by Scott McLeod | Dec 11, 2006 | Assistive and Accessible, Management and Operations, Research and Evaluation |
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
by Scott McLeod | Nov 21, 2006 | Communication, Management and Operations, Safety and Security, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
After meeting with a doctoral student yesterday who drove two hours each way for a one-hour meeting, I decided enough was enough, at least with my own advisees. I made a page on my web site that encourages students to work with me to use technology to solve some typical time / travel / communication challenges.
I then sent a listserv message to the rest of the faculty in my department about my new web page because I thought that some other folks might be interested in doing this too. Within minutes another message appeared on the listserv, this time from our department technology coordinator, notifying us of the University’s discouragement of Skype because it hogs resources and acts as a connective node for non-university-related data.
I encourage everyone to read the University of Minnesota recommendations regarding Skype. As I noted to our technology coordinator, the suggestion that Skype be turned off most of the time is somewhat problematic. I understand the U’s concern about bearing non-university-related data traffic. That said, I wish the U would think about Skype like it does our telephones, which we obviously don’t turn off except when we’re expecting a call.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? Experiences and/or policies from your own organization?
by Scott McLeod | Nov 20, 2006 | Law, Policy, and Ethics, Management and Operations, Miscellaneous, Safety and Security |
Miguel took exception to my ISTE point/counterpoint article on using RFID chips to monitor schoolchildren in school. I knew my stance would be controversial when I wrote the piece, so I’ll take this opportunity to respond to Miguel’s criticisms. Here’s my thinking, using the Brittan Elementary (Sutter, CA) program as an example…
- There’s nothing on the RFID chips except a number. No demographic information. No address information. No personally-identifiable information whatsoever. Nothing except a unique ID number that’s meaningful only to the specialized school software that matches kids with attendance records (and, maybe later, lunch records). There’s a big difference between the information stored on the kids’ RFID cards and what was on the British passports. Anyone who stole the info from the kids’ RFID chips literally would get bupkis…
- We already have to monitor the whereabouts of kids on school grounds at all times. There is no right of students to roam freely. As such, I’ll stick by my argument that using technology to do this instead of expensive human personnel is at least arguably defensible.
- Given #1 and #2, that’s why I said that RFID chips as used in Brittan Elementary are a non-issue. They’re no more invasive than student IDs (with or without bar codes) or biometric readers for school cafeterias or libraries. They’re arguably less invasive than networked security cameras, metal detectors, drug dog sniffs, or extracurricular students’ urine testing for illegal substances, all of which are commonplace.
- Finally, I’m wary of the slippery slope argument that Miguel use ("RFID chips … are a precedent for using technology in ways that violate our privacy"). If we decide to go down this path, wouldn’t we also be against Internet cookies, secure login databases for financial web sites, GPS in cars/cell phones, Internet form-filling software, toll booth passcards, biometric scanners, security cameras, and all of the other technologies I mention in my article? Why is RFID so different than these other technologies?
The students who take my school law courses would tell you that I’m actually a pretty strong privacy advocate. That said, I also recognize that, as technology-using individuals, we make choices every day to sacrifice privacy for convenience. That trend is only going to intensify as the benefits of divulging certain types of information outweigh whatever privacy concerns most folks have.
We need to be careful to protect students’ private information from theft and other improper uses. That said, I’m not sure that a meaningless number on a students’ RFID chip is the red flag that others make it out to be.
by Scott McLeod | Oct 19, 2006 | Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Miscellaneous, Professional Development, Reading, Tech Integration |
It’s important to acknowledge when you have made a mistake. I made one that I definitely should have caught – as an attorney, I’m a little embarrassed about this one.
Michael Ayers of The Commonwealth Practice, Ltd. has helped me determine that the twelve Gallup questions I posted about in Are schools vibrant workplaces? are actually copyrighted by The Gallup Organization with the United States Copyright Office. Not only are the questions under copyright, apparently they’re big business for Gallup. Gallup even sued another company to prevent it from using the questions in its own work with corporations. Apparently they’re not just any questions, they’re THE questions that corporations should ask to retain talented employees. Companies pay Gallup to administer employee surveys and/or for permission to use the questions. This means that I can’t host an online survey for a school organization that wanted to ask its employees these questions without getting Gallup’s permission first.
I don’t usually find copyright issues very interesting, but this one has been illuminating for me (I guess because of my personal involvement). As an attorney, I think it’s interesting to hear that Gallup is so protective of those questions. As I told Michael in an e-mail exchange, I think the concept of being able to copyright sentences or statements is a strange one. For example, could someone lay claim to the phrases, "How are you doing?" or "What do you think are the biggest challenges facing your organization?" It’s not like this is a marketing / branding / commercial slogan ("Where’s the beef?").
