Last week edu­ca­tion was in the spot­light a bit as Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion Arnie Dun­can took part in a back to school bus tour.  The Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion reports that, “Through­out the tour, Dun­can will be vis­it­ing class­rooms break­ing ground in clos­ing the achieve­ment gap, early edu­ca­tion, school nutri­tion and safety and teacher recruit­ment.”  I really wish that he would also visit class­rooms and schools that are using tech­nol­ogy to enhance learn­ing and teach­ing.  If this did hap­pen, I didn’t see any videos or reports describ­ing it explicitly. Sometimes I fear that because I am sur­rounded by like-minded edu­ca­tors and don’t work in a K-12 envi­ron­ment on a daily basis that those out­side of my cir­cle do not buy into the value of tech­nol­ogy in edu­ca­tion. They see it as some­thing to be feared and a man­age­ment night­mare.  Unfor­tu­nately, these per­cep­tions per­sist because of a lack of knowl­edge about how tech­nol­ogy can enhance learning.

Leav­ing tech­nol­ogy out of a con­ver­sa­tion about chang­ing edu­ca­tion is sim­ply unac­cept­able.  I do under­stand that tech­nol­ogy with­out effec­tive teach­ing doesn’t trans­form edu­ca­tion, BUT do we really expect to pre­pare stu­dents for a dig­i­tal age in a tech­nol­ogy deprived school?  Does it make sense to teach tech­nol­ogy as a seper­ate class once a week?  Is it rea­son­able to assume stu­dents will learn how to nav­i­gate online in safe and respon­si­ble ways with­out help from schools?

Now that I have that out of my sys­tem, I’d like to thank all of you who are mov­ing edu­caiton for­ward with the aide of tech­nol­ogy.  Many of you who read this blog are the for­mal and infor­mal lead­ers in your school who are con­stantly seek­ing out ways to use tech­nol­ogy to enhance teach­ing.  I encour­age you to con­tinue to model, lead, col­lab­o­rate and have con­ver­sa­tions about this topic.  You will have a bat­tle with those who don’t under­stand and fear this change, but you also have many allies who will and do sup­port you.

Nick Sauers

Last evening I attended Spirit Lake, Iowa’s one-to-one deploy­ment of nearly 1000 com­put­ers to stu­dents in grades 5–12.  The kick­off began in the high school gym with a crowd of nearly 3000 excited stu­dents, par­ents, staff, com­mu­nity mem­bers and other spe­cial guests.  The event was a true celebration!

Mov­ing a school to one-to-one is a huge change for schools when prop­erly imple­mented.  It can and should change the ways that teach­ers teach and stu­dents learn.  The tech­nol­ogy allows for lessons to be enhanced in ways that are nearly impos­si­ble with­out the use of it.  When a school com­mu­nity makes that giant leap, there really should be a cel­e­bra­tion.  In Kotter’s book Lead­ing Change, he writes about the impor­tance of gen­er­at­ing short– term wins.  This is an extremly impor­tant step in suc­cess­ful change ini­tia­tives, but it is often one that is overlooked.

Spirit Lake cer­tainly did not over­look that step.  Check out the videos of the celebration.

This first video was the kick­off to the cel­e­bra­tion, and it set the tone for the evening.  The count­down on the score­board was a nice touch!

Jason Har­ring­ton who is a par­ent as well as a local busi­ness­man talks about what hav­ing a one-to-one school will mean for par­ents, busi­ness, and com­mu­nity mem­bers in this video.

Mid­dle school prin­ci­pal Kevin Range con­tin­ues the excite­ment with his “fire-up” speech.  Kevin quoted a board mem­ber in his pre­sen­ta­tion, and this quote high­lights the pro­gres­sive think­ing of the dis­trict.  I con­sider this quote to be right on the money!

“This is not about tech­nol­ogy, it is about giv­ing our kids every oppor­tu­nity to be suc­cess­ful learn­ers in the 21st century.”

