As I was read­ing my Google Reader today, I came across another great source to help edu­ca­tors develop their tech­nol­ogy skills.  21 Things for the 21st Cen­tury Edu­ca­tor is a site ded­i­cated to pro­vid­ing online assis­tance and train­ing based on ISTE’s National Edu­ca­tional Tech­nol­ogy Stan­dards (NETS) for teach­ers.  The site is also ded­i­cated to help­ing teach­ers assist their stu­dents in meet­ing the NETS for stu­dents.  In addi­tion to the 21 strands of resources on the site, there are also vir­tual ses­sions edu­ca­tors can view on Adobe Con­nect.  I’ve only had a chance to view two of the strands, and I found both help­ful.  They were short enough that they kept even my attention.

This site has much more guid­ance than the resources that I posted Wednes­day.  For those of you who are design­ing pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment for teach­ers, this may be a great tool.  Edu­ca­tors could work through the 21 strands in small teams through­out the year.  This site also offers lots of guid­ance for those of you who are will­ing to explore on your own.  Good luck!

Nick Sauers

Web 2.0’s top 1,000 list is a great resource for web 2.0 tools. The site is very user friendly, and it is easy to scan the appli­ca­tions, which are listed by topic.  Those top­ics include audio, blog­ging, book­mark­ing, cal­en­dar, chat, col­lab­o­ra­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, design, file­shar­ing,
knowl­edge, mul­ti­me­dia, news, writ­ing and many more.  This site may be
very help­ful for edu­ca­tors who want to use web 2.0 appli­ca­tions, but are not aware or uncer­tain of what tools are actu­ally out there.  It will also be help­ful for ed techies who are always look­ing to expand their tool­box of resources. 

Last week I spent three days work­ing with var­i­ous groups of edu­ca­tors as part of the train­ing CASTLE pro­vides.   Super­in­ten­dents, prin­ci­pals, teach­ers and tech­nol­ogy direc­tors attended our work­shops.   Accept­able use poli­cies and online safety were two top­ics we addressed. As most of you prob­a­bly real­ize, many edu­ca­tors have very strong feel­ings when it comes to these subjects.

The dif­fer­ing view­points and diver­sity of the group resulted in some inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions. Unfor­tu­nately, there is not just one sim­ple solu­tion or answer to these issues that I can offer school dis­tricts.  I attempted instead to present atten­dees with some facts and ques­tions to get con­ver­sa­tions started.  Hope­fully these prompts can help edu­ca­tional lead­ers have mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions related to these topics. 

Who is respon­si­ble for the cur­rent sys­tems in our schools?  Who is respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing poli­cies and pro­ce­dures that teach empow­er­ing use of tech­nol­ogy?  As edu­ca­tional lead­ers, we must take respon­si­bil­ity for the sys­tem.  We are the system!

What are the real facts about online safety?  In order to make informed deci­sions about any topic, facts need to be gath­ered.  Many times poli­cies relat­ing to online safety have been devel­oped as reac­tionary or address­ing an overblown concern.

When we lock down and fil­ter the inter­net aggres­sively, what things do we lose?  Any­time that a gov­ern­ment or orga­ni­za­tion restricts free­doms, it comes at a cost.  Dis­tricts must address this ques­tion!  If stu­dents and teach­ers are blocked from numer­ous resources, we have to real­ize that there are costs to stu­dents’ educations. 

Do we really need to develop spe­cific tech­nol­ogy poli­cies, or are many issues around tech­nol­ogy already addressed in another pol­icy.  (i.e.  A school in Mis­sis­sippi pro­hibits teach­ers from com­mu­ni­cat­ing with stu­dents on Face­book.  Is Face­book really the issue, or is inap­pro­pri­ate com­mu­ni­ca­tion or behav­ior with stu­dents the issue?  If the lat­ter is the issue, there should already be poli­cies that address that this.)  Will we need to con­tin­u­ally develop new poli­cies as new tech­nolo­gies are released?

Do we treat tech­nol­ogy dis­ci­pline issues dif­fer­ently than other issues?  Do we take the pro­hi­bi­tion approach to tech­nol­ogy?  Because some stu­dents may use YouTube or other resources inap­pro­pri­ately, should we block all stu­dents from using them?

