Classes, global travel groups, and individuals are publishing on the Catlin Gabel website to share their work with the Catlin Gabel community or other specific audiences. Learning objectives vary on these blogs from building community awareness to communicating directly to specific stakeholders.
Any student, teacher, or staff member can maintain an individual blog or contribute to a group blog on the Catlin Gabel website. Some blogs are open to everyone visiting our website. Most blog posts require login.
You can always find blogs from the Quick Links menu on the Catlin Gabel website. Happy reading!
» Link to all blogs
Links to specific blogs
Nepal 2010
Japan 2010
Cuba 2010
Senior Projects
Urban Studies
Honors Art Seminar
Science Projects
Spanish V Honors
French 2
External blogs
Paul Monheimer in Israel
The Catlin Coverslip
Classroom pages
Middle and Lower School teachers use classroom pages more often than student blogs. The function is similar.
Second grade
Fourth grade
Fifth grade
Sixth grade
Lower School French
Seventh grade
Tags: drupal, publishing
My principal challenge in schools is to encourage thoughtful, useful adoption of technology to strategically support teaching and learning. Along the way, I encounter varying attitudes regarding technology in schools. We have early adopters, heavy users, techno-skeptics, occasional users, and more. I often wonder what is the best way to reach different types of technology users so that each makes the most effective use of technology for his/her educational context.
This October 2009 Educause study of undergraduate students and information technology provides some useful information that helps inform my efforts and may help temper fears that our IT department wants everyone to use IT as much as possible.
80% of students were using a learning management system (e.g., Moodle) during the quarter or semester of the survey.
63% found the experience of using a learning management system “positive” or “very positive.”
45% of students indicated that most or almost all of their instructors use IT effectively in their courses.
70% found that IT made working in their courses “more convenient.”
49% felt that using IT improved their learning.
60% prefer moderate use of IT in their courses. Only 4% preferred exclusive use of IT, and 2% no IT. Students appreciate the face-to-face learning experience.
This provides some useful language for explaining our current approach to IT integration to support teaching and learning. We would like for all teachers to explore using IT. A learning management system may smooth class operations, leaving more time to focus on learning. Face-to-face learning is still most highly valued.
Tags: college, educause, learning, teaching, techintegration
We have purchased a SafeConnect network access system to replace Cisco Clean Access at Catlin Gabel. This ends a rocky, four-year relationship with CCA, in which we dedicated a lot of money and staff time to CCA yet were unable to implement the full functionality we desired. Other schools using SafeConnect have spoken so enthisiastically about the ease of use and smooth function of the system. We hope we will have a similar experience!
We plan for SafeConnect to:
- Limit both the wireless and wired networks to known computers
- Authenticate dedicated computers by machine identity and shared computers by user identity
- Store detailed access logs to help us investigate specific reports of cyberbullying
- Audit the network for specific running processes (e.g. netbots)
- Enforce minimum patch levels for all computers
- Ensure that antivirus software is still enabled on all computers
Implementation cost is only one quarter of what we paid to implement Cisco Clean Access four years ago!
Tags: cca, ciscocleanaccess, nas, networkaccesscontrol, networkaccesssystem, safeconnect
Reed College has published a report on the Kindle pilot project they undertook this year. The study reports that e-readers are useful in many ways but have too many shortcomings to be a standard device at this time. Especially weak were annotation and bookmarking capabilities. My favorite line:
When students were asked if they would purchase a Kindle DX (or
other dedicated eReader) for academic use, they indicated that the price would need to drop
dramatically –– to less than $100 –– in order for them to seriously consider purchasing one.
I appreciate the perspective and thoroughness of a study such as this. It helps cut through the rhetoric about new hardware “changing” education and properly define the time frame for meaningful change as years.
Tags: ebooks, ereaders, kindle, reed-college
Four of us spent the morning at Reed College, asking questions to CTO Marty Ringle and members of the Computing and Information Services department. In my career, I had never previously spent an extended period of time with college-level IT staff. The differences were striking. The college has 140 faculty members and 300 staff, the reverse ratio of our school. These 440 employees serve just 1400 students. Our 200 employees serve 730 students. Reed Computing has 32 employees. We have six. One possible conclusion: employees require a lot more IT support than students!