Nick Sauers

My friends and fam­ily would cer­tainly tell you that I am a very social per­son.  As a mat­ter of fact, they claim I can’t go any­where with­out bump­ing into some­one who I know some­how.  With that in mind, I have to admit that dur­ing my career in schools I was some­what iso­lated.  Yes, I did attend the occa­sional con­fer­ence, and yes I would talk to other teach­ers dur­ing lunch and before and after the school day.  We would also have the oppor­tu­nity to col­lab­o­rate when we had pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment days.

The prob­lem is that even with those con­nec­tions, it was a rare event to get out of the build­ing and con­nect with other edu­ca­tors. This really lim­its the ways that schools can change and it rein­forces the sta­tus quo.  Can we really expect peo­ple to change when they spend the major­ity of their time in the same sys­tem with peo­ple who have sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences and mind­sets?  Where do we expect new ideas, resources, and oppor­tu­ni­ties to come from?

This past year I have been able to con­nect with edu­ca­tors from around the state, nation, and world with  extremely diver­si­fied back­grounds, inter­ests, beliefs, and strengths.  Those indi­vid­u­als have been an extremely pow­er­ful resource for me.  You could argue that I have been able to do that now because my job has changed and I travel much more fre­quently.  You would be partly cor­rect, but more than that I have been able to con­nect because of tech­nol­ogy.   I’ve listed some of those tech­nolo­gies below that have pro­foundly impacted my pro­fes­sional growth. Please note that this list is not one of those top ten cool tech­nol­ogy tools lists.  I do like those lists, but my pur­pose is to sim­ply reflect on tech­nolo­gies that have helped me stay connected.

1. Twitter-I was a big skep­tic at first, but now I am a believer!  I get tons of resources from Twit­ter because I fol­low peo­ple who put out great stuff!  Links to web sites, blogs, arti­cles, and pro­vok­ing thoughts are the major ben­e­fits for me.  I also have enough “fol­low­ers” that I can post a ques­tion and gen­er­ally receive a quick response from some­one with a wealth of knowl­edge.  My time isn’t wasted fol­low­ing some­one like Brit­tany Spears who will share what they had for dinner.
2. RSS-My Google Reader is also invalu­able to me.  Rather than search­ing to see when blogs or web­sites are updated, every­thing comes to me.  I use this fre­quently when I am writ­ing my blog!  Although I keep sub­scrib­ing to more and more sites, my reader makes it fairly man­age­able to read all of those sites.
3. Blogs-When I made the move to Iowa State, I was given the task of blog­ging about one-to-one schools.  By blog­ging on a reg­u­lar basis, I have to con­tin­u­ally read and search for resources on the topic.  This  has been an extremely pow­er­ful way for me to increase my knowl­edge about the topic.
4. Google Docs-Much of the work I do is col­lab­o­ra­tive.  Google docs allow me to work with oth­ers  on the same doc­u­ments  with­out play­ing email tag with one another.  It also ensures that I have the doc­u­ments I need even if I don’t have my computer.
5. Pirate pad-OK, maybe this isn’t at the top of the list, but it is still valu­able.  Being able to take notes simul­ta­ne­ously with a group of peo­ple  enhances the qual­ity of my notes and it keeps me much more engaged with a work­shop or presentation.

These five tools have been a great way for me to stay con­nected.  I would strongly rec­om­mend every edu­ca­tor use these tools as resources to con­tinue to grow pro­fes­sion­ally.  They cer­tainly are not dif­fi­cult to learn!

The Ladies Home Jour­nal recently pub­lished what they con­sid­ered 10 stand­out edu­ca­tion pro­grams in the United States.  Regard­less of your thoughts of the valid­ity of their list, it is excit­ing that the Sci­ence Lead­er­ship Acad­emy (SLA) was named one of those schools.  SLA is a one-to-one school with a real focus on chang­ing the way that we edu­cate our stu­dents.  I was for­tu­nate to tour the school at the end of Jan­u­ary at EduCon and was amazed by what I saw.  They had 5 core val­ues in their school, none of which focused on tech­nol­ogy.  Instead, tech­nol­ogy was used to enhance each of their core val­ues.

(I know that I’ve posted and dis­cussed this photo before, but I absolutely love it!)

In his inter­view with the mag­a­zine, Chris Lehman had what I con­sider to be an extremely impor­tant quote. 