What mes­sage does your AUP send home?  Does it focus on all of the pos­i­tive ben­e­fits afforded by tech­nol­ogy, or does it only address fears and pun­ish­ment of inap­pro­pri­ate behav­ior?
 
How can we trust our teach­ers with our stu­dents, but not the inter­net?

Licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons attribution-share alike license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

For addi­tional resources, check out our wiki from the day.

Nick Sauers

Over
the past two weeks I have posted dif­fer­ent stakeholder’s view­points
about the con­cerns peo­ple have in regards to one to one.  These
responses were from the angle of a school  board mem­ber, prin­ci­pal, and
super­in­ten­dent involved with schools that are mak­ing one to one work.  Hope­fully this series will con­tinue to help you address some of these
appre­hen­sions. Today I am going to give you my two cents worth. 

One to one is just too expensive! 

I have had the oppor­tu­nity to work with, observe, read about, and lis­ten to oth­ers dis­cuss var­i­ous one to one pro­grams. The schools vary in make-up from small to large, urban or rural, and increas­ing or decreas­ing enroll­ment.  ALL of those schools have been able to finance one to one because they felt that it was impor­tant for their stu­dents.  I am con­vinced that any school that has a true desire to become one to one can afford to do it.  The advan­tages for stu­dents enrolled in a one to one pro­gram make the expenses well worth it.

There is no research that sup­ports one to one.

This is sim­ply not true!  There is research that sup­ports var­i­ous ben­e­fits of one to one.  The Jour­nal of Tech­nol­ogy, Learn­ing, and Assess­ment recently pub­lished numer­ous arti­cles about the ben­e­fits.  AALF also has a very wide col­lec­tion of research on one to one.  McRel and the Maine Learn­ing Tech­nol­ogy Ini­tia­tive also have addi­tional research.

If stu­dents have com­put­ers, they will con­stantly be off task.

This con­cern is ludi­crous.  Many of you may know from read­ing my pre­vi­ous posts that I have very pas­sion­ate feel­ings about this.  Stu­dents will be off task when they are not engaged regard­less of the medium used for instruc­tion.  We need to ban bore­dom and bad teach­ing, not computers.

We can’t give the com­put­ers to kids–they will break them!

The break­age rate for com­put­ers is actu­ally very low, under 5% accord­ing to many reports.  This has not been a major prob­lem for most schools that are involved with one to one.  Devel­op­ing appro­pri­ate poli­cies and pro­ce­dures can also help reduce break­age further.

What hap­pens if kids get on inap­pro­pri­ate sites while they are at home with the school computers?

Some stu­dents will do inap­pro­pri­ate things with their com­put­ers.  How­ever, that is not a rea­son to ban all stu­dents from a tool that has the poten­tial to totally trans­form their edu­ca­tion.  We don’t ban dri­ving because some mem­bers of soci­ety choose to drive irre­spon­si­bly.  The tool, or car, is too valu­able to our soci­ety.  Com­put­ers can be just as pow­er­ful of tool in the edu­ca­tional setting.

Par­ents will not allow us to let stu­dents access the inter­net.

Par­ents need to be edu­cated about their children’s com­puter and how they will be used.  If par­ents under­stand the pur­poses they are intended for, they will be much less likely to try to pro­hibit them.  Edu­ca­tion and con­tin­u­ous infor­ma­tion will be vital. 

Posted by Nick Sauers

In Ham­let, Shake­speare says, “The Readi­ness is all.” This is apro­pos to stu­dent learn­ing via 1-to-1 in a vari­ety of ways.  

1-to-1 allows think­ing readi­ness when a stu­dent has his/her own dig­i­tal assis­tant packed with resources and an Inter­net con­nec­tion, the think­ing is fingertip-ready for projects, analy­sis, read­ing, writ­ing, research­ing, pub­lish­ing, pre­sent­ing and problem-solving.  “What if” pos­si­bil­i­ties when con­sid­er­ing a prob­lem are pos­si­ble because all the resources are available. 

