Creating a welcoming web presence

January 23rd, 2012 by Nick Sauers

I have worked the past cou­ple of weeks on get­ting pre­pared to dis­trib­ute a sur­vey to teach­ers through­out the state of Iowa. Part of that work included vis­it­ing school web­sites and col­lect­ing teacher emails. With the help of a friend, I ended up col­lect­ing approx­i­mately 4,000 emails from 140 dif­fer­ent schools.  As you can imag­ine, the look and feel of those school web­sites var­ied greatly. My expe­ri­ence vis­it­ing those web­sites brought for­ward the fol­low­ing issues.

When I vis­ited web­sites, I often won­dered what the pur­pose of the web­site was.  I would guess that the pur­pose each school had for its web­site would explain some of the dif­fer­ences between web­sites. Most of the web­sites seemed to fit into one of two categories.

Sta­tic repos­i­tory of information-These web­sites were obvi­ously updated or changed very infre­quently. They con­tained forms and var­i­ous resources about the school. This would by far be the larger category.

Fluid infor­ma­tion source-These web­sites were updated fre­quently, and they con­tained cur­rent news about the school. Some included videos, pic­tures, and even twit­ter feeds.

This post isn’t intended as a crit­i­cism of schools, but rather as a con­ver­sa­tion starter. As a school, you need to decided where to spend your time and resources. Keep­ing an up to date web­site cer­tainly takes time. With that in mind, I’m going to end with a list of poten­tial rea­sons to invest in updat­ing your web­site and a list of the com­mon prob­lems I found on websites.

Why invest time to keep an up to date website?

  • Your web­site is the first place out­siders see when they look for infor­ma­tion about your school. This includes poten­tial employ­ees, new fam­i­lies, and com­mu­nity partners.
  • Your web­site can serve as a great way to share all of the pos­i­tive things hap­pen­ing in your school with com­mu­nity members.
  • The school can con­trol the infor­ma­tion on their web­site, and it can be a great way to address chal­leng­ing issues.
  • Mem­bers of the school com­mu­nity do want to be able to visit your web­site as a one stop infor­ma­tion warehouse.
Com­mon prob­lems and frus­tra­tions with school websites:
  • Out­dated infor­ma­tion! This was extremely common.
  • Bro­ken links were also quite common.
  • Lack of information-It was dif­fi­cult to find infor­ma­tion and con­tact emails for staff members.
  • Infor­ma­tion that was chal­leng­ing to access-Most com­mu­nity mem­bers will be frus­trated if a click doesn’t get them to the infor­ma­tion they need.

Visit your own web­site and click around on var­i­ous resources. What mes­sage does your school web­site send?

Characteristics of 1:1 Schools and Communities

January 6th, 2012 by Nick Sauers

This is my first blog of the New Year, and first post for some time. I’d like to say that my depar­ture from blog­ging has been due to a trip to warm Phoenix to see my Hawkeyes play in the Insight Bowl, but unfor­tu­nately that isn’t the case. I’ve instead been work­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion, which will attempt to ana­lyze the impact of one-to-one schools across the state of Iowa. Some of my ini­tial find­ings have been very inter­est­ing, but I share them with a dis­claimer. These are very pre­lim­i­nary find­ings, and I may be over­sim­pli­fy­ing them a bit. I am still work­ing to clean-up the data, but I thought these very crude results may be of inter­est to some of you. If you’d like to find out more, feel free to send me an email so we can chat (nck0208@gmail.com).

The ini­tial part of my study attempted to ana­lyze the char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools. The goal was to iden­tify char­ac­ter­is­tics of one-to-one schools that were very dif­fer­ent (sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant) from non-one-to-one schools. Because I didn’t want the char­ac­ter­is­tics to be impacted as a result of a school going one-to-one, I used data from a year that schools were not one-to-one (2007). Here are some of those char­ac­ter­is­tics that were very dif­fer­ent between one-to-one and non-one-to-one schools.

It is impor­tant to stress a cou­ple of points with these data.

