Dangerously Irrelevant

[UPDATE: I had enough interest for two people per day for the week of September 20. All the slots are full now. Thanks. I'm looking forward to the week!]

I’m looking for 5 to 7 volunteers to guest blog on the topic of Reconciling standards- and data-driven accountability with the ‘21st century skills’ movement.

Posts could pertain to curriculum, instruction, assessment, leadership, policy, professional development, or any other relevant issue. If you’re interested in writing a thoughtful, reflective piece of approximately 5 to 8 paragraphs on this topic, would you drop me a note?

This would be for the week of September 20 to 26. You will be able to cross-post on your own blog(s) and also can put a blurb at the bottom about yourself and your social media sites, so this should give you some good visibility.

Thanks in advance!

[This is a guest post from Carl Anderson. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!]

By now it is an old story but still a pressing contemporary issue. Industries that have traditionally relied on a top-down hierarchy of power distribution are folding. We see it today most readily in the newspaper industry but it is painfully obvious that other industries, especially those who deal in information currency, are under siege as well. It is clear that the schools are a part of this list.

Traditionally, or for as long as anyone alive today can remember, most school systems have operated under a very clear top-down hierarchy. The Department of Education passes down edicts to states. State Departments of Education (headed by a commissioner) then pass funding & accreditation requirements and curriculum standards down to school districts. School districts are headed by superintendents operating with an authority given to them by school boards delegating responsibilities to principals and other building administrators. These administrators then delegate responsibilities to teachers and other school employees who then deliver the state mandated standards-driven curriculum to students. I realize this is a very simplistic picture of our school systems and there are great differences in the nuances between schools but for the most part this is the type of system most of us operate under.

This system was very efficient for many years and was necessary for a long time. However, when we hear criticisms of schools operating under an industrial model of education looking more like factories it is not just what goes on in the classroom that causes this comparison but also how they are structured. This structure looks like almost any corporate business hierarchy with the CEO and shareholders at the top and the workers and consumers at the bottom. Just as the corporate structure is designed to make as much profit for those at the top this system best ensures that the needs of those near the top of the pyramid are met. Today, in education, this hierarchy is most concerned with administering RTTT and NCLB measures like curriculum standards. Hence, the overly high concern with high stakes testing and "teach to the test" messages many of our teachers end up hearing. Who does this system serve? With whom lies agency in learning?

There is a new structure of learning emerging that is gaining momentum, one which appears to have no regard for edicts issued via a top-down hierarchy. Web 2.0 & social media technologies have given teachers and students agency in their own learning through the creation of what has been collectively referred to as "personal learning networks" (PLNs). Through PLNs learners choose their own learning agendas and self-select who they listen to and what curriculum (if any) they follow. Through the use of popular technologies like Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, and Facebook informal learning is quickly becoming a viable option. Teachers no longer have to look to their school system for support, they can find it through the networks they have created. This same kind of network structure and powerful informal learning is also what has made this latest phenomenon of unschooling actually seem like a viable option for some. The more our networks grow the more they challenge the authority of the traditional top-down hierarchy.

While unschooling is a little bit extreme and probably not right for most kids the fuel giving this movement momentum is something we need to address in education or our formal institutions of education will suffer the same fate as the newspaper industry. I am reminded of this slide from a TED Talk by Devdutt Pattanaik called, East vs west -- the myths that mystify..

In this talk Dr. Pattanaik discusses how the fundamental belief structures between east and west cultures clash. He illustrates this with a simple story about Alexander the Great meeting a gymnosophist, "When they met, the gymnosophist asked what Alexander the Great was doing. To which he replied, 'I am conquering the world. What are you doing?' 'I am experiencing nothingness,' replied the gymnosophist." Neither could see the point in the others endeavor because the denominator for Alexander's life was One and the denominator for the gymnosophist's life was Many. This fundamental element of belief informed everything about how both individuals interpreted these actions. The traditional hierarchy that has dominated our school systems has a denominator of one while PLNs, student-centered learning environments, and movements like unschooling operate with a denominator of many. If our industry is going to survive we need to find a way for both equations to find a common denominator. We have to look for ways to invert this hierarchy.

One potential method that our schools could use to help address this issue of one verses many is teacher professional partnerships (TPPs). TPPs are similar to law firms where the practitioners own their own practice. In TPP schools there is no administration but instead the teachers in the TPP work together to share the responsibilities normally delegated to building an district administrators.

This solves a few problems that teachers and schools face. First, it brings more decision making responsibility closer to those who are directly effected by those decisions. It places agency closer to those served by schooling and in so doing elevates the teaching profession. With agency comes responsibility and built-in accountability. If a teacher is held responsible for their own performance via a personal stake in ensuring that they offer a quality learning environment that students will want to participate in there will be no need for complex systems of teacher performance pay or other measures like those in RTTT. With a TPP a teacher's performance is shown in their enrollment and whether a school thrives or fails depends entirely on how well they manage their own practice. What's more, TPPs eliminate the need for teacher unions since the partnership is in itself a union of sorts.

Currently there are just ten TPP public schools in operation in the United States and so far they all appear to be doing well. This model of school organization holds a lot of potential addressing the problems and issues facing schools and education including the inevitable irrelevance of our traditional school hierarchy. Ted Kolderie from Education|Evolving will be Steve Hargadon's guest on his Future of Education series this Thursday, July 8, 2010 to discuss Teacher Professional Partnerships. For more information on TPPs I urge you to attend this free online discussion in Elluminate or at least listen to the recording afterwords.

Carl Anderson is an art and technology teacher, technology integration specialist, and adjunct instructor for Hamline University's School of Education. He writes the Techno Constructivist blog and is @anderscj on Twitter.

[This is a guest post from Don Watkins, responding to an earlier guest post by Doug Green. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!]