Nonetheless, even under a four-factor copyright analysis, Gallup would win if I used these questions without permission and it decided to sue me in court. It has an economic interest in this set of questions, one that’s apparently large enough to justify it going all the way to the federal Eighth Circuit Court (one level below the United States Supreme Court) to uphold its claim.
Obviously I wasn’t trying to set myself up in economic competition with Gallup. Indeed, I was actually trying to plug the concepts behind the questions and the book by Buckingham and Coffman (which is excellent, by the way, if you’re interested in company climate / employee satisfaction issues).
In the end, it’s too bad this is true. Schools aren’t going to pay Gallup for this but some of them would really benefit from the information. It may be possible that I can work something out with Gallup for the occasional request by a K-12 organization.
So read the book if this is the kind of thing that interests you. It’s superb. And please support Creative Commons.
by Scott McLeod | Oct 12, 2006 | Blogging, Communication, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Management and Operations, Professional Development, Safety and Security, Tech Integration, Tech Tools |
Google for Educators is a new web site from our friends at Google that puts twelve of its tools together for use by K-12 teachers. The list includes Google Documents (formerly Writely) and Spreadsheets, Blogger, Google Video, and more.
Very cool. Now the question is going to be how many educators are blocked from using some or all of these tools by their districts…
by jon | Oct 5, 2006 | Assessment, Blogging, Guest Bloggers, Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Planning and Funding |
I’ve been wanting to write this piece for a long time, but never figured out the right outlet. This blog, however, is a great space for me to try it out (ah, the beauty of blogging!). Plus, I think I did reasonably well with my Freakonomics analysis on Monday, so I figure it’s safe to work my thoughts through another popular non-fiction book.
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, is a book about baseball. So, I don’t know how many readers of this blog will have read the book. But, for me, the book is about so much more than baseball and the lessons of the book are incredibly applicable to education. Lewis initially set out to write a book about how the Oakland A’s, a major league baseball team on the low end of the financial resources continuum, managed to compete at such a high level seemingly every year. There are tremendous disparities in spending across Major League Baseball, and the game has been plagued by the perception that the teams that spend the most money win the most. The New York Yankees (my favorite team!) were the face of this perception. The A’s seemed to defy this perception.
What Lewis ultimately discovered was that the A’s, led by their unique general manager Billy Beane, had adopted an organizational commitment to scouting and assessing players using statistical analysis of the loads of data generated by the game of baseball. These forms of analysis, labeled generally as sabermetrics, had been around for many years, but they were largely written off as the province of geeks and statheads who just happened to like baseball. Beane, however, came to believe that a sabermetric approach to scouting and valuing players would allow them to make the most cost-effective decisions possible. They were able to figure out which individual statistics were the greatest predictors of team success. Then they sought players who thrived in those key areas despite being deemed by others as flawed in other areas of the game thereby devaluing their salaries. So, for example, sabermetricians were able to demonstrate that on base percentage (OBP – the likelihood that a player will get on base in any given plate appearance) was the single greatest predictor of runs scored. That seems logical since a player must get on base to score a run. But, traditionally, players were valued based more on their batting average (the likelihood that a player will get a hit in any given plate appearance) than OBP. Therefore, there were some players who didn’t have great batting averages (and as a result didn’t earn very high salaries), but had relatively higher on base percentages (mostly because they earned lots of base-on-balls – aka walks). Those players became Oakland A’s.
Most baseball purists and old school baseball people fervently opposed this sabermetric orientation. They argued that you couldn’t judge a player by crunching numbers. You had to watch the players play, get to know them as people, etc.; in other words, make value determinations by scouting the old fashioned way. The numbers were cold and unreliable, they’d say.
Is this starting to sound familiar? Purists, traditionalists arguing that we should not rely on numerical data to make decisions? Numerical data are cold and unreliable, and they can’t tell you what you need to know about people? These are the same arguments you hear from those opposed to what has been labeled "data-driven decision-making" (DDDM) in education.
I could stop here and argue that the Oakland A’s commitment to sabermetrics and cost-effective decision-making has been highly successful (just look at how well they’re doing in this year’s playoffs!), so everyone should buy in to DDDM in education. But, that’s not the real point I want to make.
For me, there is another perception problem here. The popular sports media has, for the most part, portrayed this so-called Moneyball philosophy inaccurately. The popular sports media would have us believe that sabermetric analysis is an opposing paradigm to traditional baseball scouting methods. But, the fact is that sabermetric analysis has been used by the A’s (and now many other teams as well) as a complement to more traditional methods of scouting and player valuation. It is not as if the A’s have fired all of their scouts and hired all statisticians; their scouting department includes a few number crunchers in addition to all of the scouts who do what they’ve always done.
