The statue of Ben Franklin greets visitors entering the Benjamin Franklin Institute in downtown Philadelphia. This was one of my favorite places to visit when attending annual Educon events in Philly.
Network Security
2012/04/09
When I worked as the State Educational Technology Director, I paid general attention to issues of network security but didn’t have to be directly involved in the geeky details. Now that I’m a tech director at the district level, I find myself looking more closely at such information.
Pwn Plug is “a tiny computer that comes preloaded with an arsenal of hacking tools… can be quickly plugged into any computer network and then used to access it remotely… comes with “stealthy decal stickers”—including a little green flowerbud with the word “fresh” underneath it, that makes the device look like an air freshener…”
Khan Academy
2012/04/09
I’m doing some research on Khan Academy and this post is where I’m collecting my thoughts and resources.
Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation YES, is someone whose opinion I have great respect for. She has four blog posts about Khan Academy and math.
Frank Noschese’s blog has a ton of information. Frank is a National Board Certified Physics teacher. After reading his “Khan final remarks” post, you will want to read through all of his posts via the Khan Academy Criticism blog menu link. I especially appreciate the way Noschese has links to so many sources.
The best news of all is that there is another free resource besides Khan Academy. You may have heard of Mathematica software or the Wolfram Alpha search site. They now have free learning resources on the Wolfram Education Portal. The site is in beta right now, so there’s more to come!
School Tech Audits
2012/03/09
I have started researching the various types of technology audits that have been done by schools in our state and elsewhere. Today I came across this nicely articulated journal article – K-12 technology audit: Lessons for school leaders | IEJLL University of Calgary
I have also been taking a closer look at SchoolDude’s IT modules (our district already has their inventory module, ITAM Direct) and comparing it to the open source SpiceWorks software (which has a as an alternative inventory solution). It appears to me that we might be able to accomplish a great deal of data collection and analysis about our infrastructure if we were to more fully and consistently implement one of these.
My goal this week is to articulate how this might all fit together with (a) the new requirement to submit data for the “Technology Readiness Tool” and (b) our district’s need to conduct a full audit of our current network, equipment, bandwidth, and staffing levels. This will allow us to much more clearly say what we need in terms of technology acquisitions and implementation if we want to succeed in our vision of creating high quality 21st century learning environments. Here is a recent note on the Assess4Ed.net website about the question of bandwidth capacity for online testing:
The June 2011 report ( http://www.setda.org/c/document_library/get_file?folderId=344&name=DLFE-1336.pdf [1]) recommends that devices be wired, but does not require it. Again, it is overall bandwidth going into the building and the amount of bandwidth available to each device within the building that should be the concern, not the type of connectivity. A school with with a 1GBPS WAN connection and a robust 802.11n wireless network working on 1GBPS internal LAN with excellent coverage would be better served with 100 wireless devices simultaneously taking an assessment than would be a school with a T1 WAN and 25 wired devices operating with old 10/100 ethernet switches. Arbitrarily specifying wired or wireless would be a disservice to those schools that have made significant upgrades to their wireless network infrastracture. I know that in my own building there are low quality wired drops that operate at only 10 MBPS where a roomful of laptops can connect at 100 plus MBPS to a single wireless AP to access a bandwidth intensive math simulation (Carnegie Cognitive Tutor).
This Tech Readiness Tool is just one aspect of a larger need we (and all schools) have to have a clear and comprehensive picture of what it will take to get where we need to be. Along these lines, the Digital Textbook Playbook, mentioned in this article, and hosted on this FCC page is another resource that is likely to be incredibly helpful.
Lastly, we will need some really good visuals for this work. Thanks to my Twitter feeds, I picked up a nice blog post on 7 different data visualization tools. One that I think might be helpful for our tech audit process is ManyEyes, a free tool created by a team at IBM Research. Of course, there’s always the standard data graphing tools built into Excel and Google Spreadsheets.
Pecha Kucha: Better and Shorter Slide Presentations
2012/02/09
A few years ago, I attended my first Educon and saw the Pecha Kucha format in use. I instantly adored the approach because it was very visual (20 slides with interesting photos and such) and didn’t lose my attention because the format requires those 20 slides to be delivered in 6 minutes and 40 seconds (20 seconds per slide). Nice! I advocate this approach wherever it makes sense!
