I’m not going to speak to this issue, instead I will let the original article that inspired me to blog this do the talking.

Are iPod-banning schools cheating our kids?

The larger, more interesting question is: Why do we devote so much time and energy teaching kids to memorize facts we know they’ll forget? We should instead teach critical thinking, creative decision-making and sophisticated information retrieval.

Education, Technology, K12 Education

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The teachers and students are on winter break and the 12 month employees are working through the 23rd. I am taking the time to clean ActivBoard filters, catch up on some cleaning and other basic housekeeping. We sent information on what to turn off for the two week break so as I’ve been walking the campus for the filters, I’ve been checking on those technology items that needed to be turned off.

I’ve found that the worst offender of not being turned off in a room is the printer, followed by the monitor. According to the Office Equipment Energy Savings Calculator, LBL the following table shows that you can save $30 per printer annually by turning them off at night and logically more if you turn them off during breaks and on weekends. You can save an amazing $42 per monitor!

So lets just take these numbers and not consider that they are turned off for 2 weeks during the winter break and the 2 months of summer because they are usually left on during the weekends for the duration of the 10 month school year that teachers are here. Now, I’m going to use my school which is above 700 students but below 1000. With 4 computers per classroom with approximately 50 instructional rooms, 89 lab computers and 25 miscellaneous desktops on campus that would be 314 monitors and a savings of $13,188.00/year. As for the printers, we have 1 team printer per grade level, 1 per classroom, 3 in the labs and 25 for other staff. These numbers are approximate, which leads to a savings of $2,550.00/year for 85 printers.

Okay, my school is smaller and of course the high schools will be a lot larger, but I am going to just use my figures for our whole district. Lets take the total savings of $15,738.00 times the 43 elementary, middle and high schools we have and that is a savings of: $676,734.00 annually. That is on the low side because most of the other schools are larger than my school, especially the middle and high schools. But, if you look at that number you can see how saving that amount on just monitors and printers could be spent on something else in our currently tight fiscal situation as a district.

Think about it…

In our district the school technology support professionals have a limited account and an administrative account in the Active Directory. While most of the time I can administer my campus and users from the limited account, there are times when I need to access the administrative account for just one thing. An example of this is looking up a staff or student ID for a program they need access to.

In this case the steps for this simple thing are:

1. logging off
2. logging into the admin account
3. running the program to look up the ID
4. doing the look up
5. logging off
6. logging back into the limited account
7. adding the user into whatever I need to

Now, that is way too much to do for something so simple. So, my solution is to use “runas” in a batch file to run the program I need as the admin account. This saves all the wasted steps, while letting me be secure in my limited account. Security, plus ease and working smarter is what it’s all about.

So, what does the batch file look like? Here it is:

runas /user:adminusername@domainname “C:Directory pathFilename [any commands to send to the program]“

Okay, now here is a visual example:

runas /user:edutechation@edutechation.com “C:Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore http://mysite/admin”

The batch file will open a command window to ask you to input the admin password and if the password is correct it will launch Internet Explorer to the web site mysite/admin as the admin account with admin privileges. When you exit IE it drops the admin privileges so the next time you open IE it will be as the limited user account you are logged in as.

The time this saves me is invaluable. Try it, you’ll like it. If you would like to read about the runas command at Microsoft click here

Technorati Tags: RUNAS, Network Administration, Educational Technology

Check out the new Free Software page above. They are a small collection of programs and web sites that I’ve found useful and have added to our teachers laptops.

The title of this blog entry says it all. We have so many new and exciting technology based learning aids, but not enough teachers that want to use them. As I’ve written in many of my posts, I do not like all the mandated testing because I feel it leads teachers to stop being creative, stops students from learning to be creative while creating average graduates. Reading and writing blocks are good things if they are used with new technology to keep the students interested.

The children of today are being brought up in an internet, media world. They have a different understanding, a different way of learning than we did growing up. Pong versus Xbox, playing outside versus going to the mall, Little League versus Soccer & Martial Arts classes and the biggest difference….computers, ipods, MySpace, Facebook. Most kids today can do more with a computer than the adult teaching them. This is unfortunate and it is even more unfortunate that more teachers are not trying to learn how to use these new technology advances to stay ahead of their students and give them the education they deserve.