Earlier this week I read web posting about replacing your technology coordinator/director with a building administrator. As a guy who has spent the last twenty-three years serving at a small K-12 I disagree. However, I do understand a growing frustration led by Scott McLeod and many less known names around our country and our world. Getting rid of your technology director and filling that position with a building administrator would only exacerbate the problem. I came to my position in 1987 at a time when most schools had technology coordinators who were re-purposed mathematics teachers many of whom taught a programming class or two, with languages like Pascal. I am not a mathematics teacher and had no experience and only a B.S. in Liberal Arts. What I lacked in experience I made up for with verve and enthusiasm that has remained my trademark. We had about fifty Apple II and IIe computers along with a smattering of Commodores. Since then our department has grown to group of several microcomputer technicians but only one of which is available each day to serve the needs of over five hundred computers, nearly a hundred printers, dozens of software applications, twenty-nine file servers which a year ago were virtualized and now we are even supporting a cloud infrastructure that insures our students, teachers and administrators have twenty-four x seven access to nearly all applications whether at school or at home and even from some java enabled mobile phones.

In a small school district with meager resources I took it upon myself to learn all that I could and along the way I earned a Masters in Educational Psychology with an emphasis on Learning and Technology. I became a hypercard programmer, taught students to keyboard and write using word-processing software. We used FredWriter which was free and an alumni (who is now a Facebook friend) donated 5.25 inch disks which had FredWriter on one side and a data disk on the other. While I attended the State University of New York at Buffalo enroute to the M.A. I met Dr. Douglas Clements and with the aid of my wife a third grade teacher at the time instructed elementary students in Apple Logo and a special geometry curriculum written by Dr. Clements and his colleague, Mike Battista. In the early 1990's we had our first local area network using Lantastic and I had to learn a bit about star topologies and running cable. A few years later we put in category 5 ethernet when everyone around us was putting in IBM Token Ring. Research and hard work saved our district tens of thousands of dollars initially and if you factor in not getting taken in by the Token Ring crowd we saved the district from cost of rewiring. I was an early adopter of both Windows NT and Windows 95 and we became the first school district in our area to move in that direction at a time when everyone else was using OS/2 Lanserver and Novell. This too saved tens of thousands of dollars. We were early adopters of so called "white box" open architecture computers which were custom designed and made from quality components.

My efforts have always been to knock down walls and to build bridges to places of opportunity for our students, our faculty, our administration and our community. I see my role and those of my fellow technology directors and now technology integrators, curriculum directors, curriculum specialists as people who can and do encourage innovation. We owe this to our various constituencies. We do not serve them well when we accept the status quo. When someone tells me that this or that can't be done I make it my business to prove them wrong.

Ten years ago we were forced by fiat to filter in order to comply with E-rate. I railed at the idea of having to filter and it was during a conversation with a vendor of a particular filtering product that the salesman, who was no doubt tiring of my soapbox lecture about the first amendment, suggested that I build my own filter with Linux. I accepted his challenge and bought my first copy of Suse Linux from Amazon and proceeded to hack my way to a filter eventually using open source products Squid and Squidguard to fit the bill. At the same time I encountered stiff resistance from IT traditionalists upstream who insisted that I was treading in dangerous ground. I called SLD and made sure that I was not breaking the law and kept moving forward. Eventually we began to use Red Hat and later Fedora Linux with Squid and Dansguardian another open source product that created a great filter. The upstream skeptics were silenced and others followed my lead.

The experience gained with filtering led me to an exploration of Linux in much greater detail and now a liberal arts guy with no computer science in his background began building Linux servers in closets and using hardware that no one else wanted. Eventually I was able to secure some special legislative funds from the late New York State Senator Patricia K. McGee who rewarded my entrepreneurial initiatives and granted us sufficient funds for a couple of us to get more advance professional training in Linux and other open source tools. My Linux training and my love of design led me to open source web systems using Apache, MySQL, PHP and eventually to PhpBB, WordPress, Drupal and now Moodle. Long before I laid eyes on Drupal & Moodle I could see how PhpBB could be used for student learning. From my earliest days I have loved learning and sharing what I learn with others.

A few years ago one of our previous superintendents asked me to examine how we could excite student on the edge. Many of these students were very bright by virtue of their IQ scores but remained listless in traditional classrooms. Around that time too my daughter introduced me to text messaging and so another epiphany occurred and I began to see a connection for learning and teaching using cellular phones. At a time when many of my peers in both the teaching and administrative ranks disdained cell phones, I was looking for ways to connect them to student learning. This journey has led me to an integration of cell phones, web applications using WordPress, Drupal and Moodle and student learning.

A year ago our high school principal gave me an opportunity to return to the classroom that I had been gone from for five years due to administrative overload. He asked me to consider teaching a class that would teach students what not to do with Facebook and cell phones. I asked to think about it for a few days. A bit less than a year ago I began to write a curriculum that was influenced in part by a trip to NECC 2009 in Washington, DC and some of ISTE's materials including Mike Ribble and Gerald Bailey's book on "Digital Citizenship in Schools." I spent last summer reading their book and many others, following tweets from my personal learning network on Twitter and Facebook and writing a curriculum that is a work in progress. I finally learned a bit more about using Moodle including how to build your own Moodle server in our virtual server cloud. Now, in addition to my technology director duties I teach two classes each day of truly amazing young people who have animated my life in a way I never dreamed possible. They have encouraged me along with my personal learning network to continue to grow both personally and professionally. They are eager to learn and love our class times. Their is a waiting list for my classes. We emphasize digital citizenship and students are encouraged to blog each day and to use their cell phones for educational purposes. I'm indebted to many including my personal learning network of Katie McFarland (@katiemc827); Rick Weinberg (@rickweinberg); Mark Carls (@mcarls), Liz Kolb (@lkolb); Steve O'Connor (@steveoc) and many more whom I follow on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

