We 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.

Here are few exam­ples of what I con­sider suc­cess through sharing:

#edchat, #ised­chat, #satchat & #leadin­gonline are all exam­ples of the ongo­ing shar­ing of suc­cess­ful prac­tice (and unsuc­cess­ful prac­tice) in edu­ca­tion.  Through these Twit­ter hash­tags peo­ple are ask­ing ques­tions, shar­ing sto­ries and help­ing guide others, making the facilitators mod­els of how social media can be used to con­nect peo­ple and help them achieve their goals.

ISED and NYCIST are just two exam­ples of the list­servs I sub­scribe to and rely on.  I learn from what oth­ers are shar­ing and give back what I’ve learned. List­servs are noth­ing new to edu­ca­tion and shar­ing, but I think they still offer an amaz­ing way to con­nect with peo­ple and learn.

Blogs, blogs and more blogs.  There is no short­age of peo­ple writ­ing online and the num­ber of edu­ca­tional blogs out there is only grow­ing. Find peo­ple that write, and read what they have to say. They are tak­ing time to write about what they are doing, what they have learned, their suc­cess and fail­ures, and giv­ing it to all of you so that you can learn. It’s why I, for one, do what I do; and I am happy to share with you the work some of my col­leagues and friends are doing as well:

• Steve Valentine (@sjvalentine) - Refreshing Wednesday - A look into the mind of an Upper School Assistant Head and his thought on schools, leadership and curriculum
• Reshan Richards (@reshanrichards) — The Constructivist Toolkit — Helping others make sense of the rapidly changing face of education technology.
• Brendan Schneider (@schneiderb) — SchneiderB.com — An admissions officer and social media guru. If you want to know how inbound marketing can help in the admissions process.
• Fraser Spears (@fraserspeirs) — Fraser Speirs — If you are interested in 1:1 iPad programs look not further.
• edSocialMedia (@edSocialMedia) — edSocialMedia — This is a great collection of people talking about all things relating to social media in education. You will find professional in all areas of school life sharing their successes. [Disclosure: I manage the blog for edSocialMedia]

There are numer­ous other blogs out there of peo­ple shar­ing best prac­tice and suc­cess sto­ries.  Search using Google’s blogs search or Tech­no­rati to find the blog that can help you achieve your success.

Further, I would encour­age each of you read­ing this to think of a suc­cess, big or small, you can share – and then share it. It can be as short as a tweet, a com­ment made on a blog, a reply to a list­serv, or a post on a blog as a guest.  It can be you start­ing your own blog, making a pre­sen­ta­tion at a con­fer­ence or inviting peo­ple (from inside or out­side your school/institution) to see what you are doing.

If you think you are successful in what you are doing, give back and inspire others!

Schools visited/conferences:

• Rye Country Day (NY)
• Rocky Hill School (RI)
• The Park School  (MA)
• Packer Collegiate (NY)
• Noble and Greenough School (MA)
• Newton Country Day (MA)
• Buckingham, Browne & Nichols (MA)
• Dalton (NY)
• Lausanne Collegiate (TN)

• Noble and Greenough Learning Conference — 2007
• The Laptop Institute — 2006–2012

 

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.

By allowing our students and faculty to be administrators on their own machines we are empowering them to be owners of their devices while teaching them that its okay to explore, make mistakes and learn.

We require that each of the students study a “Driver’s Manual” - http://driversmanual.mka.org - and pass a “Driver’s Test” in order to get their license to drive their laptop, to “own” it.  We use these two tools to teach the proper care and feeding of the device.

Everyone is responsible for doing their own systems updates, installing their own printers and software, backing up their own devices — we provide them with a 500GB drive for Time Machine backups — and if they have a question, need help or have a problem they can come in to one of our Tech Centers and talk to an Apple Certified Tech or member of our Ed Tech Department.

Our management platform, Casper, allows us to do all this while maintaining a level of control and management to best support our faculty and students.  We use Casper’s Self-Service tool to provide shortcuts to downloads and scripts that do a whole host of things, from installing a print driver to running a maintenance script that can help improve the performance of the device. It also gives us a small window into the device to make sure the everything is running the way it should (our Privacy Policy).

Throughout all of this, we are trying to teach the responsible use and ownership of technology devices. When students are home, away at camp or graduate and move on to college and the world beyond they will not have a full-time IT department at their disposal.  They will need to be problem solvers and know what to do when they have an issue.

The devices we chose for our 1:1 pro­grams and how we choose to manage them within our envi­ron­ments should not only reflect and sup­port the type of teach­ing and learn­ing we want to see hap­pen in our class­room, but should also reflect what’s happening out­side those rooms and in the world at large.

 

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?

For the past number of years professional development has focused on things like Backward Design, the Gradual Release of Responsibility model and curriculum mapping. Each of these concepts have some really great ideas and methods for helping to focus instruction, but there are often rules and forms that must be followed in order to do these things “right”.

