking about both of these tools is that they’re teaching programming while doing other things. They’re teaching kids to be good problem solvers, innovative thinkers, and collaborators. That’s meeting half of the 21st Century Skills. If they happen to learn a little programming while they’re at it, and maybe decide that they like telling machines what to do, so much the better.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking a closer look at both of these tools.