What all of this has taught me is never to accept status quo and always to keep pushing ahead for the sake of those we serve, the students and staff of our respective school districts. Putting a building principal into a position like this one with little or no preparation could be a disaster. A technology director ought to be a bit of a rebel, a diplomat, and a life long learner. Today's technology directors have to work together with curriculum directors and technology integrators to make sure that today's students are really being prepared for the twenty-first century. Today's technology directors must be agents of change, they have to envelope pushers but at the same time they have to work with other professionals who can shape curriculum. No one can do everything and certainly not everything well without help. We are bridge builders who should be familiar enough with the building blocks that underpin our networks. We have to be open to change too. Just today a technology integrator friend was expressing some frustration from an IT guy who told him that DropBox couldn't work on their network. What the IT guy isn't saying is that he fears that someone can put a rogue file into the network by way of DropBox. While that's possible it is no excuse for not opening DropBox so teachers and even students can use it. I know that the IT guy is blowing smoke and already I told my friend and fellow technology integrator that we're going to try it on our network and that we will be able offer empirical evidence that will allay the other person's fear.

The nuances of technology direction and management are many and unless the particular building administrator has some keen interest in technology there would be nothing in their professional background either as a classroom teacher or a building administrator that would prepare them. I can say this because I have now completed half of the coursework at a local university that will lead me to administrative certification. Until now, and I can only speak for my own State of New York, no one has picked up the ball. Since the inception of computer technology into schools which began in the late 1970's now there has been no real standard for technology director or coordinator. Some like me are designated as teachers although like me we have functioned as de facto administrators. Many of us are ten or sometimes eleven month employees when in fact we ought to be twelve month employees and many like me find themselves functioning in a "no man's land," where we are mistrusted by both teachers and administrators. Generally, we are highly principled, ethical and driven individuals who are charged with managing chaos. One of my best friends and a fellow technology director has a quote from Dante's Inferno taped over his door, "abandon all hope ye who enter here."

Today's technology coordinators/directors should be grandfathered into administrative positions. Higher Education and State Departments of Education need to prescribe a program of study and certification for technology directors and it ought to include much of what I've studied in my administrative course work, but in addition to that it ought to include a special track that emphasizes technology skills and that ought to include network planning and implementation, technology visioning and planning and it ought to include curriculum integration too. Education needs geeks but we need a special kind of geek who is one of us.

Don Watkins, Technology Director
Franklinville Central School
Franklinville, NY
@don_watkins
http://www.linkedin.com/in/donwatkins
http://www.tbafcs.org

[This is a guest post from Doug Green. If you’re interested in being a guest blogger, drop me a note. Happy reading!]

Update: see also Don Watkins' response to this post.

With the coming of computers to schools, district leaders felt the need to hire district level administrators to oversee instructional and administrative computer systems. After about 30 years, some districts are finding that they can do without their own technology gurus. Has the school district technology director gone from life on the cutting edge of technology in education to obsolescence? The purpose of this article is to explore reasons why this may be the case.

Things Have Changed

At one point is was possible for at least a few educators to have a good grasp of what computer technology could do and understand what it took to maintain stand alone systems. With the advent of school and district-wide networks, however, there was a need to add network specialists to maintain the district infrastructure. As the number of workstations in classrooms and offices expanded, there was also a need for staff that were trained and dedicated to maintain them. This meant that the technology director was leading a growing staff of non educators at the same time computers and other technologies were expanding into every niche of the instructional program.

To some districts it makes no sense to have an administrator who was most likely a former teacher responsible for computer networks. Such networks now resemble other utilities such as electricity, natural gas, and telephone service. They can be purchased from a private vendor or from a local school district service bureau such as the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) system in New York State. As for administrative computer services, the software and support are purchased from somewhere. Rather than going through the technology director, the people responsible for the services like the director of attendance for student information, the principals for scheduling and mark reporting, and the business office for functions like payroll can just deal directly with the agency selling and supporting the service.

On the instructional side, the mere existence of a technology director can allow other leaders to think that they are not responsible for the integration of instructional technology. They see it as something separate rather than a part of the big instructional picture. When principals and teachers see instructional technology as someone else’s job, they are less likely to adopt in an effective manner anything that the “technology person” pushes into the classrooms.

The Great Enabler?

As the job of the technology director has been taken over by organizations like BOCES and other district administrators I have seen people in these position look for ways to be useful which can often enable bad habits among their fellow administrators. In one district I found the person helping the assistant superintendent for instruction count the number of days school had been in session to make sure that the end of year plan would comply with state regulations. His massive spreadsheet made the task seem complicated when all one needed to do what take a calendar and count up to 180.

Studies summarized by Rogers (2003) show that top down decisions are less likely to enjoy successful adoption in education than in other organizations. This is due to the fact that teachers with masters degrees think they know what they are doing and enjoy a sense of freedom that gives them a good deal of control over how they deliver the curriculum. In order to get teachers to implement a new technology effectively, it helps if they feel some ownership for the decision to adopt. The technology director may also be seen as a person who can do things with technology that are beyond most teachers. Teachers are more likely to follow a peer who they feel has technical expertise similar to their own.

In effective schools, decisions about instructional technology initiatives are more likely to come from district or building shared decision-making teams. This gives the decisions a bottom up aspect that increases the likelihood that they will work.

The Data Piece

Another function that can land in the technology director’s portfolio is that of chief information officer (CIO). This is a title that the New York State Education Department has asked districts to use so that they have an entry point for dealing with instructional data including scores on state tests. A look around the central New York region shows that this title can land just about anywhere. While some districts give it to an assistant superintendent, others bestow it on the technology director, and still others give it to a programmer, a teacher, or even a secretary.

In essence, this job has two main functions. One is to lead the district and the individual schools as they analyze test results and other instructional data in order to make informed instructional decisions. As Burdet, City, and Murname (2005) show, this is a job that should clearly run through the superintendent’s office and the offices of the principals and should involve committees of teachers. Giving it to some technology person may produce fancy charts and graphs, but it is not likely to make the kind of instructional impact that in intended.

