Kassblog http://www.kassblog.com/ Technology Directions en-us Nucleus CMS v3.32 ? Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.kassblog.com/nucleus/nucleus2.gif> Kassblog http://www.kassblog.com/ Happy new fiscal year, everyone! http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=735 ]]> Hardware http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=735 Tue, 1 Jul 2008 10:36:00 -0700 School Archives in Drupal http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=733
I could use the feedback of more experienced Drupal folk on this design. Many thanks!

I created a custom content type and attached the following taxonomy categories. I am thinking that heavy use of taxonomy will allow for easier navigation of the database than custom fields/exposed filters.

taxonomy

The first one, "Category," is an internal term used by the alumni office to identify to which broad part of the school program the item belongs.

I only added two custom fields to the content type.

custom fields

ImageField allows easy image upload. Additionally, all of the uploaded files end up in a subdirectory of /files, so that it will be easy to move the archive elsewhere should we decide to do so one day.

image upload

I configured ImageCache to automatically create a thumbnail from the uploaded image, display it in the node teaser view, and link it to the full-sized image.

thumbnail

(this is just a sample I was using)

For my last trick, I installed Auto Nodetitle and wrote a little PHP to automatically generate archive ID numbers. For some reason, this didn't work properly when the title was hidden, but it is likely better to leave it visible so that the archivist may manually override the automatically generated value if necessary.

Here's the code I used for Auto Nodetitle.


<?php
$token = '[title]';
if (empty($token)) {
$sql = "select `field_id_value` from content_type_archive order by `field_id_value`";
$result = db_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
$id=$row['field_id_value'];
}
$newid=$id+1;
return 'Catlin Gabel Archives: Item '.$newid;
} else {
return $token;
}
?>

Finally, the office would like users to be able to search by decade. I am already capturing the date as a custom date field and class year as a taxonomy term. How would I set up a search of either of those fields by decade? Is there an easier way than setting up a calculated field and searching on that?


tags: , ]]> Programming http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=733 Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:27:16 -0700 News Versus Spin http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=731 Obama-Clinton event in Unity, New Hampshire.

After watching all of it, I concluded that the two campaign teams had designed a tightly scripted event in order for Clinton to provide as much support to Obama as possible. I paid particular attention to the themes evoked by each during their speeches, deciding that their speeches were mostly about supporting each others' reputations and expressing moderate policy positions to appeal to undecided voters.

Then I watched "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN last time, something I rarely do. There, I learned the real story. "Do Hillary and Barack really like each other?" "What does their body language tell us about them?" "Where is Bill?" Ironically, they showed only a minute or two of actual footage from the event! The network devoted the bulk of their presentation to "analysis" of the event, when they had a rich source of primary footage that they could have emphasized instead! We would never teach our students to use primary sources in such a manner.

Last week, the New York Times bemoaned the lack of success of Google News, which has apparently captured only 8% of the online news market. The leader is Yahoo!, whom I left last year when they buried actual news in favor of "infotainment" lead stories. I see Google News as the Craigslist of news sources. Their mission is to remove the middleman between consumers and the news, which I appreciate. Less spin, more reporting.

Edtech bloggers are excited about the potential for Wikipedia and Google News to change the way in which students become informed about the world. However, with the powerful marketing forces of major news networks and the capitulation of former innovators like Yahoo!, it is going to take a lot of effort to encourage good habits of news consumption among our students.




tags: , , , , ]]> Communication http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=731 Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:04:28 -0700 Moodle: Make Assignment Description Optional http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=729 It's admirable that the Moodle development team wants to require a description for each assignment. The description field provides instructions to the student. It makes it easier to browse all the assignments for a course. However, I work with a lot of teachers who want to post as quickly as possible and who are not accustomed to a completely electronic, web-based course format. The solution? Make the description field optional, so that they are not required to enter something into this field for Moodle to accept the submission.

Open mod/assignment/mod_form.php
Comment out line 41, as follows:
// $mform->addRule('description', get_string('required'), 'required', null, 'client');

I assume you can modify other assignments in a similar manner.

We run Moodle 1.9.1

On a related note, I have heard of a school that has written their own Moodle modules. I am currently wondering how to blend teachers' requests for a school-wide major assignments calendar with Moodle's default categories of personal, course, and global events. Creating a new assignment or calendar type called "major assignment," or adding such a flag to the relevant assignment types, may be the way to do it.

tags: , ]]> Software/web http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=729 Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:22:17 -0700 Hybrid Professional Development http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=727 A post from D'Arcy resonated with an effort I am thinking of starting next year to promote the sharing of classroom technology activities among teachers from different grade levels. D'Arcy links to the Viral Professional Development project, where Jennifer Jones writes:

The primary goal of VPD is to grow a culture of sharing, where instructors learn from each other and spread the knowledge throughout the organization.


