Kassblog

I shared this with our upper school faculty today. danah boyd provides insight into why students spend so much time on social network sites, even during class.

When it comes to socializing with friends, youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can’t get together with their friends en masse or when they can’t get together without surveilling adults. By and large, there are few free spaces where youth can gather with their friends en masse and, even then, inevitably a chunk of parents refuse to let them, thereby destroying cluster effects. So, of course, they turn to SNSs. School is one of the few times when they can get together with their friends and they use every unscheduled moment to socialize – passing time, when the teacher’s back is turned, lunch, bathroom breaks, etc. They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired. This is why they text during classes. They go onto SNSs during the day to write to friends who have different schedules or to write to the whole group if a portion of them are on a different lunch. Given how regulated youth are, any open space where socializing is possible will be taken up by socializing; it’s often the only place they can see their friends. This isn’t something that the schools can fix, but they also shouldn’t be surprised when group time turns into gossip time.

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A mentor teacher once told me, “When I want something done, I ask a busy person. That way, I know it will get done.” Teachers often express that their professional lives are too busy to permit much experimentation with technology. Yet, somehow every school has a minority of teachers, often very busy ones, who are doing wonderful work with new technologies. Why?

Maybe this results from priority-setting. Even the busiest person makes time to focus on his or her top priorities. When I present new technologies to a group of teachers, some hear what the new tools can do and find that they fit perfectly with their existing teaching strategies. Others find the capabilities of the new tools intriguing but foreign. Those who prioritize technology are always able to find the time for it, both teacher time for learning and planning and student time for completing new, sometimes time-consuming, activities.

Those who find technology socially isolating or excessively complicated are unlikely to devote time to it. I trust that training and schoolwide discussion help paint a rich picture of the realities and potential for new technologies to support teaching and learning. A multi-faceted training program offers workshops, individual support, classroom/office visits, online resources, and tech-shares. A tech-share provides an opportunity for teachers using technology to share their work with their peers, explaining the teaching objectives and evidence of learning. In order to understand how young people are using computers to connect with each other, teachers should hear students’ voices and study this with great interest.

I don’t buy the popular belief that technology can change pedagogy. Only teachers change their teaching strategies. More likely, the right technology allows a teacher to amplify some aspects of his/her practice that he/she has always wanted to do a better job with. Teachers may even find ways to use new tools to reinforce existing teaching strategies, good or bad. The concept that technology can change pedagogy by itself leads to bad policy, such as large, public technology programs that fund only computer acquisition and not professional development or support staff salaries.

I started this blog post headed in one direction but finish in a familiar place: a focus on teachers. Choose technologies that have potential to match teachers’ objectives, support teachers as well as we can, and share exemplary work broadly.

It is difficult to maintain a healthy balance between providing service and encouraging self-sufficiency in independent schools. Well-endowed, such schools often find it easier to buy more staff or products to meet an expressed or implied service need. We find ourselves now wanting to hold tuition increases in check as the country’s economic downturn exerts pressure on our tuition-paying families. This forces us to consider other options to keep technology costs increasing at a reasonable rate while, at the same time, our clients want to take advantage of new, exciting technologies that no doubt would help support teaching and learning at school and home.

A key example is our annual laptop preparation work. This year, it took nine people all week, working day and night, to complete a checklist of 15 or so items for 270 student computers and approximately 100 employee laptops. This simply isn’t sustainable any longer. How could we encourage students and employees to perform more annual maintenance tasks for their computers? At least two components exist to this question: knowledge and motivation. The knowledge part is relatively easy. Experienced both at providing documentation and teaching others, we should be able to equip our users with the necessary knowledge and skills to complete most of the maintenance tasks themselves: software updates, application installations, control panel configurations, drive mappings, and so on. Motivation is a trickier question. What if we provided a list for students and employees to complete, and then most didn’t complete it? What motivation could persuade individuals to complete the items in list?