The other part of the job is caring for the data itself and making sure it is correctly reported to the state in a timely manner. I did this for my former district during the year after I retired so I know what it involves and I have seen how many other districts deal with it. Whoever does it will need rudimentary data processing skills and a modest understanding of relational databases. It certainly should not fall to a high paid administrator. It could even be given to a capable clerk or sent to a regional support service.

All Administrators Should be Tech Savvy

As part of the work I do teaching leadership for teachers seeking administrative certification, I read the job postings each week in the New York Times. I look for common themes and trends so I can let my students know what districts are looking for in the way of knowledge, experience, and expertise in their new hires. Many ads contain a bulleted list of items that include communication skills, collaborative leadership styles, and a vision of how all students can succeed. For the last several years, however, they also usually include something like the following found in a recent posting:

Has expertise in the use of instructional technology and the utilization of achievement data to advance student learning

When microcomputers first entered the classroom in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, many of the members of the administrative class had attended college in a era where they could submit hand written work or pay someone else to do the typing. Even today I still know of administrators who don’t do email simply because they can’t use a keyboard. One even told me that he only wanted “one button to push.” You can imagine how happy he was when I set him up with a computer that had a one-button mouse.

Now the classes I teach feature some students who are almost digital natives as they don’t remember a time when their schools didn’t have computers. As more future leaders show up with computer skills, districts are in a position to expect that their new leaders can manage instructional technology without having to ask a district technology person what to do.

And a Child Shall Lead Them

In 1976 when my district got its first computer, I was the science department chair. I had no time to figure out how it worked so I let some of my students who had an interest “play” with it. I soon became the “adult” expert even though I knew less than the students and within two years became the district computer director. Two years later I was hired by a larger district as their first Director of Computer Services with a big raise and an office next to the superintendent.

As part of my doctoral research I noticed that teachers who learned from their students were often the ones who did the most with instructional technology. With the coming of the Internet, the students had easy access to the world of information which made finding facts like shooting sitting ducks (McKenzie, 1998). As one superintendent told me, “we don’t own the information any more” (Green, 2001).

I recently worked with a doctoral student who was reviewing her work from the early 1990s. This prompted me to make a list of the technological innovations that have arrived since 1991 that I felt were likely to have some impact on instruction.

New Technologies with Possible Impact on Education Since 1991

• 1991 QuickTime Introduced
• 1991 First Smartboard becomes commercially available
• 1994 Netscape 1.0 browser available for Internet surfing
• 1995 The first Internet Wiki
• 1996 Cell phones become common in United States
• 1996 First Mobile cell phone with built-in PDA
• 1996 Hotmail – Free web-based email for anyone
• 1996 Java and Javascript programming languages add applications to the Web
• 1998 The First web log also known as a blog
• 1999 QuickTime 4.0 supports streaming video
• 1999 Macromedia Flash 4.0 handles inputs and MP3 audio files
• 1999 iMovie is free with iMac purchase
• 2000 Google – The world’s search engine
• 2000 Instant Messaging starts to take off
• 2000 PayPal makes it easy and safe to pay for Internet purchases
• 2001 Douglas Green uses speech recognition to transcribe dissertation interviews
• 2001 iPods and iTunes become available
• 2001 Text messaging starts to take off
• 2002 USB flash drive memory cards become available
• 2002 The term is Blogoshpere adopted to represent the world of blogs on the Internet
• 2004 Facebook & Myspace make social networking more available
• 2004 Podcasting allows new form for media distribution
• 2004 Duke University gives an iPod to each freshman
• 2004 GarageBand allows for easier music editing
• 2005 Eye tracking systems become available for disabled
• 2005 RSS (real simple syndication) adds a new type of spam
• 2005 Guitar Hero joins the gaming culture
• 2005 YouTube allows anyone to publish and access videos
• 2006 PornoTube adds to the worries of parents and teachers
• 2006 Student Response Systems (clickers) become affordable for educational use
• 2006 Flickr available to customers in United States for storing and organizing media
• 2006 Skype becomes available for free calls and video conferencing
• 2006 Sherburne/Earlville, NY Schools place a SmartBoard in every classroom
• 2006 Wii adds a physical aspect to gaming
• 2006 Twitter adds yet another type of spam for Internet and cell phone users
• 2007 Wikipedia becomes the largest encyclopedia ever with more than 2 million articles
• 2007 iPhones are introduced bringing countless capabilities to cell phone users
• 2009 A USB flash drive costs about $20 for one gigabyte 

A look at this list should lead one to think that many students are more comfortable with some of this technology than their teachers. I have had many of my administrative students tell me that they would be lost were it not for the computer help they get from their own teenage children.

When a technology innovation comes to the classroom by way of the technology director it is likely to focus on the technology. When it arrives as the result of initiatives owned by the teachers, it is more likely to focus on the content. An example from the art department that I have seen in many schools makes this point. If computers in the art rooms have a technology focus the likely result will be courses that teach how to use software such as Photoshop and Illustrator. If the computers are introduced by the art teachers they are more likely to use these tools to focus on artistic concepts and to promote artistic craft.

This month, for example, the magazine Edutopia (Bernard, 2009) has a cover story about an article where students offer lesson plan ideas that feature items from my list. My point here is that any school district looking for ideas about instructional technology is unlikely to get all they need from a single source technology director.

Goodbye Wizard of Oz.

Once a district decides to eliminate the technology director position the next questions is what happens to the person in that position. If the person is seen as bright, hard working, and knowledgeable they can be moved to other positions of leadership. Depending on their talents they might make successful principals or assistant superintendents, which are much better positions from which to promote the use of instructional technology. They might also return to the classroom where they can become a model for innovation technology use. They may be able to retire as I have seen in several local districts or they might be able to secure employment with one of the district’s technology vendors or the local school-support agency.