This is exactly what I have in mind. While our school is tiny compared to a university, teachers nonetheless work primarily within their own division (elementary, middle, high school). Yet, we have teachers at all different grade levels investigating technology in a similar manner. What potential exists for the use of multiple media, small handheld recorders, and social web tools. We even have one who has carried his technological toolset from the high school to the elementary.

Teachers do not have a lot of common time to spend talking face-to-face, especially across school divisions. They have a lot more opportunity to interact online, to complement and enhance occasional in-person meetings. As I learned from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, I need to find a half dozen or so who will form a committed core group to keep the momentum going. Ewan McIntosh stresses the importance of getting the technological part right the first time.

I'll give this a try in the late summer and early fall. Building Learning Communities ought to build my enthusiasm to put some effort into this.

tags: , , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=727 Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:53:41 -0700 Moodle, Drupal, and Gallery Updated http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=722 Moodle to version 1.9.1, Drupal to 5.7, and Gallery to 2.2.5. The process went very smoothly, except for one hiccup. The Moodle updater stopped partway through, somehow causing an runaway loop that caused the sessions2 table to balloon by gigabytes. Notwithstanding the fact that this brought the web server to a halt, the installer ran fine once I emptied the sessions2 table and ran it a second time. We discovered that we stored the database on the system volume, so now we will move it to the data volume.



I appreciate that all three applications ask that you install a completely fresh codebase. Old code and modifications go away, giving the application a clean start. In the case of Moodle, we had only tried two modules, iPodcast and Speex. Both were not successful and are now gone (except for some traces in the database). Drupal is modular by design, but it took less time than I had anticipated to install the 20 additional modules we currently use. Settings were already present in the database, so Drupal only needed the new code.

Gallery-Drupal integration required some additional work. It didn't work at all at first, when I had not yet updated Gallery to the latest version. Unlike with Moodle in the past, Drupal developers are keeping Drupal-Gallery integration 100% up-to-date. Just use the latest Gallery with the Drupal integration module. Following suggestions, I also moved Gallery to within the Drupal directory -- that only required one setting change.

I am also taking some time to clean up both installations, responding to user requests and making them easier to use. I modified all occurrences of Moodle's use of "enrol" in the English language pack, since I still have no figured out how to force U.S. English language use on existing courses. I trust that new courses will inherit the U.S. setting. For the most part, people don't notice the language difference, the notable exception being the use of "enrol!" I also simplified the default blocks layout for new courses to make the page less busy.

NanoGong
Finally, I succeeded in the installation of NanoGong. I have wanted in-browser audio recording for some time, especially for language classes. It looks like the good people at the Gong Project have really come through with a solution nicely customized for Moodle but able to run anywhere.

In Drupal, I configured Video to play movies within the node, eliminating the need for an additional click.

tags: , , , , ]]> Software/web http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=722 Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:25:30 -0700 But will it include calendars? http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=720 Apple says:

Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007


Does this mean just mail, or mail+calendar, or the whole package? Note that even Microsoft Entourage does not sync Notes or Tasks with Exchange Server.

On a related note, Jon Udell has built a small script (exchange2ical) to publish iCal feeds for Exchange calendars!

I wonder which approach will bear fruit most quickly.

tags: , ]]> Server http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=720 Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:07:02 -0700 2008 Election and Global Collaboration http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=718
When History Happens

Taking IT Global

Global Education Collaborative Ning

ALA Election Web Sites

Skewz: All Sides of the Story

Voices Without Votes

tags: , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=718 Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:51:30 -0700 Off to a quick start this summer http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=711
The upper school ended the year by devoting a day to the 1:1 student laptop program. I was so pleased that we got the faculty together to discuss the program for the first time in many years, even if fear of student distraction and tech overload dominated the discussion. Some teachers are struggling with students distracted by the myriad online opportunities once they open their laptops. Many are concerned about the effect of so much screen time on the social fabric of the school and active class discussions. Other teachers appear to be handling it just fine. On the more positive side, applications of the laptops to support teaching and learning are widespread and powerful. One teacher summed it up with, "We would never want to go back." We will review the results of these discussions and prepare further conversations for the fall.