Similarly, in education, "data-driven decision making" is the label given to the movement to making decisions based on the scores of numerical data that are now available to educators as technological means (computers, databases, etc.) have intersected with a climate of standards and assessment. But, to suggest that DDDM is a new movement or idea in education implies that before now, decisions were made in a vacuum; decisions were made in the absence of data. That’s not the case, though. Decisions, particularly those about individual students, were made based on professional judgments (teacher perceptions, observations, etc.). Like sabermetrics in baseball, (statistically oriented) DDDM is a complementary approach to professional judgment in education. They are epistemologically different approaches, but they are not mutually exclusive.
Finally, the Oakland A’s needed to add sabermetric analysis to their organization because they were playing on an uneven playing field with respect to financial resources. As a result, they have been able to compete successfully against the big spenders. Education is a notoriously uneven playing field with respect to financial resources. I hope schools and districts struggling with relatively low per-pupil expenditures see DDDM as a way to make more cost-effective decisions.
by Scott McLeod | Sep 29, 2006 | Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Professional Development, Reading, Tech Integration |
Yesterday I asked, "How strong and vibrant is the workplace we create for most educators?" As part of that post, I listed twelve questions from First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently that, when answered positively, have been strongly linked to success on organizational goals, organizational productivity, employee satisfaction, and employee retention. I concluded my post with an invitation for a few school districts to maybe survey their employees on these twelve questions. I even offered to host the survey.
I just wanted to note that this doesn’t have to be at the school district level. These twelve questions are equally relevant at the school level, department level, or whatever. Focusing on the needs of employees is smart organizational strategy, however big or small the organization. A survey done within an individual school would tell that principal quite a bit…
by Scott McLeod | Sep 28, 2006 | Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Professional Development, Reading, Tech Integration |
A friend recommended that I read First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. Since the principalship is a classic middle management position, I thought I would check it out. So far it’s pretty interesting – the authors’ findings are based on interviews and other data collected by the Gallup Organization over the past 25 years from over 1 million employees and over 80,000 managers across a broad range of companies, industries, and countries.
Using factor analysis, regression analysis, concurrent validity studies, focus groups, and follow-up interviews to sift through the incredible mountain of data, the authors note that the strength of a workplace can be narrowed down to twelve questions that measure the core elements needed to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees.
As I look over this list, I wonder how teachers would respond to these questions? How strong and vibrant is the workplace we create for most educators?
[It would be interesting to have a couple of school districts give this survey to their employees, maybe breaking out the results by school building or job category. If anyone’s interested, I would be willing to host the online survey for a few districts and have made an example survey. Contact me if you would maybe like to do this.]
by Scott McLeod | Sep 27, 2006 | Communication, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Management and Operations, Safety and Security |
As a technology leadership guy who also happens to have a law degree, I often get asked legal questions related to school technologies. Today, at the request of Miguel, I’m going to discuss issues related to posting student photos on the Web. I’ll preface this discussion with my usual caveats that 1) I am not offering legal advice, 2) I am not in an attorney-client relationship with anyone, and 3) I always recommend that folks consult their school district’s attorney regarding legal issues.
Pictures taken for school-related purposes
Schools take pictures of students all the time – for yearbooks, at athletic events, in class, at artistic performances, etc. Often they want to post those pictures to the Internet, thus making those photos potentially available to a global audience.
Every school district should have a policy for dealing with student photos. That policy should comply with the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) as well as any relevant state statutes (for example, Minnesota has the Government Data Practices Act).
Schools should solicit parents’ permission to post photos of their child on the Web. The permission form should clearly describe the anticipated ways in which the school will use student pictures. When posting photos, schools should try their utmost not to post accompanying names at all – the next best option probably is to post students’ first names but not last names. Sometimes schools need to post students’ full names – for example, an online feature of the star pitcher on the softball team or the lead actress in the school play – but these situations should be carefully thought out beforehand to minimize parental concerns about student privacy and safety. Parents should be informed of all of the various permutations so that they can make informed choices about when to grant or refuse permission for their child’s photo to be used.
Schools have the difficult obligation to somehow monitor which students’ photos can be used online and which can’t. For example, if a photo taken of a class activity has a student in the background whose parents refused permission, that photo likely can’t be used online, even if the focus of the picture was on other students.
Another dilemma for schools is what to do with parents who don’t return the permission form. Schools basically have two options when this occurs:
- assume they have permission to publish unless parents turn in the form and opt out; or
- assume they do not have permission to publish unless parents turn in the form and opt in.