1-to-1 allows work­ing readi­ness when the work and tools are handy at all times. The iter­a­tive process of writ­ing, revis­ing, and rewrit­ing is facil­i­tated when the project goes with the stu­dent — in the class­room, at home, at grandma’s house, any­where. The cre­at­ing, tweak­ing and rehears­ing of pre­sen­ta­tions, which takes many hours, can be accom­plished more flu­idly instead of in 40 minute moments of the class­room because the pre­sen­ta­tion goes with the student.  

Also, plain vanilla work of com­plet­ing assign­ments is pos­si­ble, and they don’t get lost, when the vehi­cle involves a dig­i­tal assis­tant trans­ported by a stu­dent.  1-to-1 facil­i­tates learn­ing readi­ness and not dis­jointed, spo­radic classroom-space-specific learning.

– Pamela Liv­ingston, author of “1-to-1 Learn­ing: Lap­top Pro­grams That Work”

The Iowa One to One Insti­tute was a great day to con­nect and learn from oth­ers despite the inter­net prob­lems that we had.  Over 550 edu­ca­tors had the chance to col­lab­o­rate with one another about how tech­nol­ogy can trans­form edu­ca­tion.  There were over 70 dif­fer­ent ses­sions that par­tic­i­pants could attend cov­er­ing a wide range of top­ics.  Par­tic­i­pants and pre­sen­ters have posted resources from the day in var­i­ous loca­tions.  Here are some of those resources for you to explore.

Many of the pre­sen­ters have posted their mate­ri­als on the Iowa 1-to-1 Net­work group blog.  You will find lots of great resources  there!

You can also check out the ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tions around the Iowa One to One Insti­tute by view­ing the Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion at #i11i. 

Here are some blog posts from the day that are worth tak­ing a look at:

• Deron Dur­flinger reflects on his day.
• Evan Abbey’s blog post.
• Russ Goerend’s video reflec­tion of his day.
• Patrick Larkin’s blog post

Addi­tional Resources

• Notes from Angela Maier’s presentation
• Notes from Russ Goerend’s presentation
• Notes from Shan­non Miller’s presentation
• Notes from Jen Sigrist’s presentation

Posted by Nick Sauers

Iowa hosted its first ever Iowa One to One Insti­tute yes­ter­day
in Des Moines. This con­fer­ence was con­ceived of at a meet­ing of Iowa one
to one edu­ca­tors who expressed the need for a day of col­lab­o­rat­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion and
resources. Their desire was to cre­ate a con­fer­ence to sup­port
oth­ers involved in one to one and those schools mov­ing to one to one.
The con­fer­ence would pro­vide schools a chance to col­lab­o­rate as well as
share suc­cess stories. 

CASTLE took the lead in plan­ning and man­ag­ing the event, but we also had lots of other con­trib­u­tors.  Cur­rent one to one schools pro­vided pre­sen­ters and some tech­nol­ogy for the day.  Apple, Byte­Speed, CDW-G,and Tier­ney Broth­ers also sup­ported the event in var­i­ous ways.  It was an awe­some day for those involved, and we have received great feed­back from par­tic­i­pants.  I will be post­ing more details and resources from the day very soon, but
my post today will focus on what may have been the biggest obsta­cle that we faced yesterday.

For those of you who were in atten­dance, you know that I am refer­ring to the internet.….or lack of inter­net.  At about eleven in the morn­ing the inter­net totally crashed and left us
with­out ser­vice.  The hows and whys may not be very rel­e­vant to many
of you, so I will save that expla­na­tion for the end of my post today.  My rea­son for writ­ing is sim­ply to address the ques­tion that I posed in the title.

What hap­pens if the tech­nol­ogy fails?

