Archive for July 8, 2010
Collaborative Learning on an International Stage
I will present two sessions at the above-named conference on Friday, September 24 in Boise, ID. Here are my two sessions.
Structuring an Online Conversation: the Why Not? Model
Let’s imagine that you have found an international partner for a virtual exchange. Now what? This session will describe the key features of a rich online environment and curriculum for international collaboration. Learn how to take your virtual exchange beyond the “pen pal” stage. We will explore the “Why Not?” model used to connect Oregon schools with teens in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, Jordan, and Iraq. Session participants will be invited to share success stories and challenges from their virtual exchanges.
Global Education: More Than Just Trips
The presenters will share global education projects that go beyond cultural exchange and language learning. Examples will highlight international service, the Global Viewfinder Film Series, trip planning, curricular integration, cross-grade collaborations, technology, ongoing partnerships, and sustainability. We will encourage attendees to share interdisciplinary global projects that happen at their schools.
Category: Curricular integration |
Tags: conference, globaleducation, progressive-education, technology
Epson 450Wi Installation In Process
The installation of these 12 units is underway. A structural expert attached the proper backing to support the weight for each wall location. Next, a low-voltage electrician will cover the cables and finish them in a wall plate for easy connections.
Integration of rich audiovisual materials in classes continues to increase, particularly at the elementary level. Demand for dedicated, mounted projectors continues apace.
Email Strategies
As mentioned yesterday, our most popular technology training this summer is Managing Your Email Inbox. Far from old-fashioned, this topic hits most of our teachers and staff members head-on. Email is ubiquitous on campus, the most used technology for 200 employees to distribute information to individuals and groups of different sizes. It is common for employees to receive 100 emails per day, and they’re not of bad quality, either. Parents use email the most to communicate with teachers.
Despite the ubiquity of email, not all employees possess strong technical email skills. Whether or not email is an “old” technology, lacking these skills is a contemporary issue. Some attendees at today’s workshop came to learn to use a desktop email client for the first time. Others already knew how to use rules and folders but wanted to find out how their peers handled the email deluge.
We practiced tips from GTD, Inbox Zero, and Send today. We explored the triage technique to deal with new messages immediately and once when possible. We created rules to move listserv messages to subfolders and increase the relevance of inbox messages. We turned off notifications and set the mail check interval to 20 minutes. We encouraged ourselves to quit our email applications to limit distractions. We shared our own knowledge of reading techniques, since that was not emphasized in the materials I read when preparing the workshop.
Photo source: biscotte
Category: Professional Development, Software/desktop |
Tags: email, professionaldevelopment, training
Being Responsive To User Needs
It’s easy for an education technology professional to get swept up with the dominant discussions in the edtech blogosphere. How will social media and mobile devices change education as we know it? When will new models of education sweep away the old? Such conversations largely diverge from the dominant issues facing teachers.
This spring, we asked what technology workshops we should offer this summer. Moodle? Facebook? Laptops? Not at all. We identified topics through conversations with faculty-staff leaders and our annual laptop program survey. Take a look at the list and the attendance figures (in bold).
- Social Networks: 2
- Editing the Catlin Gabel Website: 5
- Email Management Strategies: 15
- Mac Essentials: 8
- Windows 7 and Office 2010: required for all Windows users
Most teachers and staff commented on the difficulty of mastering existing information sources and productivity tools. Basic competency and literacy trumped new skills. We do have teachers who live on the cutting edge, but they are relatively few in number and often meet their technology needs through different means.
Email “overload” is a particularly hot topic at our school at present. Teachers and staff find it difficult to keep up with the heavy stream of information and questions that arrive by email. For some, reading and responding to email takes up precious free periods that could be used for face-to-face conversations, lesson preparation, or student assessment.
Our users have said it clearly. They need to feel comfortable with email and operating systems first. They know best when an aspect of their professional life is out of balance. Let us provide them with support, strategies, and resources.
Encouraging teachers and staff to take the next step in their technology work is best done through smaller, more personal means. Many vehicles exist, but I find the “showcase” model the most effective. In faculty or department meetings, individuals stand up to show their latest work with technology. These peer presentations are usually grounded in practical, important needs of the school. They also send the message, “if I can do this with computers, then so can you!”
“12221 Emails” courtesy of somewhatfrank
iPhone 4 First Impressions
I finally gave up my BlackBerry for an iPhone 4. I was perfectly happy with the BlackBerry for email, calendar, and taking photos but increasingly found myself in situations away from the office, during which a more capable device would have helped.
I had hoped that Android was equal to the iPhone, but reports of buggy early versions of ActiveSync and Facebook, compared to their mature iPhone counterparts, scared me off. Usability trumped joining an open app ecosystem.
BlackBerry just kept falling behind. For example, the community-contributed WordPress app required some arcane manual configuration on the phone, whereas the iPhone version Just Worked with only the blog URL!
The new device is fast, easy to use, and extremely capable. It’s a lot of fun, but I’m not getting carried away. Ultimately, it’s still a smartphone, and a computer is still far and away the most useful device.
Just two screens of apps so far! One pleasant surprise: the Comcast app provides fast access to voicemail messages and even DVR scheduling. Otherwise, my list of apps will look pretty familiar to iPhone veterans.
Phone reception has been flawless so far. I think we have it better here in Portland. Also, no “death grip” issues so far. That seems more like a juicy story for the press and a poorly handles PR moment for Apple than an actual issue for most users.