The latter option is more protective of students and is generally the one I recommend to educators.
Here are some example policies, forms, and other resources related to school use of student pictures:
Pictures taken by parents or other guests
In an interesting twist, Miguel and I recently had an exchange about an e-mail he received from a technology coordinator:
A parent has taken photos at school events, primarily athletic events, then posted them on her own personal web site (without permission of the students or parents involved) with prices for purchasing. I know there could be a problem if the students were identified by name but they are not. There are no captions at all.
Our superintendent is out of town. I’m sure someone has encountered this situation. Does anyone know if this is legal?
Here’s my take on the situation: if the pictures were taken in a public place, or in a place where parents / guests had permission to take pictures (e.g., inside school or on school grounds), I believe that parents or guests are legally entitled to take the photos and/or sell them. If a school district wanted, I think it could have a policy prohibiting anyone taking photographs within school buildings or on school grounds, but the enforcement and/or public relations issues would be difficult.
I found some excellent resources on this issue:
Of course a school district can always request that photographers exhibit some sensitivity to folks’ concerns about privacy and safety, particularly since most of the subjects of the photos are minor children.
Conclusion
Obviously the issues surrounding photographs of students on the Web are numerous and complex. The challenge for schools is to balance their (and parents’) desires to publicize the great things that are happening in their organizations with their responsibilities to protect children and to satisfy parental concerns about student privacy and safety. The guidelines described here also would pertain to videos of students, not just photographs.
How does your school organization handle issues related to online publishing of student photos?
This post is also available at the TechLearning blog.
by david_quinn | Sep 18, 2006 | Guest Bloggers, Law, Policy, and Ethics, Leadership and Vision, Management and Operations, Planning and Funding, Tech Integration |
The pressure of being the first guest blogger!
As Scott mentioned my name is David Quinn and I am an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Policy at the University of Florida . I am in my second year at UF having previously taught at the University of Arizona for six years. I am excited about the opportunities that are emerging at UF especially being able to focus my teaching, research and service around issues of technology leadership in schools. I teach three classes at UF: Leading Change, Data-Driven Decision Making and Technology Leadership in Schools and I am excited at the convergence of literature and research in these areas that are readily applied to administrative practice. I just read through this bio and it is sounding pretty academic, so on to my musings.
While teaching the tech leadership class this past summer, my graduate assistant, Matt Ohlson, and I were talking about how relevant or irrelevant school and district technology plans can be. As we looked for school and district tech plans that could serve as exemplars for our students, we were amazed at the spectrum of plans. Some might contend that a plan is just a piece of paper (or more often than not an Adobe Acrobat file) that schools and districts complete because of a mandate like receiving e-rate funding. I would argue however, that an inclusive process of planning for technology can be a powerful stimulus for changing schools from something Frederick Taylor would appreciate into an organization that acknowledges that technology, especially the Internet, has radically changed our world over the last 10-15 years. I am in schools on a regular basis and cringe whenever I see the same rote instruction led by lecture, while 5 networked computers collect dust in the back of the room (that’s a whole other blog entry).
Getting back to the discussion of technology planning, one of the often-referenced district plans is from Bellingham Public Schools. This is an excellent “living” document that really drives the utilization and integration of technology in Bellingham Washington. Searching the Internet for model plans tweaked my interest in what was happening at the district level in Florida. Being new to the state, I with major assistance from Matt began collecting and analyzing as many of the 67 district technology plans as we could get our hands on. Out of the 52 plans that we compiled, there are some powerful documents including those from Pinellas, Sumter and Palm Beach Counties. Many of the plans fall far short of providing a guiding vision for tech utilization. A majority of these plans follow Florida’s minimum guidelines for district technology plans without deviation. I don’t blame these districts, they were told “if you want e-rate funding, you will submit a plan that addresses these criteria.” Those districts that went above and beyond typically have large technology departments and experienced leadership, whereas many of the weaker plans are from small rural districts where the director of technology may also have numerous other obligations. Colleges of education should also accept some of the responsibility because most are not preparing administrators how to be technology leaders.
This investigation has been enlightening and we have begun to collect school-level technology plans for review. While district tech plans provide a roadmap for many schools, a school-level technology plan is essential for guiding technology implementation acknowledging the unique context of each school. The most rewarding part of teaching the tech leadership class was seeing a good number of my students become excited about the opportunities that technology provide for schools. Several students are using their new knowledge and enthusiasm to start leading change in their own schools.
This “stuff” as Scott so eloquently puts it, is always on my mind, and I am excited about the future of technology in schools.