Here is a great video description of how Pecha Kucha was used at a conference in New Mexico a few years ago. This is well worth watching so that you can adopt the same approach when and where it’s appropriate to do so.
In my case, I have been thinking about how to encourage the Pecha Kucha style in my district — for professional development sessions as well as for student work. It can also be very useful for topics that need to be presented on our ConVal website. The visual learner in me really likes thinking about this! Time to start creating some!
Making Assessments Meaningful
2012/02/09
Bank Street College has a series of what they call “occasional papers” posted on their site. There’s one called “Toward Meaningful Assessments” which explores this from the perspective of a group of 1st grade teachers in NYC using performance assessments. There are several more occasional papers available on the site — on equally interesting topics.
Backwards and Forwards
2012/01/29
Welcome! It’s a rainy Friday morning in downtown Philly. Although the weather is dreary, the next few days for me will be anything but dreary because THIS IS EDUCON PHILLY WEEKEND! Before I explain Educon, I want to explain the “backwards and forwards” title of my post.
The backwards part refers to the fact that I need to get back to blogging again. If this is important to me, why haven’t I done so before now? Life gets busy, I make short posts to my Facebook or Twitter accounts, experiment with dozens of other social media interfaces, and read (or skim) hundreds of cool Internet resources. But I don’t post to this blog because I’m in a hurry to get to the next meeting, to reply to someone’s email, to work on this or that project, or I’m too tired to think straight from another busy day. And of course, the perfectionist part of me wants my blog (make that blogs, plural) to be well organized, perfectly planned, and strategic before I can feel I’m in the rhythm and routine. And we all know that life is not perfect.
So I am not going to worry about going backwards anymore. Instead, this is the first post on my ThinkICT blog as I move forward to THINK about how information and communication technologies are an integral part of today’s teaching and learning process.
Thank you for visiting! I hope you’ll return now and then to see how I am thinking about ICT.
Critical Skills Program
2012/01/29
Educon is about having conversations. Today I attended Laura Thomas’ conversation about the Critical Skills Program at Antioch New England University. Here are my notes during the session:
Idea #1 – Create a Google Site or other online course area where PLCs could record their ongoing work. What are the common elements that ought to exist on all PLC online workspaces?
- Data – a place to share what data we are looking at
- Problems – a place to wrestle with problems we are encountering
- What else? –
Idea #2 – Create a 3×3 page of links on your website (see Adam Bellow’s site).
Idea #3 – It’s important to share evidence of results. Teachers who have participated in Critical Skills Program and kept applying what they’ve learned, have classroom data showing the program made a difference. It’s important to share the data because we are currently in a data driven, data hungry climate these days.
Session Hopping at Educon
2012/01/29
During session 3 there are three different sessions I want to attend. There’s Sylvia and Jon’s “You Can’t Buy Change” as well as Alex and Dean’s “Learning in Public” and then Chris’ “What Happens When Kids Run the Building”.
I started out in room 304 thinking about “Learning in Public”. As I write this, I am watching a YouTube video of a kid showing how he made a bowdrill set. What? Did Dean just say you can show a video of you cutting your toenails and get 100 views on YouTube? … Anyway, he’s talking about the quality of the comments to this young kid’s video.
So what’s the skill here? Simple tagging can be an incredibly important skill in order to get your online content to the right audience. How do we teach kids to tag their content when they start posting publicly?
What’s the process involved in learning to work in new spaces? How do we teach pre-service teachers about this process? What do we mean by learning?
Dean talked about recording a video of himself learning to play the guitar. Next, a friend of his got several of his guitar students to record videos to help instruct Dean. This is cool, seeing the dynamic of 14 year old students become teachers using the medium of video.
One of Dean’s students, Stacy, is talking about her own experience with learning in public. She started using sign language videos available on YouTube, then Dean helped her connect with teachers of sign language in other countries. “It kind of felt more valuable… it wasn’t just for me.” In terms of proficiency, she spent 50 hours or so on it, so she doesn’t feel terribly proficient yet. She blogged about her learning experience and felt the best part of it was getting feedback from classmates and others.