In 1993 when I held this position I was able to un-invent myself by convincing the superintendent that the administrative and network supervision aspects of my job could be sent to our local BOCES and that the responsibility for the instructional piece should be placed in the hands of the building principals who could look to a district level staff developer for support when they needed to help their staff learn how to use new technology. At the time, the district saved $35,000 as a result of this move.

I should also point out that a reason for making my job disappear was so that I could become a principal in a building were the decision making team had a strong interest in moving ahead with instructional technology initiatives. My goal in writing this article, therefore, is not to put my fellow directors out of work by making them look like modern versions of the Wizard of Oz. My goal is to help schools make more effective use of their technology dollars as they empower all administrators, teachers, and even students in finding ways to allow instructional technology to facilitate and motive all learners. A job that has become impossible for one person can become possible once it is viewed as everyone’s job.
 
References

• Bernard, S. (2009). Kids Talk Tech. Edutopia. June/July 2009, 22-27.
• Boudett, K. P., City, E. A., & Murname, R. J. Eds. (2004). Data Wise: A Step by Step Guild to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning. Harvard Education Press: Cambridge, MA.
• Green, D. W. (2001). The Impact of Internet Access of Elementary Classroom Teaching: A Constructivist Perspective. (Doctoral Dissertation, Binghamton University, Dissertation Abstracts International, 63 no. 01A(2001): p 151.
• McKenzie, J. (1998). Grazing the Net: Raising a Generation of Free-Range Students, Phi Delta Kappan, 80(1), 26-31.
• Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. Free Press: New York, NY.

Douglas W. Green, Ed.D., was an administrator for 30 years and has 300+ publications in technology, education, and leadership. He retired to care for his wife who had Lou Gehrig's disease and started blogging after her recent death. His blog at DrDougGreen.com features book summaries and news items that makes it easy for busy educators to keep up to date.

First, I'd like to thank Scott for hosting me as part of my virtual tour to support The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology. You can follow the entire tour at Ed Tech Jen. To thank you for taking the time to find out a little about me and about the book, I'll be giving away a copy of the book to one lucky commenter.

Technology Mentoring

In pulling together this collection of the best articles from a five-year span of Learning & Leading with Technology, I looked for three things:

1. Articles that were compelling to read.
2. Articles that many of our readers responded to, nominated for the collection on The Best of L&L blog, or had included in course packets.
3. Articles that contained ideas that transcended specific technologies or educational settings.

Gora and Hinson described a program in their school where the more-experienced technology users helped teach their fellow teachers to integrate specific technologies into their instruction. They found much better results from these mentorships than from other professional development methods they had tried in their school.

One of the nice things about this program was that it had the deep support of the principal. This was really a key component of its success, and the main reason that the program is still in effect today.

When I contacted many of the authors whose works are included in the book, they shared a different result. Some had retired, and some had moved into other educational settings where technology use was not as well supported. Those who were still teaching used many of the same pedagogical techniques, but were unable to include the technology component. Thus, the fact that the program described in this article is still active is notable.

One of the compelling points for me was that this school had taken a solid teaching truth and applied it to itself. We know that students learn a topic really well when they have to teach it to their fellow students. So it makes sense that teachers who have to train other teachers in a technology integration technique or the use of an application would learn it better than if they were just using it personally.

What about you. Have you used mentoring in your educational setting? If so, what sort of process have you used to group mentors and mentees and to assign topics of study? How do assess the effectiveness of the mentorship?

Have you taken any other tenet of effective student learning and applied it to teacher professional development or to your own professional learning? How has it worked? Have you thought about sharing that idea with other technology leaders?

About Jennifer Roland

Jennifer is a writer living in the Portland, Oregon, area. She holds bachelor’s degrees in magazine journalism and political science from the University of Oregon. Her education also focused on history, economics, linguistics, and educational policy and management. Before embarking on her freelance career, she was a staff member at ISTE. Follow Jennifer on her blog tour at http://edtechjen.com; each tour stop includes a chance to win a copy of The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology.

About The Best of Learning & Leading with Technology

ISTE’s flagship magazine, Learning & Leading with Technology, is where the organization’s members and industry experts share and discuss the latest and greatest in using technology to enhance education. This collection includes the very best articles from 2003-2008. Along with the articles as they originally appeared in the magazine, the book includes commentary and context introducing the articles as well as short essays from the original authors, who further discuss the issues and topics of their articles and how they’ve affected the ed tech world.

My latest roundup of links and tools…

When did the IT staff get promoted above the superintendent?

Will Richardson notes:

[A] school superintendent I spoke with … lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

See also my older post: Principal blogging not allowed.

Math and motocross

Check out this sweet series of motocross math videos at HotChalk. The brains behind the math? Former guest blogger Jason Dyer!

“I didn’t know Sasquatch was real.”

Fun with the Pacific Tree Octopus!

Maybe we should do this for teachers and administrators too

"Seventy-one-year-old Peggy McIntyre needs to learn as much as she can about Windows before 8 a.m. Or else."

Post-Gutenberg economics

It’s now a publish-then-filter world. Clay Shirky notes that “we’re clocking a singularity a week at this point.”

We need to educate our educators

Seth Godin says:

It’s easy to be against something you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand.

Open your brain, open your model of education

The Education Innovation blog has an interesting post on closed v. open models of education. [Note to self: this might be the world’s longest URL]

Some good thinking going on here

Thanks to Mike Sansone, I recently discovered the Union Square Ventures blog. In Power to the People, they state:

[W]e believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.

In Why the Flow of Innovation Has Reversed, they note:

[T]he vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. . . . [O]ne reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Students aren’t the only ones missing the big picture

The Florida Department of Education is concerned that students are missing the big picture when it comes to science. A task force stated that “teachers should provide a broader focus on scientific concepts and process in a 'big picture' sense.” Hmmm… I wonder if that means the Department is going to narrow down the list of required science standards and also pare down the size of approved textbooks. I’m guessing not. Download the full report if you dare.