I was really impressed with the department’s governance process. They have seven different organizational groups that meet regularly to facilitate the process of democratic decision-making. Top-down decision-making is rare. We may bemoan the number of meetings we already have, but I left Reed thinking that we need to have more—we just need to structure them better. Our hosts also spoke to the benefits of meeting regularly with faculty members, individually or at “brown bag” lunches, building trust and familiarity that pay dividends later.
We also left feeling good about the program we run at Catlin Gabel. We have reached an enterprise level of service with our help desk, wireless security, intranet website, deployment, and other services. It is always refreshing to gain an external perspective on our program. Spending too much time at our own school sometimes leads to myopia.
I learned about the Collaborative Moodle Liberal Arts Project. Reed is one of a number of colleges working together to improve aspects of Moodle particular to needs they share. While the improvements look useful (bulk assignment downloads, better gradebook), I was disappointed that none of them pertain specifically to online learning environments.
Marty summarized the new report on Reed’s Kindle project. Their experience confirmed our initial reaction that the Kindle and similar devices are not yet ready for education enterprise deployment. The annotation, highlighting, and navigation features do not yet replicate enough of the features of writing in the margins of a book with a pen.
I’d also like an assistant and a conference table in my office!
Last year, I built a site to allow parents to register their children for Catlin Gabel’s summer camps. This helped our small staff more easily handle hundreds of registrations each spring and provides our parents with immediate feedback for their summer plans. This year, I incorporated this into our new website by rebuilding the features using the same technique. The site had to include courses from a print catalog, accept credit card transactions, enforce enrollment limits, record student information, and new this year, require a complete medical release form as part of registration
This technique relies on just four modules: Ubercart, CCK, Views, and Webform, three of which I was already using widely throughout the site. Although I was worried about the increased load of installing Ubercart on our site, I found through testing that RAM use and page load time did not differ significantly between a copy of site that included Ubercart and a copy that did not.
Summer Course is a custom Ubercart product type, which creates a new custom content type to which one may add fields. I added select lists for grade and session (week). I chose not to use taxonomy for this, because I would have more control over the display of CCK fields in the node editing form, and because these value lists only apply to this one content type.
One view presents users with the main list of summer course offerings, offering both a link directly to the detailed course description and a button to purchase immediately if you know already the courses you want to choose. Exposed filters allow one to limit the list to certain grades or weeks. I display the Ubercart-supplied shopping cart block on this page.
The cart and checkout processes are very standard. Users review their cart and then move to complete checkout. I bought a monthly subscription to PayPal Website Payments Pro, so that our website could send purchase information directly to PayPal and receive an immediately reply, without the user leaving our site. We use PayPal’s admin interface to transfer funds to the school’s bank account and issue refunds. As an added benefit, we do not store any credit card information on our servers. In order to make another feature possible (see below), I require the user to log in to access checkout.
I combined student information and medical release into one form. I could have built the form in a custom module, but I chose to use Webform in order to save time and make it easier for others to modify the form in the future. I route parents from the Ubercart screen to the webform and then route them back to checkout by setting the webform’s “thank you” page to /cart/checkout.
I wrote a custom Ubercart module to add a “student information and medical release” panel to the checkout screen. This is done by invoking hook_checkout_pane in my module. To require the completion of this form, my custom pane creates a select list showing all of the medical release webforms that the user has created on the site. Since the medical form also contains the student information, the user has to complete one for each student she wishes to register. Completing the form makes student names appear in the required select field.
The custom module saves the submitted webform id in a custom database table, linking each course registration to a specified student. A couple more custom functions hook into the checkout review and invoice panes, displaying the student’s information through the rest of the checkout and confirmation process.
A second custom module allows our staff to export orders from the system for reconciliation with any paper orders received and the billing process. I prefer not to have the website handle too many of the back-office functions of the program, since it would take so much additional effort to include accounting reconciliation and other administrative features that only a few school staff members will use. The website is primarily for the many end-users who will sign up for courses.
The Ubercart “stock” feature allows us to limit online enrollment for popular classes, so that the website does not unwittingly facilitate over-subscription.