One idea is to offer a refund on our annual laptop fee. That would motivate the parents. However, it’s a bit of a misplaced motivation, since the laptop fee doesn’t pay for the maintenance work, it pays for the students’ share of licensed security software. What if we got the computers back to these individuals the most quickly? In fact, if a student or employee successfully completed all of the items in the list, he/she could get their machine back right away. Given the attachment that users have to their computers, this could be powerful motivation, indeed. But would it be enough? What about an iPod raffle? That might get their attention!

A long-term strategy should be more subtle. In order to slowly change a strongly-held cultural norm in the school, we will need to gradually provide training, instructions, and a subtle push so that users gradually take more ownership over the routine maintenance of their computers over time. Strengthening the shared vision within the tech team, consistently communicating our expectations of users during daily interactions, providing high-quality training materials and support, tapping into a schoolwide effort to contain program costs, we should be able to increase user self-sufficiency over time.

Tech staff from resource-poor schools may laugh reading this post. Certainly, we are very fortunate to experience a problem caused by having enough resources to provide enterprise-level services to this school. I know, having been there in the past in two former institutions. Teachers and students working in schools with 0-1 tech staff and a $17,000 annual operating budget build self-sufficiency out of necessity. The occasional grant can provide room for enhancement and growth, yet systems are perhaps more likely to fall into disrepair and disuse. The creative application of open-source technologies, free, hosted services, and E-Rate funding can help, and we may read of success stories at institutions that have managed to keep their tech operations afloat. Nevertheless, this is a challenge that we face at our institution — valid and authentic in its own context.

Your thoughts are welcome here …

My to-do list six months ago:
- Build admission inquiry web site
- Build bookstore checkout system
- Prep computers for start of year
- Introduce Drupal schoolwide
- Roll out wireless security system

My to-do list this month
- Plan technology staff retreat
- Hire second support technician
- Tie up loose ends in admission and bookstore web scripts
- Write curricular technology integration report
- Publish newsletters responding to aspects of schoolwide tech survey
- Present web 2.0 philosophy to middle school parents
- Redesign school-provided cellphone policies
- Evaluate viability of wireless security system

Over the last six months, I have recognized the need to shift my emphasis from development and configuration (building new technology capacity) to team-building, communication and training. On the one hand, this is natural for this point in the year — the summer is prime time for rolling out new technologies, supporting new technologies and new uses of old technologies dominates the fall, and then we begin to plan for future initiatives once winter arrives. However, a larger change is also afoot. I have discovered (the hard way, sometimes), that this school technology program requires more management than I had previously thought. It just doesn’t run itself the way it did at my previous, smaller school. The larger school is much more complicated, with more varied uses of technology and a greater need to coordinate practices from different parts of the school. In some ways, it’s like running a very small school district, as our four age-level divisions operate to some degree as four separate schools. Cultural differences also exist, especially in amount of direct support that teachers and staff expect for their technology activities.

My role shifts from developer/initiator to facilitator/manager. I gain an exciting new set of professional objectives. How do I coordinate the technology team to best serve the school? How can I best influence the schoolwide dialogue about technology integration and its relationship to new societal norms? At the same time, I lose long stretches of uninterrupted time to develop, install, and configure new technologies myself. I would like to continue to build new tools to support school curricular and operational programs, but I have my hands more than full with existing initiatives. Hopefully, the need for rapid introduction of new technologies has now passed at this school — we now have most of the tools that we should for a leading school in 2008. Perhaps other members of the tech team will grow into the burgeoning field of community web site development.

Other school leaders experience the same issues. Chris Lehmann has written about the same experience since becoming principal of Science Leadership Academy. Another school leader spoke to “view from the balcony” at Leadertalk the other day. Of course, they are principals, and I run a tech department, but I feel similar pressures on a smaller scale. I guess that everyone makes their own decision at some point about how much daily practice to give up in order to serve the schoolwide needs of the institution. Certainly, forums and resources for leadership studies are of great value to help individuals make these transitions.