In the middle school, I continued my annual practice of teachers sharing successful technology integration strategies with each other. I find that teachers not already working together in teams do not regularly share lesson plans with each other. The tech share provides at least an annual moment for this to happen, allowing me to step completely to the side. It provides all teachers the opportunity that, if their colleagues can experiment with new applications of technology in the classroom, so can they. Teachers shared their work with digital audio recorders in Costa Rica, trip planning using Google Earth, reflections on literature in Moodle forums, and manipulating images of one's self in Photoshop.

Today, we started our new web site design process. A month ago, I let go of my previous strategy to upgrade only the back-end of the web site and postpone the redesign to later. This will dovetail nicely with a reexamination of our schoolwide communication strategy. I also have the help of Drew of OneNW, who provides online communications consulting to environmental organizations. He has helped us start this process well-focused on our target audiences, their values, and their roles at Catlin Gabel. This will lead to the development of user scenarios and a detailed design document, which we will share with some part of the school community for comment. We hope to launch a new site a year from now, a site that will offer both the intuitive access to information and useful transactional tools that people now expect from an organization's web site.

At the same time, I continue to pursue the Drupal experiment. In just two hours' time, I built a prototype for a human resources site using Views and a Custom Content Type. This allows anyone to create an account, submit a job application, and upload attachments. It also solves many of the problems we are experiencing with our current web services provider for job applications, Ceridian. This tool would be part of our main web site platform, get applicants to a list of jobs in one click instead of three, and allow them to upload multiple file attachments instead of just one. By creating an account, the applicant may return and modify the application later on, for example to upload more attachments.

This prototype does not yet offer all of the desired features, and it appears that I will need to learn Actions in order to add automated email features to the system, for example when the HR director wants to notify at once all the applicants who did not get the job. I am also taking a look at Coherent Access (thanks, Bill), which may provide an easy hand-off from the HR office to the supervisor reviewing the first round of applicants. Since we receive 3,000 job applications a year, this will be a more strenuous test of our ability to host large volumes of content in our own system.

Summer workers have arrived, we placed our summer order for Macintosh computers yesterday, and equipment for audiovisual installations is on the way. Soon, we will be up to our eyeballs in computers to upgrade and prepare for the start of school in August. I went with two units of the new Smart 608i2 -- save $900 over the 680i, as long as you don't mind the lack of amplified audio! The Epson 1825 replaces last year's 1815p but looks almost indistinguishable in features and form. The summer schedule is tightly scripted. On a good note, we are making more use of scripts to automate installation and configuration than ever before. Stay tuned for a report of whether it actually speeds up the configuration process.

New core switch

Yesterday, our new core switch (Cisco 6500 series) arrived, and our consultants and we took the network down briefly to test the new configuration. It passed the test, so we appear to be on track to put it into production the coming Monday evening. We will need to touch all campus switches and access points to complete the upgrade, another step in getting our entire network infrastructure under warranty and on a predictable replacement schedule.

I am pleased to attend design meetings for the proposed Creative Arts Center. The teachers have come up with fabulous ideas for the arrangement and equipping of new classrooms, which are essential to the future success of the Arts program at Catlin Gabel. The construction of the building depends on raising the requisite funds by April 1, so stay tuned as we hope that the dream will become reality. An early idea for our communications plan is to create a mini-site with a completely different graphic design and blog format to keep people up-to-date on progress toward the goal, inform, and generate enthusiasm for the project.

Yesterday, I launched a new home page design for insideCatlin, our intranet community portal. We added so many new content sections and tools to the site this past academic year that the home page no longer made any sense to users trying to find specific items. The new home page design loads the user's Moodle cookie and displays links appropriate to that person's LDAP and Moodle group memberships. If you go there, you will see only the base set of items unless you are a Catlin Gabel community member. They see additional items that only apply to their context in the school. In this way, we provide dozens of links to the home page without cluttering it for any individual user.

For security, a script doing the work lives outside the web directory, and the links themselves do not contain protected content. You actually have to log in before you see substantial information, a strategy borrowed from Yahoo! and other internet portals. I am also raising the visibility of media content -- photos from Gallery, and audio and video files from Drupal. Naturally, I have yet to build the audio file queries, and I want to convert video upload from Video to a FLV-compatible format before working on that section. The photo thumbnails look really great, though!