“Kids here learn from the work they do, not from what comes out of a teacher’s mouth.”

I can say after my visit that his teach­ers really live by this mantra.  Learn­ing is very inquiry based and the teacher doesn’t act as the “sage on the stage”.

When read­ing through the descrip­tions of the other schools that made the list, I looked for com­mon themes that may exist, and there were a few that did emerge.  All of these schools were very inno­v­a­tive.  They were cer­tainly dif­fer­ent from what we would con­sider a tra­di­tional school.  They also seemed to have a keen sense of stu­dent inter­est and stu­dent engage­ment.  A final theme was that of project based and inquiry based learning.

Does your school have some of these same themes?

I recently came across two blog posts focused on help­ing edu­ca­tional lead­ers pre­pare as they head into a new school year.  Both posts focused on ways to improve lead­er­ship.  Before I lose some read­ers I must inter­ject a com­ment.  I believe that lead­er­ship is much more than a posi­tion or title.  All schools have both infor­mal and for­mal lead­ers.  Hope­fully, many read­ers who are inno­v­a­tive edu­ca­tors are part of that lead­er­ship structure!

The lists come from the blogs Pipedreams and Adven­tures in Teach­ing and Learn­ing.  I have selected some of the points from each post and made com­ments under each of those items.  For com­plete lists, click on the links to each of the blogs.

Start the first staff meet­ing by show­ing your staff YOUR NEW BLOG.

Model, model, model! I real­ize how busy edu­ca­tional lead­ers are, but the power of a lead­er­ship blog is over­whelm­ing.  When you develop your blog, try to develop it in a way that doesn’t put all of the bur­den of the blog on your shoul­ders.  Rou­tinely invite guest blog­gers on your blog.  Those blog­gers could be teach­ers who com­pleted an awe­some project in class, a drama coach, or any­one who else who has some­thing excit­ing to share.  Teach your sec­re­tary how to use a flip cam­era and how to upload videos to the blog.  This is extremely sim­ple and not very time con­sum­ing, but it adds tons of value to the blog.  If you want peo­ple to read your blog, you must post fre­quently and it must be meaningful.   

Be will­ing to ask an expert – even if that expert hap­pens to be a first year teacher. 

Some of the most suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment I “led” as an admin­is­tra­tor was not led by me at all.  I found teach­ers who were experts with var­i­ous types of tech­nolo­gies.  They seemed happy to present and teach­ers were happy to lis­ten to an in-house expert.  This really seemed to increase the feel­ing of own­er­ship with everyone.

Model great learn­ing and teach­ing.

This may be the most impor­tant point in the entire list.  If you expect oth­ers to use twit­ter, wikis, social media, and blogs, you need to model that use.  This doesn’t mean that you need to be an expert or know more than every­one in the build­ing, but you must stick your neck out and try.

Rec­og­nize pos­i­tive growth; often.

This is some­thing that lots and lots of us do a poor job with even though it is very impor­tant.  Peo­ple want to be and need to be thanked and rec­og­nized, even if they say they don’t.  It is human nature.  Tak­ing the time to be delib­er­ate and rec­og­niz­ing some­one for their pos­i­tive growth is a pow­er­ful way to ensure that growth continues.

Hope­fully my con­sol­i­dated list, or the lists from these two blogs are help­ful as you head into a new school year.  It may be advan­ta­geous to try to pick a cou­ple of items from the lists for you to really focus on this year.  Once you are doing a great job with those things, choose a cou­ple more to focus on.

Nick Sauers

A recent post in eduTech high­lighted FAIL­Faire, which is an event held in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.  The pur­pose of FAIL­Faire as described by the orga­niz­ers is listed below.

“At FAIL­Faire we want to rec­og­nize the fail­ures: the pilots that never
got any­where, the appli­ca­tions that are not deliv­er­ing, the projects
that are not hav­ing any mea­sur­able impact on the lives of peo­ple, and
the cul­tural or tech­ni­cal prob­lems that arise.”