At our school the Instructional Technology Coach has set up training classes at least two times a week for all the different technology available to the teachers. This year to date I’ve seen a few of the classes and while they are attended by 8 to 10 teachers out of 44 classroom teachers, it is always the same teachers. That is about a 25 percent attendance rate, which might seem good, but I consider it extremely low. I consider 75 percent a good rate of attendance, but I might be looking through rose colored glasses. The teachers attending are all teachers that have been teaching for less than 10 years and are willing to grow, to learn new things.

The teachers that really need this training are the old bloods that have been teaching for 15, 20, 25 years. They are set in their ways, they “know what we should be teaching”. I’ve run into these types of teachers in my effort to get them to stop using 10 to 15 year old CD’s to teach students how to read and write. We are here for the kids. They need to either jump into the 21st Century or retire so that we can get teachers who want to grow and use the new technology. We need people who want to teach the kids what they need, what they deserve.

That’s what I think…What about you?

Are we creating cars or are we teaching are kids how to grow, learn, be inventors, or most importantly to think for themselves and be creative. As we have added a multitude of tests, mandated reading and writing blocks are we taking away from the creative process of teaching and learning? That’s what it looks like from my vantage point.

We are teaching to the tests because that is what the local school board, the state and the federal government are looking at for Adequate Yearly Progress. Our kids are being asked to learn the test, not be creative. They are becoming machines, clones, a car that knows the same thing, does the same thing. Where do you add podcasts, wiki’s, blogging, all forms of collaborate learning when you are restricted to blocks and what you are supposed to teach? Where do you fit the technology in when you have to teach to a test that leaves creativity out? David Warlick makes an interesting point along these lines in is 2 cents worth blog…

I frequently use a manufacturing model to describe our education system. Our students roll down the assembly line where we install math on them, and we install reading, and science, and social studies, and at the end of the line our quality control engineers measure each product to make sure that it complies with the blueprints — to make sure that every student knows exactly the same things. Source: 2 Cents Worth » Becoming the Machine

It might be nice that our kids should know the same things, but it doesn’t allow for the genius of creativity or expression of different ideas. Growth dies in a system that you standardize. The United States will never gain a place as one of the best educated nations by producing clones. Children are not machines that should be run down the assembly line of k-12 education. Teachers need the freedom to choose creative lessons within a loose framework of guidelines and expectations for student progress. We are going to lose more ground to other nations if we continue down the road of standardization in teaching and mandated testing.

That’s what I think….What about you?

Will Richardson had an interesting topic for his blog the other day and it caught my eye as some of the idea’s that I’m trying to get started at my elementary school. The five topics that Will asks about are:

1. Wikipedia–as in teaching kids about the collaborative construction of knowledge.
2. Cell phones–as in teaching how to use them effectively as tools for “just in time learning.”
3. MySpace–as in teaching the safe and effective use of the Internet to build networks and publish content.
4. Martinlutherking.org–as in teaching the skills necessary for navigating a world where editing occurs post publication.
5. Google–as in teaching the skills to find the information we want.

What other “basics” would you add?

Source: Weblogg-ed » What’s in Your Curriculum?

Now lets take these 5 items as I see them in our school district. These are in no particular order other than what I considered most important when I read them.

First of all MySpace is blocked by the websense filters as I believe it should be, but there is no reason to not teach Internet safety. I believe you can create a teaching situation that is behind the firewalls that you create a social networking site for the kids that teaches how to interact, publish and be safe at the same time.

Secondly, I see Google as a great source of information. We have already used it to research a 5th grade project called Heritage Day. The students Googled their family names, got relative background and coat of arms, came up with some background from their parents and put it all together on poster boards for an evening program for their parents. Teaching about Google as a media, new library source is the way to give children the step up into technology that they need.