Disempowered today = disempowered tomorrow

I left this comment at Jim Gates’ Tipline blog:

Students who aren't fluid technology users today will be the low-wage workers and disempowered citizens of tomorrow.

I want it right THERE

Finally, if you’re anal-retentive about your Windows taskbar like I am, check out Taskbar Shuffle.

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys] 

What is your favourite form of online synchronous communication? I am pondering this today as I write the 5th and final blog post as guest blogger on Dangerously Irrelevant. As I much as I love and become immersed in the asynchronous communication modes of being online there is nothing better than a quick fix or an interaction or meeting that is in real time. Let me share with you some methods I have used recently for real-time (synchronous) communications. For a start there is always GChat! using GMail and having access to friends and colleagues around the world via the chat facility gives me a warm glow (you too?). For example, this screen shot was taken today. The different colours represent online activity: Green (online), Red (online but busy), Orange (online but away from computer), and Grey (has been online recently but gone now). It is early Saturday morning here in Qatar as I write this so I can see that Vicki has probably gone to bed in Georgia, my friend in India has gone out shopping, Elizabeth and Dean are possibly still awake in the USA, Judy in Australia is up but busy, Saad is up and online in Dhaka, David in Singapore, and Chris in France...well it's early in the morning for him but he is often online at odd hours.  What an international group I have represented here!
Advantages of GChat: archive of chats stored in 'Chats' mailbox. Message can be sent to a person not online, they will receive it later.

Skype of course has to come next! What a wonderful tool. I use Skype in the classroom, I use Skype to communicate with family and friends around the world. Here is a link to an article I wrote for ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology  magazine Using VoIP to Foster Connectivity and Communication. It is also reproduced here on my wiki.
Advantages of Skype: Can include video and text-chat and audio chat, can include a group of up to 9 people. A Skypecast can include a lot more! Skype calls can be recorded using applications such as PowerGramo or Pretty May.

Another tool, UStream, is being used by many educators to share, once again in real time initially, what they are presenting, thinking, or discussing. This image is from Educon 2.0 in January. George Mayo presented on global collaboration and Skyped a few of us in to his presentation, which he also had running through UStream. This shows George in conversation with Clarence Fisher. The Skype calls and conversation were seamless and George was adept at directing the live audience as well as the virtual audience along a path of exploration.

I am really loving Elluminate this year. The facility of audio, chat, whiteboard combined with being able to import PPT files and images, videos, take polls etc etc means it is a very powerful tool for synchronous work. Yes, I know it is expensive for a school, however don't forget the free V-Room that will take 3 people and is fully functional.

It is through Elluminate that we run the student summits for Flat Classroom Project. Each student and teacher in the summit prepares a JPG file and uploads it ready to talk to the images on the file that represent their work and experiences.
Advantages of Elluminate: Video of presenter possible, audio of one or more participants, back-channel chat.

Student from LACHSA presenting in Elluminate (Flat Classroom 2007)

I cannot finish this post without mentioning Twitter. Yes, I know this is strictly not synchronous however often it feels like it! For example this morning I tweeted this: To which I received these responses: and also a direct message via Twitter from @mohamed: "instant messenger because of presence and ability to have trusted connections. Now if only it was integrated with SMS"

My Twitter community is always there for me. Learn more about Twitter, find more Twitter resources. Follow me on Twitter.
Advantages of Twitter: micro-blogging with usually fast response from followers, able to share ideas without getting into a 'real conversation', archives all tweets, integrates with mobile phone technology.

Also, to share another synchronous online experience.......Not long ago I also had the opportunity to be part of a 'fishbowl' classroom project. Karl Fisch sent me an invitation to 'live blog' with students at Arapahoe High School as they discuss Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. A class blog post had been set up and as we listened to the live conversation by the 'inner circle' the outer circle (educators and outer students) posted comments to this post. We used an online tool called MeBeam with success to webcam the educators and the physical classroom together.
Here is an image of participants using MeBeam with the blog comment window open as well.

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

[A special thank you to Scott McLeod for inviting me to be guest presenter over the past week. This has been quite a challenge and I have appreciated the opportunity to put more extended blog posts together.]

Technorati Tags: twitter skype ustream elluminate google synchronous communication

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

I have been reflecting on global collaboration and what it means for teachers, students and the wider community. I have also been reflecting on sustainability of online spaces and how much of what we are 'producing' in terms of creative output  has not been preserved over the past 15 years. Let me be more specific.

For the past 12 years I have participated in online global projects with my students. In 1996, my school in Australia, Eltham College, received an Honorable Mention in the Environmental Awareness section of  the International Cyberfair project (organised by the Global School Net). This project had an amazing affect on our school community. To be able to publish images, sounds (yes, we even got up at dawn and recorded the Australian bird song as the day begins to upload), ideas and thoughts from our part of the world and share them internationally was an amazing achievement in the early days of he Internet. In fact many of us got up at 5am (pre-dawn!) to come to school and listen to the Cyberfair awards ceremony that year (at a reasonable time in the USA of course) that included an opening address from Al Gore. Those were the days. Alas, the website for this project is gone, changes in school server and ISP hosting etc etc have deleted it long ago.

In my first 5 years as an international educator I ran Learning Circle projects with classes in Zambia and Kuwait as part of the iEARN initiative. These involved grouping 6 or so classrooms from around the world into a 'project' that was self-determined according to curriculum section. The outcome from the interaction was often a hard-copy publication or a website. I still have two of the 'books' produced during these years with students writings and ideas from the various international locations. I am excited to see that iEARN are now in Qatar and promoting collaborative projects in this region.

When I moved to Bangladesh and International School Dhaka we participated in the 2004 international School's Cyberfair and won the Platinum (first prize) in the Environmental Awareness section for Poribesh Bachan (Bangla for being aware, taking action). Once again this was a community project and we had great fun compiling images and records of the current environmental state of Dhaka and initiatives that were moving it forward at that time. Alas, this website is not available online anymore.

