Success is about sharing.

Posted on 02/08/2013 by William Stites

After work­ing for years on our school’s 1:1 Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive we are now com­ing to the end of our first three-year device cycle of and, it is help­ing us exam­ine, inves­ti­gate and reaf­firm where we are and what will be doing for the next three years.

sharing_successWe are tak­ing into account all aspects of our pro­gram, lessons learned from our suc­cesses and fail­ures, con­ver­sa­tions with stu­dents, col­leagues and fam­i­lies, along with new research and exam­ples from other schools and institutions.

And of course we are shar­ing as much as we ever have with any­one who wants to learn from us.  Indeed, the shar­ing process has always helped to steer our pro­gram, and it, I believe, a hall­mark for any strong pro­gram, insti­tu­tion or leader.

Recently we hosted a site visit.  We hosted vis­i­tors from ten schools and five states, all inter­ested in hear­ing about our pro­gram and see­ing our school in action.  The is the third time in as many years that we’ve done this, and all told, we have hosted over 35 schools to date.

We run these events not only because we believe that we’ve had a suc­cess­ful pro­gram so far, but also because  they force us to think about what we are doing and explain our pro­gram in a way that will help other schools grow and develop. Sec­ond, we believe in pay­ing it for­ward – we are shar­ing as oth­ers have shared with us.

As we explored the pos­si­bil­ity of our own 1:1 Ini­tia­tive we went on the road and vis­ited a num­ber of schools and attended numer­ous con­fer­ences (see below) to hear the good, the bad and the ugly from those who came before us. From these vis­its, we learned a great deal about what we wanted to do (stu­dent lead­er­ship), what we needed to explore fur­ther (own­er­ship mod­els) and what we didn’t want to do (for­get about pro­fes­sional development).

The open­ness of oth­ers and their col­le­gial­ity helped us develop our pro­gram and have the suc­cess that we believe we’ve had to this day.

Shar­ing can hap­pen in a num­ber of ways and can be about the big and the small. Suc­cess in shar­ing shouldn’t be judged by size – only by the way it impacts those asso­ci­ted with it.  Truly, from small suc­cess, greater suc­cess can grow.

You don’t need to look far to find exam­ples of suc­cess and shar­ing that we can all learn from easily.

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Using device management to teach responsible use.

Posted on 02/05/2013 by William Stites

If you attend an edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence, fol­low any of the Ed Tech list­servs or are active on the Twit­ter hash­tag #edtech you’re bound to find con­ver­sa­tions on device man­age­ment or deployment.

The con­ver­sa­tions will gen­er­ally revolve around how to image and deploy devices, appli­ca­tions (apps), mobile device man­age­ment (MDM — iPad/Android) and push­ing man­age­ment set­tings to each device to con­trol the envi­ron­ment.  You’ll hear about installing pro­files or enrolling device in any one of over three dozen sys­tems on the mar­ket (com­par­i­son chart).

But these con­ver­sa­tins often skip over an impor­tant ques­tion: what are you teaching?

Our school’s 1:1 “Learn­ing” Ini­tia­tive focuses on the teach­ing and learn­ing that occurs with the device. For this rea­son, we don’t have a 1:1 “Laptop/iPad/Tablet/etc” Pro­gram. as the focus is on the learn­ing.  The dif­fer­ence is sub­tle, but since we focus on the learn­ing, we say that.

Because of our focus on learn­ing, we use our man­age­ment sys­tem to help instruct while main­tain­ing a degree of con­trol over the devices.

We use JAMF’s Casper (@JAMFSoftware) suite to man­age our entire fleet of devices. On each man­aged device, the end-user (both fac­ulty and stu­dents Grades 4–12) is an administrator.

While attend­ing the JAMF Nation Con­fer­ence, Damien Bar­rett (@damienbarrett) sat down and gave an inter­view on how our pro­gram works.

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Posted in 1to1, Teaching & Learning, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Enough with the jargon! Simplify and talk about Teaching and Learning.

Posted on 01/27/2013 by William Stites

jargonI like things sim­ple.  Break things down for me into their sim­plest terms and let’s talk.

This is the model I fol­low when I talk to any­one about tech­nol­ogy I try to break things down to their sim­plest parts as I would when I was plan­ning lessons for when I taught in my third grade class years ago.

By think­ing about things within the lens of explain­ing some­thing to a 3rd grader, I force myself to focus on key con­cepts and ideas. This is not to imply that I talk down to peo­ple or dumb down the issues; rather I try to under­stand the point or les­son I intend to teach and get those points across clearly and with as lit­tle con­fu­sion or frus­tra­tion as possible.

