Geeking out at the PSU MacAdmins Conference.

Posted on 05/06/2012 by William Stites

If you’re not push­ing your­self you not grow­ing.  Find­ing good oppor­tu­ni­ties and ways to push your­self pro­fes­sion­ally are often hard to come by, so when my col­league came back from the PSU MacAd­mins con­fer­ence last year and said “WOW” I knew I needed to go.

The PSU MacAd­mins con­fer­ence (@PSUMacAdmns / #psumac­conf) brings together tech­nol­ogy pro­fes­sion­als that spe­cial­ize in man­ag­ing Apple hard­ware and soft­ware in edu­ca­tion (K12 & Higher Ed), busi­ness and gov­ern­ment to share their knowl­edge and best practice.

As my job puts me square in the mid­dle of hav­ing to make deci­sions and man­ag­ing much of this it was a great oppor­tu­nity for me to learn more.  While I’m not get­ting dirty in this every­day, this con­fer­ence offered me a great oppor­tu­nity to talk, share and learn from oth­ers and will be on my short list of must attend con­fer­ences in the future.

Why do I say this and what did I learn?  Here is a glimpse into just some of it…

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Posted in 1to1, Administration & Management, Conferences, EdTech, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The journey to a 1:1 Initiative.

Posted on 04/24/2012 by William Stites

What does a 1:1 Ini­tia­tive look like and what did it take to achieve it? When you visit other school that have pro­grams in place you often see the end result of what could have been a very long process and are left with the ques­tions of how did they do that?

When look­ing at or talk­ing with peo­ple about their pro­gram or ini­tia­tives it’s often to help­ful to know where they’ve come from to under­stand where they are.

Our jour­ney to our 1:1 Ini­tia­tive was one that took over a decade and had us look­ing at our past and ongo­ing expe­ri­ence to help guide where we would end.  This is but a brief look at where we’ve come since 1999.

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Considerations for deploying the AppleTV in your school or enterprise.

Posted on 04/12/2012 by William Stites

AppleTV is awe­some! I’ve had one in my home for years and I am really excited about what you can do with these devices and par­tic­u­larly Air­Play.

We are begin­ning to look at using the AppleTV in our school as part of our iPad deploy­ment but much like the iPads them­selves we are in the posi­tion of try­ing to fig­ure out how to deploy and man­age a con­sumer device in the enter­prise (schools to all of you).

The rea­son for con­sid­er­ing the use of the AppleTV in the class­room has every­thing to do (for us) with Air­Play. The abil­ity to give any stu­dent the oppor­tu­nity to share what they are doing on their device with the class and demon­strate their learn­ing is amaz­ing — - can you say bye-bye Smartboards!

But as I play with this idea and dis­cuss it with my col­leagues there are some man­age­ment issues and ques­tions that I have.

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Posted in 1to1, iPad | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Moodle and Blackboard… I’m not worried.

Posted on 03/28/2012 by William Stites

There is a lot of talk out there right now about the fact the Black­board has pur­chased both Moodle­rooms and NetSpot.  There are numer­ous blog post about it, includ­ing Remote-Learners response (Black­board Buys 2 Lead­ing Sup­port­ers of Open-Source Com­peti­tor Moo­dle - The Chronic & Remote-Learner Responds to Blackboard’s Acqui­si­tion of Moodle­rooms and NetSpot — Remote-Learner) as well as talk on the list­servs (ISED) and Twitter.

Am I wor­ried… NO. Am I naive? Maybe, but here’s what I think.

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Posted in Moodle | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

COPPA Discussion on EdTechTalk

Posted on 02/14/2012 by William Stites

Recently I had the plea­sure of join­ing Curt Lie­neck (@clieneck) on EdTechTalk (#ETT21) for a dis­cus­sion with Arvind (@arvind), Alex (@alexragone) and Vin­nie (@vvrotny) on the topic of the Chil­drens Online Pri­vacy Pro­tec­tion Act (COPPA).

Curt and I have been work­ing with our school and ven­dors to try to come to some under­stand­ing of what our respon­si­bil­i­ties are as insti­tu­tions and how to best han­dle the issue around COPPA.

He is a link to our dis­cus­sion and the tran­script from the chat room from that day. If you have any ques­tions please do hes­i­tate to con­tact me directly.

 
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Talking all things Evernote on Classroom 2.0

Posted on 02/05/2012 by William Stites

On Sat­ur­day, Feb­ru­ary 4th, 2012 I had the plea­sure of tak­ing part in a Class­room 2.0 Live webi­nar where we were talk­ing about all things Evernote.

I spoke for about 40 min­utes and took ques­tions for about another 40 or so.  They’ve posted a recap of the webi­nar on the Live Class­room 2.0 web site (http://live.classroom20.com/1/post/2012/02/using-evernote.html).

I am includ­ing the video from the webi­nar below, but I encour­age you to take a look at their site as they have include a vert large num­ber of related links.

 

 
Posted in Evernote, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Passion and Inspiration in teaching…with great power.