My first response is one that I heard from my high school Eng­lish teacher many times.  OTHER stu­dents came to class unpre­pared offer­ing up the excuse, “I for­got do do my home­work because.…(insert var­i­ous excuses here)”.  The teacher’s reply was sim­ply, “Don’t for­get.”  I real­ize that this is an extremely sim­ple solu­tion, but it is also an effec­tive solu­tion to the ques­tion that I posed.  Don’t let tech­nol­ogy fail, or at least not on a reg­u­lar basis.  Schools must design sys­tems that dras­ti­cally reduce tech­nol­ogy fail­ures.  There must be plans in place to get machines and the sys­tem up and run­ning quickly if they do fail.  I may be stat­ing the obvi­ous, but I’m cer­tain there is a very strong neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion between tech­nol­ogy fail­ures and tech­nol­ogy use in schools.  As tech­nol­ogy fail­ures increase, tech­nol­ogy use will decrease.  Elim­i­nate this huge bar­rier to edu­ca­tion by devel­op­ing a robust tech­nol­ogy sys­tem, and also by cre­at­ing a plan that can address prob­lems quickly.

Even with the best plan­ning, it is likely that there will be times when tech­nol­ogy fails.  Does that mean that classes should shut down or sim­ply turn into a study hall?  This ques­tion reminds me of a Simpson’s episode where Bart stole all of the teach­ing man­u­als.  Because the teach­ers didn’t have their man­u­als, school had to be can­celed.  Obvi­ously, that solu­tion isn’t real prac­ti­cal.  As much as I hated to see the inter­net go down at our con­fer­ence, the pre­sen­ters demon­strated how learn­ing can con­tinue even with a lack of tech­nol­ogy.  They did it in dif­fer­ent ways, but all of their strate­gies could be directly applic­a­ble to stu­dents as well.  My list below isn’t com­pre­hen­sive, but it high­lights some of the ways learn­ing continued. 

• Par­tic­i­pants were engaged because they were gen­uinely inter­ested in the topic. 
• Par­tic­i­pants were engaged because they had choice in what they attended.  This is pos­si­ble in schools even with our standards.
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion was encour­aged and there was an open dia­logue between par­tic­i­pants and pre­sen­ters.  There didn’t seem to be a hier­ar­chy of knowl­edge in the rooms.
• Par­tic­i­pants actu­ally became unof­fi­cial pre­sen­ters dur­ing the var­i­ous ses­sions.  The pre­sen­ters actu­ally val­ued and sought out the knowl­edge of the group.  

Again, this list is far from com­pre­hen­sive.  I missed out on a lot as I was run­ning around try­ing to fig­ure out what had hap­pened with our tech­nol­ogy.  Hope­fully, those of you who read my blog fre­quently real­ize that I don’t see tech­nol­ogy by iteslf as the solu­tion for all prob­lems in edu­ca­tion.  Adding tech­nol­ogy to schools with­out alter­ing edu­ca­tional prac­tices will not trans­form schools.  My list above hits on some of those edu­ca­tional prac­tices that I write about and talk about reg­u­larly.  Tech­nol­ogy is only a tool, but when used with trans­for­ma­tive edu­ca­tional prac­tices, it may be the most pow­er­ful tool ever in education.

.….read on if you care to know more about our tech­nol­ogy fail­ures from yesterday. 

As we began plan­ning this event, we had two major con­cerns and all of the minor ones that go along with prepar­ing for any con­fer­ence.  Our first con­cern was find­ing a build­ing with the capac­ity for a large con­fer­ence, and our sec­ond con­cern was the inter­net.  If you aren’t from Iowa, you may not real­ize that there are very few facil­i­ties in cen­tral Iowa with the capac­ity for a con­fer­ence our size.  The sec­ond con­cern, inter­net use, is one I feel the need to address.  As I paced the halls yes­ter­day, I stewed about the bad press that we would gen­er­ate about the Iowa Events Cen­ter through blog posts, twit­ter, and word of mouth.  I real­ized that our group con­sisted of, or were con­nected with, indi­vid­u­als from all of the largest edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tions and var­i­ous other orga­ni­za­tions in the state of Iowa (edu­ca­tors gen­er­ally seem to be a very well con­nected group). 

So what happened?