The idea of learn­ing from and embrac­ing fail­ure cer­tainly isn’t new, but it also isn’t real com­mon place in edu­ca­tion.  Schools that put thou­sands of dol­lars into any ini­tia­tive obvi­ously don’t want that ini­tia­tive to fail.  Even when ini­tia­tives fail, schools rarely acknowl­edge that and learn from the fail­ure.  Instead, the ini­tia­tive just slowly fades, dying a slow death.  The grave­yards for these ini­tia­tives can be found in most educator’s rooms as old dusty binders piled away never to be looked at again. 

In ref­er­ence to one-to-one schools, there cer­tainly have been some that have failed and oth­ers that have had some major bumps in the road.  Although this list cer­tainly isn’t com­pre­hen­sive, I’ve com­piled a list of some of the ele­ments that have lead to fail­ure at one-to-one schools.  Feel free to add addi­tional com­po­nents in the com­ments section.

1. Teach­ers did not receive ade­quate pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment prior to rolling out one-to-one.
2. Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment was not ongoing.
3. The infra­struc­ture was not prepared.
4. There were not plans and poli­cies in place to deal with the many com­po­nents of one-to-one.   
5. The school did not cel­e­brate the “small wins” with the initiative.
6. All stake­hold­ers were not involved with the ini­tia­tive or edu­cated about one-to-one.
7. Ade­quate finan­cial resources were not in place to sup­port one-to-one.

Schools that are cur­rently mov­ing to one-to-one may soon find that they failed to prop­erly imple­ment.  That doesn’t mean your ini­tia­tive is des­tined for fail­ure, but it may indi­cate you will have a bit of a bumpy ride for a time.  Pro­vid­ing ade­quate resources early on in the pro­gram may sub­stan­tially save costs down the road.  It may also help reduce the “imple­men­ta­tion curve” which is some­what nor­mal with the adop­tion of any­thing new.

Schools need to really learn from the fail­ures of oth­ers, and also take a look at their own fail­ures.  Many failed ini­tia­tives, not just one-to-one, can be attrib­uted to the list above.

Nick Sauers

Last week Mon­day I met with a group of aspir­ing teach­ers fin­ish­ing up their last two years of col­lege.  In the short time we had together, I tried to make a few points.  First, I really tried to help them real­ize how dras­ti­cally the world has changed and how lit­tle schools have.  We talked about 21st cen­tury skills which may be the most overused term in edu­ca­tion today (I say that sim­ply because the word is used to describe any­thing new in edu­ca­tion.).  My sec­ond major point focused on how we need to change the way that we edu­cate our stu­dents to meet the chang­ing needs of our soci­ety.  Finally, I shared infor­ma­tion about the sta­tus of one-to-one in Iowa and through­out the nation.  I stressed that the shift to one-to-one is very dras­tic in Iowa and also in the nation.  I also encour­aged stu­dents to think about how they can become mar­ketable to these tech savvy and/or one-to-one schools.

Prior to that pre­sen­ta­tion and since that pre­sen­ta­tion, I have won­dered how well we are doing to pre­pare our new teach­ers for this new edu­ca­tional envi­ron­ment.  I work with admin­is­tra­tors on a reg­u­lar basis, and this is also a con­ver­sa­tion that comes up fre­quently.  The com­ments that I hear over and over from admin­is­tra­tors I talk with around the state, nation and even inter­na­tion­ally is that our col­leges are doing a poor job prepar­ing teach­ers for this new edu­ca­tion land­scape.  Tech­nol­ogy courses are still taught in iso­la­tion in many places and there is a major dis­con­nect with many of the other method­ol­ogy courses.

My inten­tion with this post isn’t to sim­ply rip on higher edu­ca­tion, although I am tempted at times.  Instead, it is impor­tant that we con­sider ways to deal with teach­ers who are not ade­quately pre­pared to use tech­nol­ogy as a pow­er­ful tool to enhance edu­ca­tion.  Here are a cou­ple pos­si­ble sug­ges­tions for edu­ca­tional lead­ers, but I’d sure like other ideas if any of you have them.