  1. I didn’t report items above sim­ply if one group had a higher median. They were only reported if there was a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence. I actu­ally com­pared schools on nearly 100 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics, most of which didn’t show dif­fer­ences between the two groups.
  2. These results are NOT  results of 1:1! These data were col­lected prior to one to-one imple­men­ta­tion in an effort to describe the “type” of schools that were the first in Iowa to tran­si­tion to one-to-one (41 schools).
  3. I have over­sim­pli­fied these results a bit, and they aren’t yet finalized!
Char­ac­ter­is­tics of 1:1 Schools/Communities in Iowa
  • School and dis­trict enrollment-One-to-one schools were smaller.
  • Pupils per computer-Even prior to going one-to-one, one-to-one schools had more computers.
  • 11th grade pro­fi­ciency scores-One-to-one schools outscored non-one-to-one schools.
  • Stu­dent to teacher ratio-They were higher at one-to-one schools.
  • Teacher salaries-Salaries were lower at one-to-one schools.
  • Rev­enue from local sources-One-to-one schools received a greater per­cent­age of their rev­enue from local sources. (This may be a bit con­fus­ing to those of you not famil­iar with Iowa’s fund­ing formula.)
  • Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers with a col­lege degree-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties was lower.
  • Per­cent of com­mu­nity mem­bers in the labor force-The per­cent in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties is less than their counterparts.
  • Median fam­ily income-Family income was lower in one-to-one com­mu­ni­ties. (Hous­ing val­ues were also less.)
  • Age of principal-One-to-one prin­ci­pals were younger.
  • Super­in­ten­dent expe­ri­ence in the district-One-to-one super­in­ten­dents had less dis­trict expe­ri­ence, BUT no sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in over­all experience.
  • Diversity-One-to-one schools were less racially diverse.

Even with those dis­claimers above, I have found these results EXTREMELY inter­est­ing. There are some I cer­tainly would have expected, and oth­ers that were more surprising.

Nick Sauers

Addressing issues with reality

December 15th, 2011 by Nick Sauers

Edu­ca­tion Week recently reported on a study that looked at the preva­lence of sex­ting among youth ages 10–17. That report cited two dis­tinct stud­ies that indi­cated a sur­pris­ingly small per­cent­age of stu­dents were involved in sex­ting as they defined it. My point in high­light­ing their arti­cle isn’t to weigh-in on the issue of sex­ting.  Rather, my objec­tive is to stress how impor­tant it should be for schools to use REAL num­bers and data when address­ing some very tough issues. If you spend much time watch­ing tra­di­tional news venues, you quickly observe the neg­a­tive por­trayal of tech­nol­ogy use on chil­dren. I don’t want to belit­tle seri­ous issues such as cyber-bullying, sex­ting, and online preda­tors, but I think it is impor­tant to gen­uinely address those issues using facts. Many par­ents and schools have made anti-technology deci­sions because of those fears. Unfor­tu­nately, their stu­dents suf­fer because they miss out on many of the affor­dances pro­vided through tech­nol­ogy. That approach could be com­pared to an over­pro­tec­tive par­ent who never lets their child leave their side. Schools need to instead address these very real and seri­ous issues with num­bers and reports which do exist and are avail­able. Stu­dents should be taught about RESPONSIBLE use rather than sim­ply block­ing tech­nol­ogy. Real issues around tech­nol­ogy should be addressed and become part of the cul­ture rather than a thirty minute lec­ture about dig­i­tal cit­i­zen­ship. Schools also need to work to help their stu­dents cre­ate a POSITIVE dig­i­tal foot­print. As a school admin­is­tra­tor, one of the first things I did with can­di­dates who made the first cut was do an inter­net search of their name. It wasn’t done with the pur­pose of find­ing neg­a­tive things about can­di­dates, but rather in an effort to find infor­ma­tion about the great things can­di­dates had done. If can­di­dates aren’t “googleable” in 2011, I won­der what in the heck have they been doing!

Nick Sauers

PD in a one-to-one environment

December 8th, 2011 by Nick Sauers

I was recently emailed the fol­low­ing ques­tion from an edu­ca­tor con­sid­er­ing the move to one to one.

 What have you seen as an appropriate/adequate/effective amount of PD for schools that have imple­mented 1–1?  (Before the stu­dents received the com­put­ers and thereafter.)

Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is cer­tainly one of the key fac­tors for suc­cess or fail­ure for one-to-one schools. My thoughts on this ques­tion are pre­sented below.

