Dangerously Irrelevant

Here’s a fun video from the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A reporter interviewed local teens on the topic of Internet safety. Nothing too earth-shattering here, but fun nonetheless.

• Mindworks: Internet safety video

Today kicks off Chart Week here at Dangerously Irrelevant. Today’s topic is Internet access in public schools and public school classrooms. All data are from the recently-released NCES report, Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2005.

Public schools with Internet access

Just over a third of public schools had Internet connectivity in 1994. Within six years that figure had reached 98% and today pretty much every public school is connected to the Web.

Public schools with broadband Internet access

NCES started tracking in 2000 whether schools’ Internet connections were broadband or narrowband. Broadband is defined as T3/DS3, fractional T3, T1/DS1, fractional T1, cable modem, or DSL. Narrowband is defined as ISDN, 56KB, or dial-up. All but 3% of public schools now have broadband connections to the Internet.

Public school classrooms with Internet access

It’s one thing for a school to be connected to the Internet. It’s another for the classrooms within the school to be connected. We have made a lot of progress in this area too. Only 6% of public school classrooms lack an Internet connection.

We have made great strides in terms of getting schools connected. I think sometimes we forget what a massive task it was to get all schools wired.

Schedule for the rest of the week

• Tuesday – percentage of public school classrooms with wireless Internet connections; percentage of public schools lending laptops to students
• Wednesday – length of time public schools lend laptops to students
• Thursday – technologies and procedures used by public schools to prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet
• Friday - professional development for use of the Internet in public school classrooms

On Tuesday at the TIES conference
I gave a presentation titled The Blogging Administrator.
I discussed the benefits to principals of blogging generally, highlighted our Principal Blogging Project specifically, and had two principals, Drs. Jan Borelli and Nancy Flynn, speak to the audience about their blogging experiences (Jan connected from Oklahoma City via Skype).

The materials from this presentation are available on my TIES 2006 web page, including both my PowerPoint slides and the podcast I made of the presentation.

[FYI, for those of you who are tracking our progress, we're about halfway to our goal of getting 100 new principals blogging in 100 days]

Yesterday at the TIES conference I had the honor of giving the lunchtime presentation (i.e., I was the only presentation during that time slot). I gave a presentation titled Can Schools Regulate Cyberbullying, Harassment, and Social Networking? I discussed some general legal principles related to off-campus student cyberspeech, highlighted the only six court decisions I can find on this topic, and answered a lot of great questions from the audience.

The materials from this presentation are available on my TIES 2006 web page, including both my PowerPoint slides and the podcast I made of the presentation.

Yesterday I attended a session at TIES (the Minnesota state educational technology conference) by Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN. Keith presented some findings from a report on Hot Technologies in
K-12 Education by CoSN’s
Emerging Technologies Committee. He noted that the committee focused on
technologies that have the potential to transform practice and that the emphasis
was on technologies that are emerging, not those that have emerged
[note: when Keith asked the audience for technologies in their
organization that fit this description, responses include electronic
whiteboards, wireless, projectors, and parent portals]. Here are my notes from
Keith’s session:

5 Key Educational Issues

1. galvanize instruction and promote authentic learning
2. improve assessment and evaluation
3. address diverse learning styles and needs
4. build community
5. improve administrative efficiency

To be included in the committee’s report, a technology
tool needed to

• address one of the major educational issues above,
• possess transformative power, and
• be feasible

1. Promote authentic learning

• active highly portable storage devices (e.g., flash keys, portable external
  hard drives, iPods)
• datacasting

Transformative value

• incorporate compelling, up-to-date audio, video, data into everyday
  instruction
• empowering students to play an active role in their own learning

2. Improve assessment

• digital assessments (wired / wireless handheld devices; mClass
  DIBELS; student response
  systems)
• intelligent essay graders (e.g., ETS Criterion)
• intelligent pattern analysis (DMAs / IMAs; see also CoSN’s DDDM project web site)

Transformative value

• making NCLB-required assessments easier to perform
• managing mountains of data and finding the “gems” that actually assist in
  making decisions

3. Address diverse learning styles

• sound-field amplification
• multi-sensory customized learning tools (see CoSN’s accessible technologies project
  web site)

Transformative value

• based on principles of universal design / accessibility, these tools help
  all students, not just those with hearing disabilities

4. Build community

• programmable phone systems (can send pre-recorded phone messages in multiple
  languages)
• student information systems (web-enabled)
• learning management systems (student / parent portals)
• blogs

Transformative value

• engaging parents and the larger community
• enabling schools to reach increasingly diverse populations
• substituting electronic communication for printed reports and face-to-face
  conferences

5. Improve administrative efficiency

• radio frequency identification (RFID)

Transformative value

• student safety
• eliminating time-consuming busy work of taking attendance
• tracking inventory

My reactions

Keith’s presentation helped me remember that most of these tools are not
present in most school districts. As an educational technology person, it’s easy
to feel from the practitioner magazines and conferences that this stuff is all
over the place because you read about it and hear about it so often. For
example, wireless, electronic whiteboards, and parent portals all have been
around for a while and have been written about extensively. To hear educators
say that they are “emerging technologies” was a sober reminder that we have a
long way to go in most school districts.

It is also important to reemphasize that, while schools are finding value in
these tools, they are not all needed in all places. Districts need to continue
to give careful thought to technology purchases and not just “jump on the
bandwagon” with the latest, greatest thing. It’s easy to get swept up in the
hype – finding real value from your
technology investments is much more difficult.

Finally, I
have written about this before, but I continue to be concerned about the
slow pace of change in schools compared to society.

A few random thoughts that have traveled through my brain today…

1. Next week I am giving two presentations at the Minnesota educational technology (TIES) conference. One is on administrator blogging. One of the new bloggers from our Principal Blogging Project, a principal who works in one of the wealthiest, high-achieving suburban school districts in the country, was going to Skype in with a webcam and talk to the audience for 10 minutes about his experiences as a principal new to blogging. He just e-mailed me to cancel – one of the reasons, he was chagrined to admit, is that there isn’t a single webcam in the entire district. Yikes!
2. After reading David Warlick’s post (and the accompanying comments) on ‘fencing in the learning,’ I am struck by how many different reasons we educators can come up with for not putting kids’ needs first. As David said long ago, instead of asking What should we reasonably expect our education system to achieve in the next ten years?, we should be asking What should today’s children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years? Like David, I too think that our children have every reason to expect a lot more. If you haven’t yet read The Rise of the Creative Class, check out the first few chapters and then think about this issue again after doing so. Or, alternatively, go watch Consuela Molina’s video on digital kids in analog schools. I’m not just picking on K-12 here; it’s just as bad, if not worse, in academia.
3. Sometimes people are too touchy. Let the little stuff go, I say.
   Don’t we have bigger things on which to expend our mental energy?
4. If my 6-year-old can learn how to Skype me, and if a blog post is literally as easy as sending an e-mail, and if editing a wiki can be as simple as clicking on the Edit button, can someone remind me again what the learning barriers for adult teachers and administrators are to using these kinds of Web 2.0 tools?

What if every federal and state politician, principal. and school board member was required to visit a school like the School of the Future in Philadelphia, or an after-school program like the one at the North Kenwood / Oakland Charter School in Chicago, or a class run by a teacher like Marco Torres in Los Angeles? What would our schools be like? What would our children’s lives be like?