A little CSS and theme work lines up the Grades field values in a row and arranges some webform sections side-by-side.
Ubercart offers just about everything we need out of the box, provides a framework for adding some features, and keeps this important tool within our main website.
Tags: drupal, parent, registration, summer-camp, ubercart
Last week, I noted some interesting developments involving Drupal and secondary schools.
New Schoolyard
NewSchoolyard launched at NAIS, promising inexpensive school Drupal sites built on a template. This fills a hole in the school website market between buying an expensive product, hiring an expensive developer, and doing it completely yourself. In addition, New Schoolyard offers products and services at different price points, allowing schools to decide how much of the work they want to take on themselves or hand over to this company.
If successful, New Schoolyard may open the door even wider for more schools to adopt open-source websites and learn how to modify them. I greatly anticipate the first sites they will create and the code that they promise to contribute to the Drupal community. I have found in my own work with Drupal that it is a challenge to create a customized site that others can then truly make their own. I wonder what strategies New Schoolyard will employ to make full ownership possible for their clients.
DrupalSchools
Around for a while but flying under the radar, DrupalSchools.net is readying for a relaunch. Go check out their list of Drupal sites, tips and tricks, and thoughts on the potential role of Drupal in changing how schools work. This site promises to serve the secondary school community and put the thoughtful use of technology before techie talk. Also check out my list of school “front door” Drupal sites that I started in 2007 and have added to a bit over time.
More interest in our work
The frequency of inquiries into our work at Catlin Gabel continues to increase. Some of these schools are tinkering with demo Drupal sites, others are launching a community intranet, and others are moving toward a new, public-facing website. More schools are discovering the benefits of working with a piece of open-source software before committing to it and sharing their knowledge and perspectives gained.
Tags: drupal, webdesign, webdevelopment
Publication of student work on the website extends the learning community beyond the classroom to the entire school community. Key to this effort is a school website that includes a community publishing platform. Students and teachers choose whether to make the work viewable to the school community only (students, staff, parents, alumni) or the public, depending on the pedagogical goal of the work. Learning becomes a community endeavor rather than only a classroom pursuit, increasing authenticity and mutual understanding of the work that happens at school.
Click on each title to view the content at Catlin Gabel.
Students tackle topics of sustainable development in Portland, “The City That Works.” During the school year, we offer a semester elective. The summer brings an intensive program with students from different schools.
Students report on their independent research plans, progress, and results. The teacher provides feedback in the form of comments. Only one of the students has made her blog public, so you won’t see the work of the others on this page.
The science department invites all Catlin Gabel community members to contribute items of interest to this blog.
Blogging about global trips increases the sense of community experience. The 15 lucky students who go on the trip become ambassadors for the rest of the school, no longer the sole beneficiaries of the experience.
Students get out into the community to research the hispanic presence in Oregon. Through the blog, they report their findings back to the community and help educate us all. This project includes a lot of primary audio and video footage from Portland.
Honors Arts Projects portfolios
Students attach photo galleries to their blog posts to create a portfolio, in this case to support their college applications.
Fifth grade Fractured Fairytales
Students create “alternate” versions of classic fairytales, then we publish them so that parents and others students may read them as well.
Sixth grade Language Arts Poetry Box
Students write poetry, but then the teacher publishes both the text and an audio version for parents and the rest of the community to enjoy.
We have now collected two years’ worth of blog posts from seniors reporting and reflecting on their spring projects. Up until now, all of the posts have been for the Catlin Gabel community only. This year, students will make the public/community-only decision for each post. Watch this page in May 2010 to follow their progress.
Tags: blogging, community, constructivist, curriculum, education, learning, progressive
Like many schools, we cut the school’s IT operating budget by 25% this year. To minimize adverse effects on technology use at school, we employed the following strategies.
Adopt open source
We have benefited tremendously from building expert, internal capacity for open source website development and web server software management. In past years, we launched and then grew a sophisticated intranet website at no cash cost to the school. This year, we built our new, public-facing website on Drupal, with existing personnel, for a total cash cost of $6,000.