In the past 18 months I have been a co-founder (with Vicki Davis) of the Flat Classroom Project and Horizon Project and global collaboration as I knew it suddenly took on a whole new dimension. I have written about this new 'Global Collaboration 3.0' earlier however let me make some salient points here as to why we now have a whole new focus for online collaborative projects and what that means for education.

• Web 2.0 has changed the online world making interaction and collaboration easier. Instant publication via a wiki, social networking via a Ning (see flat classroom Ning) have brought people (teachers and students) together as they have never been before
• A 'flat classroom' is able to connect, collaborate and create products with other 'flat classrooms' anywhere in the world and as well as the already tried and true organisations such as GSN and iEARN there are also many wonderful educators out there internationally making this happen. This is not a definitive list but a starting point: Global education collaborative, Many Voices, Voices of the World, Global Collaborations, Taking IT Global (you have to check this one out!), Thousand and One Flat World Tales, Global education resources, Life 'Round Here. I also recommend you look at the work of Kim Cofino and A Step-by-step guide to global collaborations, Developing the global student.
• In global collaboration 3.0 here are high expectations for connectivity and communication with a true 'flat classroom' setup where teachers and students are on the same level and with the focus on student-centered learning

What is my 2020 Vision for global collaboration? (thanks to Karl Fisch for his inspiration and for being the Keynote speaker for Horizon Project 2006)

• Global collaborative projects need to be embedded into the curriculum. We need to be looking at how students can have experiential learning opportunities at all levels of education. As a middle and high school specialist I expect my students to have had at least one global project experience before they leave Primary school, and then to have at least one global project experience each year of middle and high school. I do not think this is unreasonable or unrealistic
• We need to continue (or start) to foster technology integration as part of what we do in schools. Gone are the days where students come to the computer lab. to do IT. Moving towards 1:1 mobile computing programs is a start, providing professional development for teachers in embedding IT into their curriculum is even more important, providing the support via integration facilitators is also essential. Facilitators must have a no-class load within a school and could be IT and/or library/media specialist or strong curriculum specialists comfortable with online tools and Web 2.0
• We need to be unblocking viable connectivity tools so that digital access and participation is available for all classrooms around the world. Can we get governments and school organizations to talk about this at the same table? Can we develop a set of essential tools that ALL schools around the world access in order to communicate?
• We need to be developing digital citizenship skills and courses within schools, starting once again at the Primary/Elementary school level. It is so important to be able to work professionally online and to understand the dynamics of online communication. This does not come easily to most beginners. Students who are perhaps used to being online via Facebook or MySpace have a perspective of how to be social but not professional online communicators. There is a difference and we need to highlight this.
• We need to be investigating sustainability of online spaces and archiving successfully projects and collaborations. Currently we use wikispaces and ning (amongst others of course)....will these still be around in 5 years time? If not, what happens to the amazing content and productivity from classrooms all around the world? Will it be lost for ever?

I have a strong belief in the power of online connectivity and global collaboration (in all of it's many forms) at the school level to make a difference to the world we live in through fostering better understanding and cultural awareness. These are not just words. I have seen this happen through the projects I have run with my own classes.

What is your 2020 vision for global collaboration? Do you have a global collaboration on your horizon?
I invite you to join our Flat Classroom Ning, Horizon Project Ning and also to have a look at our current project just starting, Horizon Project 2008, where we have 11 classrooms and over 250 students from Australia, Austria, Japan, Spain, Qatar and the USA.

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: flatclassroom flatclassroomproject horizonproject horizonproject2008 iearn globalschoolnet cyberfair ning wikispaces kimcofino karlfisch vickidavis

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

This is my third blog post as the guest of the week so I thought it was time I introduced myself a little more and talked about where I currently live and work. As you can tell by my accent, I am from Melbourne, Australia but have been working and traveling as an international educator for over 10 years, along with my husband (mathematics teacher) and daughter (just hit the terrible teen years!). Places I have worked are Zambia, Kuwait, Bangladesh and now Qatar. Being our first year in Qatar we are finding our new school, Qatar Academy, challenging in many ways. However I am finding my new position as Head of Information Technology and E-Learning to be a wonderfully rewarding experience with lots of amazing opportunities to contribute to the growth of the school.

I am also responding to Scott's post earlier today, The World is Spiky, where he shares some interesting insights from Richard Florida's new book Who's your city. From reading the words of Florida I think Qatar is in fact a 'tall spike' in an unflat world. Definition of this: "the tallest spikes that attract global talent, generate knowledge, and produce the lion's share of global innovation."
Qatar is an amazing place to be working right now. I found a blog post from last September after just arriving on 'Sharing an amazing vision in Qatar' in which I wrote:

Here in Qatar I work at Qatar Academy, a PreK-12 school now delivering the IBO curriculum across all levels (PYP, MYP and DP) which is located on Education City, a large campus on the outskirts of Doha. However I work for Qatar Foundation (QF) for Education, Science and Community Development. QF represents the innovation and creativity of His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Emir of the State of Qatar. QF is a non-profit organisation and was founded in 1995, and Education City is their flagship.

I also wrote:

The vision and commitment to excellence in education here is amazing. The money being spent and the rate of development is staggering. QF is the driving force behind the countries commitment to education and to Qatar becoming one of the most developed knowledge-based societies around the world. To do this they are partnering with international educational institutions, supporting higher research and contributing to community health and development programs. Her Highness, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned, Consort of His Highness, serves as the chairperson of QF and personally guides the organisation with passion, vision and enthusiasm.

Since September the pace of change and development has increased if anything. Education City is like a construction zone, with a new academic medical center, a new library, a new convention center, an amazing equestrian center and many other buildings going up....and fast! In a recent article in the New York Times talking about the rush of American universities to set up in global locations it stated:

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

At Education City in Doha, Qatar’s capital, they can study medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, international affairs at Georgetown, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon, fine arts at Virginia Commonwealth, engineering at Texas A&M, and soon, journalism at Northwestern.