Sim­plic­ity is some­thing that I think is sorely miss­ing when from pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment in education.

Attend any con­fer­ence — or  take a look at any  con­fer­ence pro­gram — and you will see ses­sions offered on the Flipped Class­room, Close Read­ing, Back­ward Design or what­ever the fla­vor of the month (or the hot book is on ASCD) hap­pens to be.

Recently I attended the Educon 2.5  con­fer­ence at the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy and sat in on an excel­lent ses­sion on “Close Read­ing” with Christo­pher Lehman (@iChrisLehman — ChristopherLehman.com) & Kate Roberts (@TeachKate) from Teach­ers Col­lege Read­ing and Writ­ing Project at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity. I had no idea what close read­ing looked like these days and was intrigued by the description:

“With 24-hour news cycles and the con­stant pres­ence of screens, text rushes past us at an aston­ish­ing rate. We must slow down, read closely, and uncover sub­tle mes­sages in texts. This con­ver­sa­tion focuses on study­ing, col­lab­o­ra­tively with stu­dents, close read­ing skills and their trans­fer into media, cul­ture, and daily life.”

Read­ing this I thought I was going to hear a con­ver­sa­tion that related to media lit­era­cies and how to parse infor­ma­tion from all of the dif­fer­ent sources com­ing at each of us — teach­ers and stu­dents alike — on a daily basis.

What I learned was how to “care­fully and pur­pose­fully” read a text to take it apart and “anno­tate, look for pat­terns and ask ques­tions” about those “pat­terns” by using the “lens of word choice and evi­dence”. [Using close read­ing strate­gies I pulled out these words:screens, rushes, sub­tle, media, cul­ture, life — proof I was engaged and pay­ing atten­tion]

But wait… isn’t “Close Read­ing” really just talk­ing about comprehension?!?!?

I asked that very ques­tion and the answer was yes (though nuanced to focus on a short piece of text).

So why not just say you are going to talk about new or improved com­pre­hen­sion strate­gies? Why call is some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing that might con­fuse some­one or make him/her think it is going to be some­thing dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent from some­thing with which he.she has already spent time?

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The Art of WiFi… literally.

Posted on 01/07/2013 by William Stites

The fol­low­ing video was done by three peo­ple in Oslo, Nor­way is amaz­ing!  It uses light and a long expo­sure shot to show wifi sig­nal strength and show the jux­ta­po­si­tion of the phys­i­cal and wire­less worlds is truly a work of art.

More infor­ma­tion here: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/02/visualizing-wifi/

 

 
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Using Minecraft in your school’s admission process.

Posted on 01/07/2013 by William Stites

Do your stu­dents like to play Minecraft? Have they asked you if they can put a Minecraft server on your net­work? (Have you let them?)

I don’t know about you, but every time I walk into our Mid­dle School Tech Cen­ter dur­ing recess I see stu­dents wall-to-wall with the major­ity of them play­ing Minecraft?  They are play­ing on their own, with oth­ers and in all sorts of ways.

It is amaz­ing to see the struc­tures they build, the worlds they design, but it wasn’t until I saw what they were able to do with the inspi­ra­tion from out­side the win­dow that got me think­ing about how the school might be ale to use this inter­ac­tive world as an Admis­sions tool.

For the past year or so there has been a lot of con­struc­tion going on out­side the win­dows of our Tech Cen­ter as we con­structed a new din­ing call and com­mon room.  This had the atten­tion of many of the stu­dents and when finally com­plete it inspired them to build the space in Minecraft.

As you can see the space had many inter­ac­tive parts (includ­ing a work­ing fire­place) and does an amaz­ing job of repli­cat­ing the space in a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment.  The abil­ity to inter­act with the space, to walk around, to turn things on and off, to truly explore the space is what got me think­ing about the use of Minecraft in Admissions.

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Posted in Administration & Management, Schools | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Learning from and overcoming the past to move forward.

Posted on 01/05/2013 by William Stites

When you make a deci­sion about some­thing… any­thing… big or small you are set­ting a prece­dent for things to fol­low. The big­ger that deci­sion is the more peo­ple will remem­ber it and turn to it in the future as a guide for other, sim­i­lar decisions.

As a school those deci­sions often become part of the insti­tu­tional mem­ory and stu­dents, par­ents, fac­ulty, admin­is­tra­tion and the board aren’t soon to forget.

I men­tion this as I uncov­ered an old video of a news report that ABC (New York) did of our school’s deci­sion NOT to go with a 1:1 pro­gram back in the later 90’s.

Our deci­sion not to go with a 1:1 Ini­tia­tive all those many years ago was some­thing that we would need to over­come as we inves­ti­gated and planned for doing some­thing we had already said no to once.