1. Col­lab­o­rate and work with higher edu­ca­tion pro­grams.  Com­mu­ni­cate the things that you look for when you hire a teacher.  Pro­grams want to pro­duce teach­ers that are not only capa­ble, but mar­ketable.  It is easy to point a fin­ger at higher edu­ca­tion, but fail to actu­ally work with them to improve their product.
2. Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is the most crit­i­cal piece of a suc­cess­ful one-to-one pro­gram.  Even if higher edu­ca­tion makes improve­ments, there is still a huge need for pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment within a district. 
3. Develop men­tor­ing pro­grams that allow begin­ning teach­ers to work with your best teach­ers, and not just the one who wants to make a lit­tle extra cash for mentoring.
4. Uti­lize pro­fes­sional learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties.  This will not just ben­e­fit new teach­ers, but all teachers.
5. Pro­vide reg­u­lar feed­back to teach­ers.  Let teach­ers observe one another and pro­vide each other with feed­back.  When I became a prin­ci­pal, I quickly real­ized how pow­er­ful obser­va­tion could be.  I was able to see the best, and unfor­tu­nately worst, prac­tices in my build­ing and learn from those lessons.

As you can see, many of these items don’t relate directly to new edu­ca­tors.  All edu­ca­tors can ben­e­fit from these points.  Does your one-to-one envi­ron­ment pro­vide that type of support?

Last week I spent two days at the School Admin­is­tra­tors of Iowa (SAI) Con­fer­ence in Des Moines, Iowa.  It was very clear from the open­ing keynote with Michael Horn to the clos­ing keynote with David War­lick that the SAI orga­ni­za­tion was thought­fully push­ing the think­ing of the hun­dreds of admin­is­tra­tors in atten­dance at the con­fer­ence.  Horn (see notes from ses­sion) and War­lick talked about inno­va­tion and the need for our schools to change.  Dur­ing both keynotes and through­out the con­fer­ence, I mon­i­tored and par­tic­i­pated in the back chan­nel con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place on Twit­ter (#saiconf10).  Those con­ver­sa­tions echoed the mes­sage being deliv­ered by the speak­ers.  My fear is that echo wasn’t nearly as loud as it should have been.

Out of the approx­i­mately 1000 admin­is­tra­tors in atten­dance, there were maybe 30 who were actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion.  This leads to a ques­tion I often ask myself after work­ing with a group of admin­is­tra­tors at one of our work­shops.  Are we preach­ing to the choir?  Do those who attend our trans­for­ma­tive ses­sions already “get it” to some degree?  My incli­na­tion is that although they may be on board and believe in our mes­sage, our work­shops give them a much bet­ter under­stand­ing that they can take back to their districts.

So what about those in edu­ca­tion who seem to be ignor­ing the mas­sive changes that are hap­pen­ing all around?

Unfor­tu­nately, this doesn’t seem to be a small group.  As much talk of “21st cen­tury learn­ing” that is tak­ing place, it is fre­quently just used as another buzz term.  Peo­ple talk of 21st cen­tury learn­ing with­out really talk­ing about change.  Even some tech­nol­ogy rich and one-to-one schools haven’t gen­uinely embraced changed.  Instead, they have just fit new tech­nol­ogy into our old system. 

I am gen­er­ally a very pos­i­tive per­son, and I hate to to be too neg­a­tive here, but the topic of this post con­cerns me.  At one of our break-out ses­sions, I asked Michael Horn a ques­tion in ref­er­ence to dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion in edu­ca­tion.  The book Dis­rupt­ing Class writ­ten by Horn and oth­ers, claims that by 2019 50% of high school courses will be online courses.  My ques­tion was whether or not schools will sur­vive in this new era.  Many of our lead­ers cer­tainly are not look­ing to the future, but instead mak­ing deci­sions based on their past expe­ri­ences.  Many of those expe­ri­ences are irrel­e­vant in today’s world.  Maybe our effec­tive tech­nol­ogy rich schools focused on new types of learn­ing will serve as that dis­rup­tive inno­va­tion.  Those schools have the poten­tial to become our new model for edu­ca­tion.  At some point, the other schools will need to change or ren­der them­selves obso­lete.  When stu­dents are no longer con­fined to a school they can eas­ily walk or drive to, school choice will take on an entirely dif­fer­ent meaning.

9:15 panel dis­cus­sion with 3 one-to-one administrators.

Stream videos at Ustream