I believe that every school should work toward mastery in one type of open source software that meets a current need. Our users and constituents demand increasingly sophisticated applications of technology, yet our budget will not keep pace with these expectations. We have taken care not to rush, building up internal capacity to master these tools over time. Were we to rely on external contractors to implement open source solutions, then it could have become at least as expensive as commercial products.
Other schools specialize in different money-saving applications of open source: desktop software, learning management systems, operating system software, office suites, and more.
Cut back on expensive, specialized solutions
Each Smart Board we purchase improves just one classroom. Each laptop computer we purchase is available to everyone. They cost about the same amount of money.
Also about the same price, an entire class may use a set of 10 Flip video cameras to collect footage for a great variety of different productive learning objectives.
Introduce some limits, while extending a helping hand
The cost of network file backup and tape storage has increased for us each year. We are now implementing 10GB primary file server quota while still storing and backing up all of the important school data we can identify. When a teacher or staff member hits the limit on the primary file server, we work with them to identify any duplicate, personal, or unnecessary files and separate changing, newer files from older, unchanging files. We move the older files to a second, archive file server that we copy to tape less frequently. In this manner, we consume far fewer backup tapes than before while still protecting the school from data loss and saving important files for the long-term.
Preserve or expand core network services
This is no time to cut back on servers, server software, and network infrastructure. We have cut end-user technologies before compromising on the core. Server and network functions affect every user every minute that they are connected to the network. Maintaining quality sustains everyone’s experience. We have kept servers on their regular replacement cycle and are just now considering virtualization for lightly used network services. Our next generation of wireless network and network access system will do more than the previous systems, with less management required, at a lower cost than before.
Strategically manage computer lifespan
This one has been tricky. We pinpointed very specific batches of computers to operate for a year longer than planned. We noticed that some users were pretty light on their machines and provided them with used computers instead of new. We stretched our lower school computer lab for an additional year, because they had had their motherboards replaced under warranty just three years ago. Otherwise, we have stuck to our normal replacement cycle, out of respect for the fragility of laptop computers in their fourth and fifth years.
Consider some new technologies
This is no time to broadly adopt new kinds of devices, but some new devices may replace the old, at a lower cost that before. We will consider wall-mounted projectors in locations where we would normally mount from the ceiling. We will pilot netbooks to replace one of our middle school mobile laptop carts, taking great care that we select a model that performs reasonably well compared to our current MacBooks. Otherwise, we find netbooks to be cramped and difficult to use, not a straight replacement for traditional laptop computers.
Break some old habits
Once-essential resources and services may have lost their value over time. We reduced the size of our upper school PC lab in half, redistributed responsibilities for our annual laptop technology fair, and removed Drupal from our intranet website. We continue to streamline purchase options for the upper school laptop program, now recommending the two laptop computer models that match the program, as opposed to offering every model available from each manufacturer.
Continue to plan well
Each year that we devote more attention to winter planning, spring and summer projects go more smoothly. This year, we started earlier than before and formalized biweekly planning meetings, and already we are purchasing and implementing network devices that will allow workstation deployment to start earlier. We have also lined up our best cadre of summer workers yet. This group of current students and recent graduates is key to our ability to touch all machines and improve our deployment strategies each summer.
Build one’s personal learning network
This year, I have formed new collaborative relationships with tech staff at other schools, without ever leaving campus. This has allowed me to gain feedback on my ideas and profit from the good work of others. As it is a slow year for conferences in Portland, I have so far avoided traveling afar for an expensive conference experience.
What, no Google Apps?
I appreciate that Google Apps has helped many schools provide the latest communication and collaboration tools at low cost. We decided to stick with Exchange Server because we had concerns about losing control of the school’s data, the inability to do anything during periods of downtime, and the hidden costs of migration, archiving mail, and supporting users.
Your turn
What are you doing to maintain quality and capacity during lean times? Please comment below.
Tags: budget, drupal, google, linux, moodle, naisac10, open source, recession, Strategic Planning, windows
French 2 students share recipe videos for crepes, banana bread, and other delicious treats. The assignment assessed students’ vocabulary, pronunciation, and ability to work in small groups. Some students used just the built-in camera in their laptop computer to record the video!
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Information Technology at 