This week, I hope to make good progress on several scripting projects, especially upgrading existing Perl scripts such as the curriculum map, bookstore, and admission inquiry scripts. Then, I have taken on some new projects, such as a community service tracking form and major assignments conflicts calendar. The school has so many needs for data forms with logic and calculations. It's great that systems like Drupal are designed for this very thing, but I am still finding it a lot easier to creates the ones that require a lot of calculation or close tie-ins with our student information system in Perl rather than in Drupal. I did recently create a senior projects archive in Drupal, so I am learning to move some recording and archiving functions into there. Each senior project entry contains a brief description of the student's project, their proposal, a link to their project blog, and their final report. This year, half the class did a senior project. Next year, the faculty hopes that all will, so the ability to review past projects and then track current ones will become even more important.

If you haven't already, go get your $250, 500-seat iLife and iWork site licenses. Pages fills the space between InDesign and Word -- our lower school teachers love it. Remember what a similar deal did for Macromedia nearly a decade ago? Kudos to Apple for the move.

I really wish I could write a separate blog post for each of the items above. I am glad I could provide you with a little reference. Do drop me a line if you are engaged in something similar and would like to compare more detailed notes.

Good luck with your summer projects. I hope to see you at Building Learning Communities in July.

tags: , , , , ]]> Strategic Planning http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=711 Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:37:59 -0700 Encouraging Faculty http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=710
1. Tech Showcase: A few teachers each highlight a successful, technology-rich activity and explore the connection between the medium and teaching/learning. This could help promote sharing of ideas among departments.

2. Top 10 Disruptive Technologies: We may lead off with the article, to provide context to breakout groups and frame one aspect of the challenge facing us.

3. Theories of Learning: Behaviorist, Cognitivist, Constructivist, Connectivist. Framing T&L within these four theories may help teachers design new activities that incorporate technologies. I can provide an example of each one, rooted in subject-specific curricula. Some points of emphasis: teachers typically incorporate multiple theories of learning to provide curriculum to students. Over the years, educational theorists emphasized each of these theories at one time or another. Increasingly, student learn through their networks: a high degree of connectedness to resources and peers characterizes their learning landscape (provide examples). Schools that do not take acknowledge and take advantage of this may appear “artificial” or “irrelevant” to students. Teachers may design new, technology-rich learning activities by: 1) identifying a curricular objective that they would like to teach better next year; 2) choosing the learning theor(ies) that would best support this learning objective; 3) designing a classroom activity or project that would help create this learning environment; 4) Taking advantage of new literacies in our students: personal learning networks, visual information. This presentation could preface departmental discussions.

4. Tech survey results. We have at our disposal an upper school parent laptop survey, upper school student laptop survey, and eighth grade student technology survey (blog articles coming soon). Our middle school head has particularly recommended that the upper school teachers should take a look at the responses of their incoming students for next year.

tags: , , , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=710 Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:59:16 -0700 Posting science podcasts to Drupal http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=705

Sixth grade students convert files from WMA and Garageband formats to make their Drupal podcast files.



tags: , , , , , , ]]> General http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=705 Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:50:04 -0700 Thinking about curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=700

The PNAIS TechShare planning committee would like each member school to articulate its technology philosophy and future plans. They hope that answering these questions will inform the technology planning efforts of other member schools. The committee asked us to think about where we are now and where we are headed. I responded to their questions as follows:

1. Describe your school's technology philosophy.

Catlin Gabel technology resources support the educational mission of the school. We aspire to a high standard of excellence, delivering systems that work reliably and with high quality. We anticipate and plan for new opportunities and empower users to investigate new applications of technology, solve computer problems, and collaborate with IT staff. We carry out our work with a support orientation and high integrity. We make decisions in order to minimize the environmental impact of computer use.

2. What is your vison for classroom technology five years from now?

To continue to deepen its application to teaching and learning in a variety of forms. All teachers will list their curricular and pedagogical goals for their classes, consider how technology could help meet these goals, and regularly attempt new, technology-enriched activities. The forms will cover the range of available technologies, such as touch surfaces, the social web, data-collection devices, audio and video publishing, and so on. Teachers will feel fully supported by IT and empowered to design and attempt new, technology-rich activities in their classes. Teachers will participate in an active community of practice with their colleagues both within the school and beyond.

3. Do you have teachers willing to adapt curriculum to utilize technology innovations,or asking for technology so that they can?

Yes, though I would use language such as “employ technology to support curricular goals in their courses.” I would say that a large minority of teachers change curricula as they employ technology in their classes. We will know better after the completion of an upper school laptop program survey next week.