There doesn’t really seem to be an easy answer to this ques­tion. The best way to address this is really through a shift in mind­set. All PD should really strive to address ways to find the best tools than can enhance what­ever the PD focus is. It is pretty easy to argue that tech­nol­ogy is one of the very most pow­er­ful tools to do this.  For example…

  • If your staff is focus­ing on project based learn­ing, think of all of the ways that can be enhanced with tech­nol­ogy tools. The abil­ity to cre­ate grows expo­nen­tially with technology.
  • If your staff is focus­ing on rigor and rel­e­vance, tech­nol­ogy can also serve as a tool to pro­vide a much richer expe­ri­ence for students.
  • If your staff is focus­ing on stu­dent engage­ment, there are all kinds of tech­nol­ogy tools that can help engage stu­dents. (If you don’t know what they are, ask your stu­dents to help find them!)

These are just a few of the many ways that tech­nol­ogy can con­nect to pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment. There are other fea­tures that are impor­tant to con­sider when design­ing PD. I would rec­om­mend dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing PD. This should be dif­fer­en­ti­ated by skill level, but there also needs to be a time for con­tent alike teach­ers to con­verse with one another. The Tech­nol­ogy, Ped­a­gogy, and Con­tent Knowl­edge (TPACK) frame­work describes the over­lap of those three areas to achieve truly high lev­els of tech­nol­ogy inte­gra­tion. With­out those con­tent alike con­ver­sa­tions, some teach­ers may have a dif­fi­cult time bring­ing new tools into their spe­cific class­rooms. Although dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is key, it is also impor­tant to develop a set of tools that are applic­a­ble to all edu­ca­tors. One way to think of this is as build­ing a com­mon foun­da­tion or knowl­edge for all teach­ers. In What School Lead­ers Need to Know About Dig­i­tal Tech­nolo­gies and Social Media, Pamela Liv­ingston and Chris Lehman posed a ques­tion with that theme in their one-to-one chapter.

 What are the essen­tial tech­no­log­i­cal tools that all teach­ers should know how to use?

A final focus I would stress for PD is to develop lead­ers within your build­ing who have the capac­ity to help lead PD and prob­lem solve with other teach­ers. Send those teach­ers to a con­fer­ence or two each year to stay ahead of the curve. Give them some time, maybe a half-day each month, to explore and play with new tech­nolo­gies. Although there is a time and place for “out­siders” to come in and help,  your dis­trict will be money ahead by devel­op­ing their own experts.

Schools fail­ure to invest in PD once they have moved to one-to-one is one of the most com­mon mis­takes I have wit­nessed at one-to-one schools. That lack of invest­ment can cer­tainly make the tran­si­tion to one-to-one a poor invest­ment as well.

Nick Sauers

1:1 questions to consider

December 2nd, 2011 by Nick Sauers

As I was fly­ing back to Ken­tucky from my Thanks­giv­ing break in Iowa, as well as a side trip to an ugly Hawk­eye foot­ball game, I had the oppor­tu­nity to read parts of Scott McLeod and Chris Lehmann’s new edited book. The book, enti­tled What School Lead­ers Need to Know About Dig­i­tal Tech­nolo­gies and Social Media includes a chap­ter about one-to-one com­put­ing writ­ten by Pamela Liv­ingston and Chris Lehmann, who are both cer­tainly lead­ers in the one-to-one com­mu­nity. The chap­ter is packed full of infor­ma­tion for cur­rent one-to-one edu­ca­tors as well as those con­sid­er­ing the tran­si­tion. One sec­tion in par­tic­u­lar struck me as extremely impor­tant for teach­ers and school lead­ers to pon­der. That sec­tion focused on how teach­ers will need to inves­ti­gate how their teach­ing will change. The fol­low­ing ques­tions are pre­sented in the text.

 

How should teach­ing and learn­ing change to reflect the new shared vision of school?

What assump­tions and behav­iors will teach­ers release in terms of their instruc­tional roles in order to achieve a more student-centered model?

What are the new struc­tures of teach­ing that should be imple­mented to achieve the vision?

How will teach­ers col­lab­o­rate to enable inno­va­tion to spread from class to class?

What are the essen­tial tech­no­log­i­cal tools that all teach­ers should know how to use?

What are the cur­ric­u­lar tools (unit plan­ning devices, rubrics for grad­ing, and so on) that can help teach­ers reach their goals?

How will teach­ers assess the new arti­facts of learn­ing that stu­dents can create?

How can teach­ers use the 1:1 lap­top expe­ri­ence as a way to cre­ate a shared lan­guage of teach­ing and learn­ing across the entire school?

 

These ques­tions are great con­ver­sa­tion starters for any­one involved with one-to-one. Along with this set of ques­tions, there are other ques­tions focus­ing on var­i­ous aspects of 1:1 programs.

 

Nick Sauers