As an example, in Backwards Design you need to fill in a template for your lesson where you identify key pieces.  The form includes three steps, with seven sub-steps and a seven letter acronym to learn in order to complete one of the sub-steps, outlined below:

• Stage One — Desired Results
  • Established Goal(s) — Relevant goals design will address
  • Understandings — “big ideas”
  • Essential Questions — provocative questions that will foster inquiry.
  • What students will know — key knowledge or what student will be able to do
• Stage Two — Assessment Evidence
  • Performance tasks — what are the tasks and how will they be judged
  • Other evidence — quizzes, tests to demonstrate achievement and how student will self-assess
• Stage 3 — Learning Plan
  • Learning Activities
    • W — where students are coming from (prior knowledge)
    • H  the hook to hold interest
    • E — equip students, experiences and explore issues
    • R — rethink and revise understanding of work
    • E — evaluate work and implications
    • T — tailored to need, interests & abilities of learner
    • O — organized to maintain initial & sustained engagement

Isn’t backward design really about starting with your end goal and setting up experiences within the classroom to reach that goal? Aren’t these steps just part of good teaching and learning?

Yes!

Does a teachers who are expected to have mastery of their own content or subject area need to master all of these steps to improve instruction within their own classes? Do they need to know what box to put what piece of their lesson, assessment or experience into in order to improve teaching and learning? Don’t they just need to understand the “big ideas” of Backwards Design?

For those of us involved in plan­ning and struc­tur­ing pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment offer­ings for our faculty, we need to be mind­ful of what our insti­tu­tional goals are and the type of school we want to be.  Many of the trends or mod­els of instruc­tion offer great ideas for improv­ing teach­ing and learn­ing, and coor­di­na­tors of pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment should certainly under­stand the ins-and-outs of these models.

Those folks need to have a deeper under­stand­ing of the best mod­els and be able to break them down to their sim­plest forms for fac­ulty to under­stand and implement in their own teach­ing.   By simplifying things for our faculties, we will empower teachers by virtue of the fact that they won’t feel like they are con­stantly being asked to unlearn what was the hot trend last year and relearn all the new jar­gon for the new one.

Lets talk about the big ideas/concepts of these var­i­ous meth­ods and ground them in what we already know as edu­ca­tors.  Let’s talk about assess­meant and col­lab­o­ra­tion.  Let’s talk about plan­ning a good les­son, assess­ment or expe­ri­ence that will moti­vate and inspire stu­dents to learn.  If jar­gon is to be used, it should be jargon that flows through all of the trends to keep con­fu­sion to a min­i­mum and bring sim­plic­ity to the forefront.

 

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

 

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.

Given the changing nature of an inquiry and how potential families can find out so much about our school before we even get them in the door, wouldn’t it be great to get the in the door before they even leave their house?

I often read about or have had conversations with people in both our Admissions office and other offices about building virtual tours, giving people the opportunity to explore the school and see what it is about.  Minecraft can provide a real niche way of reaching a number of students and giving them a wholly interactive virtual tour.

Minecraft may not appeal to everyone and it will require work to build and make available, but if you have motivated students who are willing to take the time to build something on their own, like above, it’s it worth exploring?

By reaching out to prospective students and give them an opportunity to “play” within the walls of the school, to make a game out of their visit is a win-win.  Why not think about hiding an “Easter Egg” somewhere in the environment and award those student who find it with a special prize when they come in for an actual visit.

Bring gamification to the admissions process.  Imagine a potential student/family physically walking around your school for the first time and feeling like they’ve already been there… because they have through Minecraft.

Take connecting with a prospective student digital and give them something to play with.

 

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.

It provided us with a good sense of what we would need to do differently and the questions we would have to ask and answer to make our new case.  It allowed us to go in different directions and informed the visits we would make to other schools.

We would engage in as many conversations wherever possible about what would make our program work this time and allow us to achieve the newly defined learning goals we would establish.  This time we would take a broader look at student learning and include things like organization, note-taking, collaboration as well as how our initiative would improve assessment and feedback.

I was not small task doing it and our journey to our 1:1 Initiative would take years, not months, but by learning from and overcoming our past mistakes, questions and decisions would allow us to design and implement a program that we are truly proud of.

 

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.

Now, these Chromebooks look great! They have a really nice design, are visually appealing as well as now with Google’s support a great price for (public) schools.

Just look at that picture… yeah… let’s look at this picture closely.

It’s a beautifully sunny day and you (not shown) and your device are outside getting a little work done. But wait a minute… do you have an Internet connection? Has public Internet access become so ubiquitous enough that it is available anywhere and everywhere? I don’t think so.

This is part of the problem as I see it for many people, particularly those that will find these devices appealing in trying to bridge the gap in particularly hard hit economic areas is that they will not meet their needs properly.

What percentage of people have broadband WiFi access in the home? Broadband access is growing, but it’s not there yet and WiFi access is still behind that.