Thirdly, I feel that cell phones have no place in the learning environment. With the latest technology kids have learned how to take pictures of answers, sent them to friends, text answers back and forth so well that it makes for too much of a temptation to cheat. “Just in Time Learning” is “Just in Time Temptation to Cheat”.

Fourth on this for me is Martinlutherking.org, which Will has pointed out to me in his comment below is a learning experience in what is not good in our society. This site rewrites history in an extremist view, and that this site even tries to influence our kids should be an example for us to teach that these views are the extreme minority of society. I can’t stress enough that after looking at this site any reasonable adult will see the hateful nature of the site and why we need to teach our kids why it is wrong to feel that way.

Lastly, Wikipedia and wiki’s as a whole are going to be one of the greatest tools in learning that has come to the front in technology. Wiki’s can be used by a class to create a complete lesson on any topic with everyone contributing what they have found in the course of studying. Wiki’s and blogs are where teaching can make great strides in a very short period of time.

It’s a lot to think about, but that’s what teaching is all about. Thinking, learning and adapting.

That’s what I think….What about you?

As I walk through classes to fix a computer I see a lot of teachers using CD’s to learn on the computer. After taking the time to look, the programs on these CD’s are written mostly for use with Windows 95 or 98. They only work with the CD in the drive or don’t work correctly with Windows XP. A lot of the teachers using these CD’s have been teaching for over 10 years, most 25 or more. I see this as an opportunity to educate our teachers that there are many more resources available on the web. These web based resources lead to more effective learning with the students. Let’s see how….

The first way is by letting a group or class of students use the same resource at the same time. When you are using a CD to teach, for example numbers, only one student can use it at a time in a classroom setting while working on the classroom computers. While on the other hand, in the classroom you can load the site on a teacher laptop, plug it into the video projector and put it up on a screen or an ActivBoard depending what you have available. You are then engaging a whole class at one time, seeing who is learning and who isn’t. You get to see a bigger picture than you see when each child has to wait to use a CD. Yes, you can load the CD on the teacher laptop, but these CD’s tend to run slow while having to access information versus a broadband connection of a web based application.

Another way web based activity is a better way to learn is when you have multiple computers in the classroom and the students are doing stations during a reading or writing block. the students on the computer station can all load the reading web site to work on the same assignment. This gives the teacher a more streamlined lesson plan that they can follow with the students on the computer station, the same as with a reading station at a round table. The teacher can discuss the same reading assignment with these students, instead of having to ask different questions for different CD’s.

To me this is just better use of time and learning material. At our school the Instructional Technology Coach, K1 lab instructor and myself have gotten together and found many sites that we have added to our Technology web page. The links are from a variety of teachers, but everyday we are looking for more. Please check out our links, maybe we have one you don’t. If you have one that you think would be helpful, please drop add a comment to this blog for me.

These are just two examples, there are so many more…Podcasts, blogs, Wiki’s, student online newsletters and the list goes on…..

That’s what I think….What about you?

With the new school year I’ve changed the image on the teacher stations in our 2 labs. After consulting with administration, and our Instructional Technology Coach we came up with a list of programs that should be installed on these 2 computers. One of the programs that we left off was district email and it was the first tech request for the teacher stations by the teachers. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t shocked.

If you’ve spent any time in a computer lab, it can get a little boring when your students are using the reading, writing and math programs. Although that is true, we are in the lab to increase the students knowledge, it’s another tool, it’s not the baby sitter, a substitute for the teacher. Walking around behind the students, giving them advice, seeing who is having problems is what a teacher is supposed to be doing. Yes, they can run reports on each students progress, but that is just a number, if you aren’t watching to see what they are doing, you can’t truly analyze a poor score.

So, sitting at a teacher station reading your email is not constructive use of time in a computer lab. Use it wisely and that time can actually help your students learn more. They will realistically improve on those program lessons they are doing, while they will score better on county and state mandated tests because they have had hands on training when they needed it. Being a teacher is not an easy job, but use the tools you have properly and read your email during planning, before school, or after school. Not when you can be helping your kids in a classroom setting that just happens to be a computer lab.

That’s what I think….What about you?