And yet another article from the NY Times:

Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes.

Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, after a recent trip to Doha commented:

In Doha, since I was last there, a skyline that looks like a mini-Manhattan has sprouted from the desert. Whatever construction cranes are not in China must be in Doha today. This once sleepy harbor now has a profile of skyscrapers, thanks to a huge injection of oil and gas revenues.

Then there are the other Qatari government initiatives in education from ICT Qatar that include e-Education and the e-Schoolbag program amongst other programs. I visited the new boys school rolling out the e-Schoolbag Tablet PC implementation and was duly impressed. There are many international consultants and educators currently working in Qatar, advising the government and supporting the vision with extra expertise and knowledge.

Qatar is determined to be a 'knowledge society' and with that vision in mind are carefully planning their approach to education. Yes, this is the Middle East and there are certain cultural sensitivities (aren't there any where in the world?) however I am finding a certain liberal attitude and a genuine desire to move forward. At a recent parent-teacher conference (Qatar Academy has about 85% Arabic students) I was pleasantly surprised at the friendly parents who not only wanted to shake my hand (remember that it is not always acceptable for men to shake a woman's hand here) but also called me by my first name.

So what does this all mean for the rest of the world?......well I suggest you all keep a close eye on Qatar. This is not a flash in the pan, this is a carefully calculated and planned development that is already making waves and impacting around the world. We have Al Jazeera news, we have Doha Debates, we had the Asian games 2006 and we are bidding for the Olympics for 2016. We have a clean city (I have just been to Mumbai and was brought back to the reality of a large, dirty city..what does Florida call them? 'third-world megacities'), albeit a little sandy some days. Qatar really is a 'tall spike in an unflat world' and despite the environmental concerns caused by over-indulgence (thanks Tom for reminding us), it is a beehive for creativity, innovation and 21st century thinking.

In the words of Sheikha Mozah:
"Today we plant seeds, tomorrow we open frontiers, tomorrow is rooted here".

Photo of Doha city skyline, taken late 2007

Animoto of a recent 'dune bashing' trip in the desert

Julie Lindsay, guest blogger

Technorati Tags: qatar thomasfriedman richardflorida qataracademy qatarfoundation doha

[cross-posted at E-Learning Journeys]

Change is a process in a school. Change is neither good nor bad but just is. Rapid change can cause discomfort and upset. No change can also cause discomfort and upset. Any educational institution that is not going through some form of change right now is possible missing the boat, or at least missing the opportunity to create their own boat and sail on the sea of individualized, student-centered, technology embedded learning.

In the international school world change often comes in measured doses lasting for the length of a contract (2 years minimum usually). Change can be personality driven, more rapid and possibly more adhoc in this realm of education given the desire of individuals to want to make their mark and then move onto another international school and start the process again. For the vast majority of expatriate teachers the results of visionary new programs and curriculum implementations will not be fully seen by the instigators, as they will be long gone, with new teachers and administrators in place trying to move forward with an altered vision, a newly tweaked plan and new enthusiasm. This is not abnormal and yet it can be frustrating for the school as a whole as programs come and go and initiatives are sparked and then put out.

A colleague lent me a book last week called "What's worth fighting for in your school?" Published in 1996, it talks about the culture of a school and transforming schools into better places. It got me thinking about how teaching can be a lonely profession and that building the culture of collaboration is a challenge. It also got me to thinking about how now, 12 years later, what has changed are the tools that we now use to foster collaboration but not necessarily the conditions under which collaboration, risk-taking and change can successfully take place. So what are these essential conditions for success within a school that are worth fighting for in the environment of 21st century learning?

At a recent conference, the  ECIS / ISTE IT Leadership conference, in Prague other IT leaders along with ISTE leaders Don Knezek and Lynn Nolan, discussed essential conditions for successful change and how these can be extrapolated into a leadership action plan. This is my summary/interpretation and what I think is worth fighting for in my school:

• A shared vision: what has shifted in education over the past five years and how has technology advanced and supported this? Proactive leadership can bring together a school community to share a vision for transforming learning.
• Strategic planning: systemic and aligned with a shared vision for school effectiveness and student learning through the infusion of technology and digital resources
• Understanding learning and leading in a digital age: It is through better understanding of how learners have changed, how the learning environment has changed, how the curriculum has changed that we can best plan for effective reform across the school
• Professional learning communities: now this is one I am already fighting for. Encouraging conversations, supporting adoption of new techniques, encouraging sharing of ideas, resources and best-practice
• One-to-one computing: mobility and ubiquity is the only way to go but this needs to be supported through funding for devices and for professional development. Not everyone yet sees the value in having a computing tool in hand
• Online learning community: for students, for teachers, for administrators and for the wider school community. This can be fostered through supporting technologies including Web 2.0 tools. However the tool is insignificant (to an extent), it is the interaction and potential for continuous improvement and perpetual learning that is the ultimate promise here
• Team-based professional development: Social learning and community-based exploration of new ideas for learning
• Sustainability: OK, this is a big one. We need to build in sustainability so that valid programs are able to survive leadership and other changes. At the same time we need to build in flexibility so that plans can be tweaked if needed to cater for changing technologies, local emphasis etc.

I was reminded coincidently today of a video a student in my class in Bangladesh created for the Horizon Project 2007. If you overlook some poor technical quality, ESL spelling and grammar and actually absorb the message this video has a lot to say about change, where we have come from with educational technology and where we could be going. Called 'The Future is Now', it was part of the 'User created content' section of the project.

From the book again:
"What is worth fighting for is not to allow our organizations to be negative by default but to make them positive by design"

What do you think is worth fighting for in your school?

Julie Lindsay, Guest blogger

Technorati Tags: horizonproject2007 donknezek lynnnolan iste ecis