I ordered the phone through an AT&T store on Friday and received it on Wednesday.
Oh, and the iPhone costs me $40/month less than the BlackBerry, because it works without an enterprise server plan.
Post written entirely using WordPress for iPhone.
It’s all about social media, except when it isn’t.
I led a training session the other day to further integrate social media into our admission and development work. We considered a range of new uses: student bloggers, a dedicated Facebook page for applicants, Flickr and YouTube channels. Some potential initiatives were certainly exciting to consider.
Here’s the problem. None of the new ideas made the cut when we listed priority tasks for the upcoming year. I asked what were each department’s primary communication goals for the upcoming year, without presupposing the solution. In all cases, the identified goals suggested changes to our existing website, not our social media strategy.
Why? While we have a successful website, it has more room for improvement than does our social media strategy. The main website receives 3,000 visits each day. Our Facebook fan page has about 500 fans. Improvements to the main website will reach far more people.
Also consider that our main website allows users to more meaningfully transact with the school than does our social media pages. For example, you may sign up to volunteer, make a gift to the school, apply for admission, or comment on a student blog. Our Facebook and Twitter pages primarily push content out to people who may be listening and offer some opportunities for interaction. Our main website may have limited opportunities for social interaction, but it offers more opportunities further up the engagement pyramid.
I am glad that we developed a social media strategy and voice. A small and growing proportion of our audience maintains contact with the school through that vehicle. It improves our ability to engage in a personal way with constituents. However, we will continue to parcel out our time and effort based on the audience size and quality of interaction with the school. We will be able to adjust these efforts as we track the growth in social media page membership and interactions.
Category: Communication, No category, Strategic Planning |
Tags: edsocialmedia, facebook, socialmedia, twitter, website
The Best Classroom Computers
What is the best arrangement of computers to support classroom activities? In our school, it varies considerably by grade level and subject. Once upon a time, laptops seemed destined to replace all computers, but lately we have found desktop computers to be lower cost, more reliable, and quicker to activate, hence the mixed environment in some spaces. Sometimes, fixing a computer to one location is actually a benefit, such as when teaching 22 elementary students in 40-minute blocks, rendering a digital video for hours, or keeping a reliable connection to an inkjet printer.
Upper School
- 1:1 student laptop program
- arts desktop computers for video rendering and inkjet printing
- computer science desktop computers for Linux applications
Middle School
- three laptop carts
- desktop computers in arts, English, and World Cultures classrooms and main office
Lower School
- computer lab for grades 4-5
- two desktop computers per classroom in grades 1-5 + most specialist classrooms
- four laptop computers per classrooms in grades 3-5
Beginning School
- no student computers
Student and parents attend an Upper School laptop orientation.
Fifth grade classroom computer
Lower School computer lab (22 computers)
Middle School laptop cart
One Year Old
The Catlin Gabel website recently turned one! After a gestation period of six months, the website launched on July 1, 2009.
The Drupal-based website held up well last year. Dedicated hardware helped ensure that performance would remain high. The site received high ratings for usability. We improved the site throughout the year in response to user feedback and continue to develop it now.
Drupal 6 itself matured over the course of the year. Code and SQL errors resolved themselves as the community released patches and we installed the updated versions.
The year validated our decision to integrate password-protected, community content throughout the site. When logged in, users access protected content and tools based on their group membership. Users get to these tools in their expected locations on the site, rather than having to enter a separate community portal.
This year, we plan to build a complete online admission application, improve the design of section landing pages, and make a lot of small features more usable.
Goodbye, Satellite
We are discontinuing our satellite TV subscriptions, which brought French, Spanish, and Japanese television programming into the classroom for the past seven years. Web video has largely replaced the need for live television. A teacher who wants to present students with authentic vocabulary, regional accents, or international current events need only visit a country news website or search for specific content on YouTube.
While this change may seem relatively inconsequential, I find it notable that we are actually discontinuing a technology service on campus. It can often be difficult to convince users of a service that its end has come. When a new technology arrives, often a certain proportion of users adopt the new technology quickly. Penetration increases rapidly enough that it may seem only a matter of time until everyone is using the new technology. In reality, adoption usually plateaus at a certain level, sometimes just a small fraction of all users, sometimes a majority, and in rare occasions nearly everyone.
Most technologies reach peak penetration and then eventually decline, as users lose interest, or the technology does not live up to its initial promise, or a newer technology comes along and takes its place. Still, a certain proportion of users find comfort in continued use of that technology, and this at which point it can be difficult to discontinue a service. Some number of people still rely on that technology and want the school to continue providing it.
With satellite television, peak penetration was fairly low, because the service was limited to foreign language television, and so only the language teachers used it. In addition, only the upper (high) school was cabled for satellite TV in the first place. When use declined, only one or two teachers continued to use TV in the classroom, and they were very gracious in recognizing that it would not be cost-effective to continue subscription and maintenance for just a couple of classrooms.
Contrast this with teacher voicemail extensions. Our current phone system has been in place for seven years. All employees have a phone extension, but most teachers of eighth grade and below do not have a physical phone. They have a voicemail-only extension. Use of voicemail-only extensions has declined sharply, as teachers and parents now communicate mostly by email. However, it will take more work than for satellite TV to consult with a larger user base and reach an informed decision on changing our telephone practice.
Category: Communication, Hardware, No category, Strategic Planning |
Tags: classroom, dishtv, email, satellite, satellitetv, telephone, television, video, youtube
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at