Earlier this year I attended the Florida Educational Technology Conference (FETC) in Orlando. One of the seminars I attended was by David A. Ritzmann, Director of Information Technology at the Columbus School for Girls about “the 10 ways to screw up technology in your school”. I’d like to thank him for his permission to use part of his material for this blog.

I found it very enlightening and took a look at what we were doing at our school. I took some of his ideas to help make increase the level of my tech support. Toward the end of the seminar one of his slides was an opposite of the lecture, “how to improve the technology at your school”. I used this slide to plan the way I work day to day. It’s made what I do easier, or maybe it’s easier because it’s more fun.

First, one of the most important things I did was standardize the image I was using on all the computers in the school. The Labs have the same software, except for the testing software, as the classrooms. This way you can transfer to any room and the student gets the same look and feel. They don’t have to think about where to find a program, it’s in the same place. Saves wasted time, increases student learning time.

Communication with the staff makes the job easier without a doubt. It lets them know what they need to know and cuts down on tech requests because the end user can do it themselves. To this end, I setup a website for easy reference to quickly troubleshoot basic problems without having to use the tech request email system. I also check my tech request folder hourly, if not more often to see if there is a problem that can be handled by email or is in the vicinity of where I am at the moment. Communication lets your staff know whats going on, one example is Microsoft’s patch Tuesday. The Friday and Monday before, I always email our general news list to alert all staff to leave their computers on all day Tuesday and Wednesday to receive the patches asap.

Understanding your learners is quite an interesting thing to try to do. You have kids that know more about computers and technology than their teachers for the most part because they have grown up with them. On the other hand most of the teachers have grown up with pads, pencils, some with calculators, some with horse and buggy. The kids need to be challenged or they will just play with the computer or even try to find ways to mess it up. You have to give them interesting new learning games, teach them how to use the software that the computer has to enrich themselves and grow. The teachers need to know how to focus that energy, how to use the games, the video projectors, the ELMO’s, the podcasts and even the web for blogging.

This I believe leads into being a teacher of technology. I know that a lot of IT folks try to keep it all to themselves, they consider this job security….I consider it dumb. The more you teach the staff, the easier it is for you to do other things. Like help the teachers build web pages, do blogs with their students, start a Wiki for learning with their students.

Disaster planning, geez this one is a snap, but it’s not done enough. While the district has started to back up the servers regularly, the staff tend to not back up their laptops regularly. I’m now setting up the teachers with an enhanced MS backup that they can use with a very intuitive GUI to create a scheduled backup of their documents and grades. It works….the back up goes to the teachers home folder on the server, which I’m also working on doing a backup of.

We all know that it is human nature to resist change. You need to learn how to manage change in a reasonable manner. Some staff more that others will not like change, so you have to be determined; while at the same time you cannot force something down someones throat. I managed a lot of change by doing it little by little and the folks that wouldn’t change I didn’t push. I let them go about their business until they had made a mistake that they couldn’t recover from. I then intervened and implemented the change. It’s called learning the hard way.

Along with this change is being able to show the way, or as Mr. Ritzmann would say be an agent for change. Read, read more, experiment, try new things, learn new ideas. It’s the only way to stay ahead, to help your staff move their students forward. Hey, if a teacher has an idea, by all means try it out. It might turn out to be something that everyone can use, the next great idea. We had a teacher last year buy a program, Fastt Math, to help her 4th grade class learn math better. The improvement that her kids had with that one program, the kids actually asked to use the program whenever they had a free moment, led to the principal buying a site license for the whole school.

Lastly, through everything we need to do we need keep our perspective. Don’t bite off more than you can chew, don’t let the pressures of outside sources bother you and if you have success do as I do…..shut your office door, turn on Kool and the Gang and dance to Celebration!

I didn’t mention all of the 10 things, but here they are…..

1. Standardize
2. Separate process from product
3. Communicate
4. Understand your learners
5. Be a teacher
6. Write & test a Disaster Recovery Plan
7. Learn to manage change
8. Be an agent for change
9. Work outside your comfort zone
10. Keep perspective

That’s what I think….How about you?