The other concern I have had with these device and the cloud in general is that it his moving us back to a terminal and server model. When the server is down, as it was today with Google you are out of luck.

I have read that you can take a certain piece of Google Apps/Drive offline, but it doesn’t appear to be a complete solution yet.  Word processing doc work offline, but spreadsheets and presentations are read only.

Now I am in a potion where I work at an institution that has other options and I am grateful for that.  Many schools will find that these devices will fill a need and that they provide access to technology that wouldn’t be possible in any other way.  My concern is that cost is often the driving force behind decisions and that it should not always be the deciding factor.

Again, I may be off base here in my criticism of Google and the Chromebook in general but when you look at the excitement over the device is it because of what it does and how it can transform learning or is it because of how much it cost?  If it’s because it’s both great and I’ll shut-up!

 

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?

We would need to set some expectations for what we would want and how we would evaluate these systems.

It would need to:

1. Support the latest wireless standard
2. Provide support for 2.4 & 5 Ghz radios
3. Provide the capacity and coverage we needed
4. Have a user-friendly management interface
5. Minimized single-point of failure — controller & data flow
6. Be easily scalable
7. Support various security methodologies
8. Integrate easily with existing systems
9. Have superior support and local resources (vendors) that you can easily work with

These were just a few of the items for which we would evaluate each of the various wireless systems.

We met with representatives from Aruba, Cisco, Meru, Trapeze (now Juniper), Xirrus, Ruckus and Apple (Merarki and Aerohive weren’t evaluated). We not only brought in sales representatives (vendors), but engineers from each of the individual companies to avoid getting the “sale pitch” for the product.

On many occasions had individual meeting with just the engineers from the various companies. It was important to do have the companies come in and set up their systems within your network to show us how it would work and would integrate with our existing network environment.  While extremely time-consuming, it is time well spent as once you make your decision on a wireless system it is one that you are going to live with for years to come.

In the end we chose to go with a Ruckus solution.  While many of the other companies had compelling offerings it was Ruckus’s beam-forming technology, it’s focused signal, easy of use and a controller that did not get in the way of the traffic that sold us.

Syracuse University recently completed a comprehensive independent testing of the ‘Top-of-the-line’ 802.11n AP’s. This testing included Cisco 3602i, Aruba AP135, Aerohive AP330, Meraki MR24, and Ruckus ZoneFlex 7982.  While this was done well after our implementation of our wireless network, the testing and results were consistent with our finding prior to installation and since we’ve had the Ruckus system in place.

The Syracuse final report is posted on the Syracuse website here: http://dcc.syr.edu/PDF/CCENT_3-stream_eval.pdf and you can watch a short video explaining the results here: http://tinyurl.com/af9bbs9.

For us, we spent the 2008–2009 school year evaluating wireless systems, the summer of 2009 installing a Ruckus system (along with new network switches — Cisco — and various other network appliances for support services), the 2009–2010 school year testing and fine tuning the network so that we could deploy all of our device with confidence in 2010–2011.  I can’t begin to stress enough how important it is to have your network evaluated and if need be upgrade well in advance of your deployment.  If you faculty and students can’t trust that your network will “just work” you’ve lost before you’ve even started.

Whichever wireless solution you choose make sure that it matches the needs of your network and will support the learning goals you have established for your program.   Here is to you flying high!

NOTE: Our network environment consists of the following:

• Apple OSX Server Open Directory for user/group management
• Untangle Network appliance for content filtering and firewall services
• Infoblox network appliance for DHCP, DNS and Radius (AAA) services
• Ruckus wireless
• Cisco Layer 3 switched network (10/100/1000Mbps)
• Over 1115 13″ Macbook (Pros/Airs/etc)
• 70+ iPads
• Numerous personal faculty iPhones & other smartphones.
• 3 campuses with 56 APs in total
  • Primary — 10
  • Middle — 23
  • Upper — 23

Our network providers/consultants are:

• Let’s Think Wireless (LTW) for all Ruckus and Cisco networking
• Precision Consulting for all general network consulting and integration

 

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.

In the email they state:

“We’re thrilled with the number of educators and administrators around the world who have shown interest in using Evernote in their schools, so we have modified our contracts with respect to use by underage individuals who might not be old enough to enter into a contract on their own, including specific guidance for schools in the US where we want to ensure that the requirements of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act are satisfied.”

and in their Privacy statement they clear define their position on COPPA:

What Is Evernote’s Approach to Information Collected From Children?

“Evernote complies with the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”), which requires us to notify and obtain consent from a parent or guardian before we collect, use and disclose the personal information of children who are under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 years of age without such consent, and if we learn that we have inadvertently done so, we will promptly delete it.”

Having companies, like Evernote, take such a plain language approach to this issue is refreshing for schools administrator who often have to read through pages legalese in order to get understand where they stand with COPPA.

If you are not familiar with COPPA I encourage you to look in what have post here as well as spending some time looking at the TOC and Privacy policies of those web-based service and subscriptions you use in your institutions.

 

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.