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In room 204, Sylvia and Jon were chatting with participants about situations when students ask a teacher a question and the teacher has to say “I don’t know.” This moment of finality is different than saying “I don’t know but let’s find out together.”
There was an interesting discussion about who is responsible in a building when teachers use clickers for summative assessment rather than formative assessment. I’m wondering why it needs to be an either/or? It seems to me that each situation can be different and has to be looked at from various perspectives. This is also why I think it’s important for teachers to have time and space to discuss with their colleagues what they are doing in their classrooms and how to continuously improve on their teaching practices.
We watched a short video clip of a kid convincing his parents that he needed a dog and why it would make a positive difference. The slides included photos with captions, a bar chart displaying data, an overall convincing argument that showed he took the initiative to show responsibility. This was an authentic audience with an authentic purpose.
Punctuated Equlibrium
2012/01/29
This morning at Educon, I’m in the session with Darren Kuropatwa and Andy McKiel. We’re talking about how to accomplish systemic change across a district. They have set up a way to share the conversation at digitallearningproject.com so I would encourage you to go there and read up on what was discussed.
- Neutral protocol to use: I noticed, I wonder, what if.
- Participants/leaders using GoogleDocs to discuss “what do you value?”
- “People don’t resist change. They resist other people making them change.”
- Not mandating how people grow, but enabling them to grow when and how they want to grow.
Network Theory
2012/01/29
At Educon, Jon Becker had a Sunday morning session on “Beyond Klout and PLNs: Towards an Understanding and Application of Network Theory to Education” and because I was session hopping, I only caught the last half hour of it.
- Talked about Twitter hashtags.
- Node Excel template will allow you to use Excel to map data networks.
- Gephi – open source network mapping for Mac, Win, Linux
- ThinkUpApp – captures every tweet you tweet out
- ManyEyes – web based app where you can upload data sets and run visualizations
Learning to Use Sakai
2012/01/09
A few years ago, ConVal joined a consortium of K-12 school districts in New Hampshire that were starting to use the Sakai content management system, a full featured system used by many universities and a limited number of K-12 schools. Initially, ConVal began using Sakai for its ePortfolio component, but that has now expanded to exploring the potential of using Sakai to support blended (online and in-school) learning.
Here are a few resources on how others use Sakai:
- UNC Chapel Hill uses Sakai and has a great blog with a variety of info, including short, insightful video clips from faculty who have learned what works best for them and their students. In an interview with Dr. Scott Bowman at UNC, we learn how his students benefitted from a highly engaging semester long wiki project.
- Kelly Pickering at TAFE-North Sydney Institute, Australia won a Sakai best practices award. Here’s a great list of how she uses several Sakai tools:
- Announcements – to initiate participation in online activities and to communicate valuable eLearning and course related news,
- Blogger – used as a Reflective Journal Blog involving self-reflection and critical analysis,
- Wiki – for sharing extra information and providing learners a chance to contribute to the learning content,
- Lessons – providing access to a range of engaging multimedia,
- Discussion Board and Forum – to promote group collaboration, the sharing of ideas and as an assessment method,
- Chat room and Mail – to connect the group,
- Tests and Tasks – for online quizzes reinforcing knowledge, preparing learners for assessments and obtaining feedback through survey options,
- Assignments – for easy online assessment submissions and
- Podcasts – providing another learning resource enabling more things to be done on the move through the podcatcher feature.
THE Journal published an article last year comparing the leading open source solutions for learning management systems. One of the school systems mentioned in the article is the Bexley School District in Ohio, which uses Sakai. Here is the landing page to get to Bexley’s Sakai course sites. I like the way they display three icons: one to get to their course sites, a second to get to assignments, and a third to go straight to the staff directory. Bexley also has a nice set of slides to describe their journey to full implementation.
Another school district mentioned as using Sakai is the Minisink Valley Central School District in central New York State.
Sakai is used by several New Hampshire school districts. The Sakai Collaborative home page has a list with links to their respective sites.
Since many schools are now using Google Apps in Education, the app created by rSmart is a valuable tool. Here is a short YouTube video showing the power of this integration between the two.
There are more YouTube videos available on Sakai topics.
Think ICT 