When we ini­tially began plan­ning for our event, we made it clear that 500–600 par­tic­i­pants would need wire­less access for our event.  After vis­it­ing with the tech­nol­ogy direc­tor for the Events Cen­ter, we decided that they would need to boost their wire­less access for the day.  We agreed and kicked in addi­tional money to ensure that par­tic­i­pants would have access for the day.  We stressed how impor­tant it was that par­tic­i­pants had wire­less, and that we would have some very heavy users.  I was ensured that the inter­net con­nec­tion for the day would be suf­fi­cient.  As it turns out, the inter­net con­nec­tion appeared to be suf­fi­cient.  The day started great, and there were very few prob­lems for the first hour and a half.  At about 11:00 that all changed.  It turns out that the prob­lem was an equip­ment fail­ure.  The sys­tems net­work gate­way failed.  It was explained to me that this prob­lem was totally ran­dom, and wasn’t due to our wire­less usage.  The gate­way, which had not had any
prob­lems in the past 4 years, actu­ally failed at one of the points of
our low­est usage.  At that point, the Events Cen­ter staff replaced
their gate­way with a back-up sys­tem.  Unfor­tu­nately, they were unable
to get their new sys­tem to a level that would meet our needs.

At the con­clu­sion of the day, Scott McLeod and I
met with our event man­ager, sales man­ager, IT staff, and assis­tant
gen­eral man­ager of the Iowa Events Cen­ter.  They were very apolo­getic,
and they explained exactly what had hap­pened.  I cer­tainly am not an IT per­son, but I accept the expla­na­tion
that we were given.    They were able to con­vince me that they do  have the capac­ity to host a con­fer­ence with heavy inter­net needs, and have done so in the past.  Unfor­tu­nately, we were unlucky enough to be there on a day of an unusual equip­ment failure.  

Pen­cils break, paper tears, and tech­nol­ogy fails at times even when we have plans in place to min­i­mize those fail­ures.  I feel for­tu­nate that our pre­sen­ters were able to move
for­ward even with our inter­net prob­lems.  I don’t feel the need to bash the Events Cen­ter, and I real­ize that as the expres­sion goes #%*# happens.

In Feb­ru­ary I had the oppor­tu­nity to visit the Amer­i­can School of Bom­bay (ASB) in Mum­bai, India.  ASB is an inter­na­tional one to one school with stu­dents and edu­ca­tors from around the globe.  From my obser­va­tions while tour­ing ASB, I can say that they are a school using one to one to truly trans­form edu­ca­tion.  If you would like more infor­ma­tion about ASB, you can check-out my Feb­ru­ary post.   Andrew Hoover, MS Prin­ci­pal at the Amer­i­can School of Bom­bay, has pro­vided his insight into the ques­tions that I have posed for this series.  Read and enjoy!

I’d approach this con­ver­sa­tion from the other side – the plus side, if you will. If a com­mu­nity (geo­graph­i­cal or interest-based) wants to have a dis­cus­sion about whether to go to a 1:1 pro­gram, I’m not sure start­ing with an assump­tion like “One to One Can’t Work” makes sense. To keep my com­ments brief, I would engage the fol­low­ing pos­i­tive propo­si­tions regard­ing lap­tops in an edu­ca­tional setting:

One to one is just too expensive!

 Lap­tops are expen­sive and like any­thing else that costs, we would want to a lap­top pro­gram that deliv­ers tan­gi­ble and rel­e­vant results that make the expense “worth it.”

There is no research that sup­ports one to one.

The lap­top is the most pow­er­ful tool kit avail­able to edu­ca­tors and stu­dents. Stu­dents work habits will  get focused and expanded through the use of this tool kit.

If stu­dents have com­put­ers, they will con­stantly be off task.

Schools need to build cul­tures of respon­si­bil­ity around their lap­top pro­grams that will help assure great results. This rep­re­sents an pro­found oppor­tu­nity – give stu­dents respon­si­bil­ity and they will respond and become leaders.

What hap­pens if
kids get on inap­pro­pri­ate sites while they are at home with the school
computers?

Cit­i­zen­ship (and its dig­i­tal avatar, if you will) is one of the most impor­tant skill sets we can be teach­ing kids today. Lap­tops are cen­tral to the process of learn­ing about and engag­ing this process.

Par­ents will not allow us to let stu­dents access the inter­net.

When a com­mu­nity engages a lap­top pro­gram, there is an oppor­tu­nity to become col­lab­o­ra­tors with the par­ents as well. Par­ents will need to be edu­cated and their knowl­edge and skills will need to be tapped to help with this process.

Posted by Nick Sauers