Posted on 01/30/2012 by William Stites

As a kid I played Dun­geons and Drag­ons a lot!

On week­ends my friends and I would get together play through­out the night.  We’d spend hours dia­gram­ming maps, dun­geons, fan­tasy worlds and com­ing up with new and out­ra­geous adventures.

We were incred­i­bly pas­sion­ate about what we were doing.

In 1982 when I about 11-year-old, I intro­duce a rel­a­tive of mine, Michael Miller (@M_S_Miller_1000), to the game. I don’t remem­ber the exact cir­cum­stances, but I can assure you that there were small fig­urines, dice, books and draw­ing strewn about the space as we played.

The pas­sion and excite­ment for what I was doing what and I was teach­ing — the rules, mate­ri­als, char­ac­ters, etc — was trans­ferred over and yet another soul was sucked into the world of fan­tasy role-playing games (for the younger read­ers out there this is what you did before Wii, Playsta­tion and XBox).

The pas­sion and excite­ment for the sub­ject trans­ferred from one per­son to another.

Learn­ing by play­ing, learn­ing by DOING made all the difference.

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Posted in Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

My day at Educon 2012

Posted on 01/29/2012 by William Stites

This was the sec­ond year in a row that I attended Educon for the Sat­ur­day ses­sions.  If you’ve never been to Educon before it is held at the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy (SLA) in cen­ter city Philadelphia.

If you have never been to Educon or SLA it is a very unique school and a very diverse conference.

The school is a part­ner­ship school between the City of Philadel­phia and The Franklin Insti­tute and “…and its com­mit­ment to inquiry-based sci­ence, SLA pro­vides a rig­or­ous, college-preparatory cur­ricu­lum with a focus on sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, math­e­mat­ics and entre­pre­neur­ship”.

Educon is a three-day con­fer­ence which draw pre­sen­ters from around the coun­try and around the world. You are very likely to see peo­ple like Will Richard­son (@willrich45) and Gary Stager (@garystager) in the halls talk­ing between ses­sions with atten­dees and giv­ing pre­sen­ta­tions of their own (see below).  The conference’s guid­ing prin­ci­ples are:

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thought­ful and empow­er­ing for all members
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our stu­dents — the 21st Cen­tury Citizen
  3. Tech­nol­ogy must serve ped­a­gogy, not the other way around
  4. Tech­nol­ogy must enable stu­dents to research, cre­ate, com­mu­ni­cate and collaborate
  5. Learn­ing can — and must — be networked

It is this last point… that “Learn­ing can — and must — be net­worked” that I think is one of the best parts of the con­fer­ence and learning.

I attended three-hour and a half ses­sions from Con­struc­tivism to Social Media PD to New Media Lit­era­cies and learned some­thing from all of them.

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Posted in 1to1, Conferences, EdTech, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Who owns the data in your school?

Posted on 01/24/2012 by William Stites

[Part 3 in a series on insti­tu­tional data]

When an address change comes into your school who owns and enters that data into your system(s)? When stan­dard­ized test­ing scores come in, who enters the data? If an alum, who is also a par­ent has a new email address who makes the change? Which system(s) are involved? How are changes com­mu­ni­cated and shared?

When you are try­ing to make sense of the flow of infor­ma­tion within a school you need to be clear about whose respon­si­bil­ity it is and who (domain) owns the infor­ma­tion.  In an ear­lier post (Defin­ing Data Domains for Entry, Own­er­ship and Sup­port) I tried to define the dif­fer­ent data domains with a school and answer the ques­tion of who owns the data… but what data are we talk­ing about.

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Posted in Administration & Management, Data Management, Schools | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Is there an educational rationale for BYOD programs?

Posted on 01/22/2012 by William Stites

I spent the morn­ing pour­ing over a num­ber of blog and ISED list­serv posts to try to catch up on the lat­est talk around the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device or BYOT - Tech­nol­ogy) debate in education.

I found many com­ments and ques­tions about sup­port, require­ments, a com­mon set of appli­ca­tions, web-based appli­ca­tions and ser­vices, along with men­tion of how a BYOD moves things to a more student-centered approach as the device is of their own choosing.

For our 1:1 Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive we spent a lot of time talk­ing through the rea­sons we were going down the road of pro­vid­ing every stu­dent with a device.  We wanted to be sure we were talk­ing the learn­ing first, not about the device.  Our focus would be on the learn­ing process and how we would sup­port that through train­ing, pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment and teaching.

We went through a “Straw­man” exer­cise where we looked at three options for our pro­gram before mak­ing our choice: stan­dard­ized, a min­i­mum sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion and a BYOD approach.  We used this approach to play out each of the sce­nar­ios for these three pro­gram options, even­tu­ally adopt­ing a stan­dard­ized model.

We were very delib­er­ate in how we talked about the pro­gram, refer­ring to it as our 1:1 Learn­ing Initiative.

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Posted in 1to1, Administration & Management, Schools | Tagged , | 7 Comments