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Google is offering a $99 Chromebook! Wait…does cheap make it right?

Posted on 12/10/2012 by William Stites

This is a quick reac­tionary piece to two things I read today that have me scratch­ing my head.  Both related to Google and the Chromebook.

As reported on Engad­get “Google (is) offer­ing $99 Sam­sung Series 5 Chrome­books to pub­lic schools” and while this seem like a sweet deal I am skep­ti­cal for another reason.

Also in the in news today was a report that Google has a wide­spread out­age or “ser­vice dis­rup­tion” as Google reported (ZDNet).

Now these two thing were all the buzz on the Inter­net and social media today.  I couldn’t help but see some­thing either in my Face­book or Twit­ter feed (sorry Google+ was look­ing at you today) about each of these stories.

What con­cerns me about the­ses new pieces is that peo­ple will jump into these cheap devices and not think about the issues and once they have these them they will be forced to deal.

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Posted in 1to1, EdTech, Technical | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Picking the right wireless for your school.

Posted on 12/09/2012 by William Stites

Prior to the deploy­ment of our 1:1 Learn­ing Ini­tia­tive we spent over a year work­ing on our infra­struc­ture.  Switches, fire­walls, access points and other net­work devices/appliances were demoed and tested to han­dle DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, con­tent fil­ter­ing and con­nec­tiv­ity.  We wanted to make sure we had the net­work nailed before we intro­duced over 1000 devices that would need con­stant, daily access.

One of the biggest con­cerns we had was for wireless.

The idea of plug­ging in devices was and is going away.  We needed to have a wire­less net­work that was going to be able to not only give us the cov­er­age that we needed, but also the capac­ity and be able to scale appropriately.

We also want to make sure that the net­work would have the high­est degree of uptime pos­si­ble.  We couldn’t afford to have fac­ulty plan lessons and learn­ing around a resource they couldn’t count on.

“I feel the need… the need for speed” was a line that Tom Cruise used in Top Gun and while we aren’t fly­ing F15s it applied to our wire­less plan­ning. We would want to make sure that the net­work felt like you were fly­ing that F15.  We included redun­dant Inter­net con­nec­tions at each of out loca­tions (3) to pro­vide the fuel to fly (Com­cast & FIOS — load balanced).

But what wire­less sys­tem to choose and how to make that choice?

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Your school, COPPA and Evernote.

Posted on 11/21/2012 by William Stites

In the sum­mer of 2011 while attend­ing the Lau­sanne Lap­top Insti­tute (now the Lau­sanne Learn­ing Insti­tute) I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with my friend Hiram Cuevas (@cuevash) about our use of Ever­note.  He told me how excited he was to hear about what we were doing, but had a ques­tion about how we were deal­ing with our younger learn­ers, those under 13, and the Children’s Online Pri­vacy Pro­tec­tion Act (COPPA).

I told him that was a really good questions.

For a good por­tion of last year (2011–2012) Reshan Richards (@reshanrichards) and I looked at not just Ever­note, but all of the appli­ca­tions and sub­scrip­tion ser­vices our school used.  We dove into their Terms of Ser­vice and Pri­vacy Poli­cies to see just were we stood on the issue.

The result was we now have a COPPA pol­icy, a form for Parental Con­sent and a page on our web­site with explicit noti­fi­ca­tion of the tools we are using — http://www.mka.org/techtools.

In a recent email from Ever­note they out­line some of the update to their Terms of Ser­vice and Pri­vacy Pol­icy.

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Evernote Forever on the Out of School podcast.

Posted on 11/21/2012 by William Stites

On Novem­ber 20th (2012) I had the oppor­tu­nity to talk with both Bradley Cham­bers (@bradleychambers) and Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) about “Ever­note For­ever” on their Out of School podcast.

The dis­cus­sion moved between many top­ics includ­ing the expe­ri­ence at my school using the appli­ca­tion, how it has enhanced not only orga­ni­za­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion, but assess­ment and feed­back as well.  We also dis­cussed the numer­ous options Ever­note pro­vides for the shar­ing of infor­ma­tion and how it can be that trans­for­ma­tional tool that allows you to bridge device, OS and learn­ing envi­ron­ments in and out of the classroom.

Both Fraser and Bradley have a wealth of expe­ri­ence in edu­ca­tional tech­nol­ogy. Fraser is cred­ited with being the world’s first iPad school at Cedars School of Excel­lence in Scot­land and Bradley is an accom­plished Direc­tor of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy for Brain­erd Bap­tist School in Tennessee.

I hope you enjoy our con­ver­sa­tion.

 

 
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