4. Explain how you support teacher innovators.

We consider all teachers to be potential innovators and therefore approach them about the same. We respond quickly and definitively to teacher requests for advice and support, including appearing in their classes to assist a teacher with technology-rich lessons if desired. We encourage all teachers to thoughtfully consider how technology could support teaching and learning in their classes. Often, innovation comes from surprising sources — not necessarily the most technically advanced individuals. We encourage all teachers to share their work with technology with their colleagues in both formal and informal settings. We encourage all teachers to actively seek professional development opportunities here and outside the school.

5. Describe your technology professional development plan for all employees.

The school offers three sources of funding for professional development: individual, department/division, and schoolwide. Individuals have an allotment of funds to spend where they prefer. Divisions and departments have funds to undertake professional development efforts for some or all of their members. Schoolwide initiatives such as All Kinds of Minds are also available. The school does not have a separate plan for technology professional development nor specific requirements for how much technology PD individuals should undertake.

6. Define the infrastructure (wiring, traffic capacities, switches, severs, wirless) changes you will need to make to support the five-year vision you described above.

We feel that we already have in place the baseline infrastructure to support this vision. We will continue to make incremental changes, such as introducing a wireless controller to enable better management of our wireless network, piloting small form-factor laptops such as the eeePC and 2Go to assess their potential for the classroom, and investigating social web site tools for our intranet and public-facing web sites.

7. What changes in human resources will you need to make to support that vision?

We are meeting our needs for the immediate future. We will continue to assess the workloads of our employees and request increases as appropriate.

tags: , , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=700 Thu, 29 May 2008 10:33:42 -0700 Harvard Law votes for "open access" http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=698
samirlutherIsn't this more consistent with the pursuit of learning? Thanks, Stephen. danah will be pleased.

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

source: Harvard Law School


If more schools of higher education do this, then we may have some hope of bridging the research-practice divide. Practitioners do not have the funds or the time to subscribe to expensive academic journals and the proprietary databases required to search them. Most researchers spend precious little time alongside schoolteachers, and when they do, it's primarily to collect information, not share wisdom. What if teachers could Google for research studies that inform their practice? What if teachers set a standard for themselves to ground their pedagogical strategies in research? Yum.



tags: , , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=698 Thu, 22 May 2008 22:31:44 -0700 Zoomerang Unhelpful http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=696 Zoomerang and an internally-developed tool. Yesterday, I got a call from a user who was experiencing page load wait times of up to two minutes. We weren't experiencing similar issues with other web sites.

waiting

She called Zoomerang, who promptly blamed us for the issue. Not helpful! Unable to produce the survey using Zoomerang, the user turned to our internal tool and had the entire survey up within minutes.

survey

Although I have abused Zoomerang before, I will acknowledge that it is a perfectly fine survey tool. I am just surprised that a successful company would not provide better customer service. Whether or not the problem resided at their end was not really the issue. A "valued customer" with the "pro" membership was experiencing a problem isolated to their tool.

Today, Zoomerang is running normally. Go figure.



tags: , ]]> Software/web http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=696 Wed, 21 May 2008 09:05:55 -0700 Build online community -- graduation tickets? http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=694 Drupal forum to create this space. There's only one problem. Only one person so far has tickets available. Everyone else needs tickets!

graduation tickets



tags: , ]]> Community http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=694 Mon, 19 May 2008 22:18:19 -0700 3D Cell Explorer gets a nod http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=692 SEGATech for their review of 3D Cell Explorer. They write:

If you’re teaching anything about cellular functions or know of students who are trying to gain a better understanding of the subject, speed on over to Richard’s site. The 3D Cell Explorer has instructional videos that explore topics such as:

* the cell membrane,
* mitochondrion,
* mitosis,
* meiosis and more.

This site provides a great means of demystifying the workings of living systems by helping students visualize what’s going on at the cellular level.
(source)

Also note that you can embed the movies on your own site, putting the power for teachers and students to make use of the videos in their own work.

SEGATech is a gem, recommending a steady stream of useful technology resources for education. One of the first blogs to land in my aggregator, they have stuck.


tags: , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=692 Mon, 19 May 2008 21:54:38 -0700 Community of practice http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=690 Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Chris Lehmann, I would like to strengthen the connection between progressive education and instructional technology next year.

Lehmann deconstructs the Learning to Change video to propose several practical, potentially unpopular ideas: 1) fully adopting social web technologies in education implies committment to progressive educational principles; 2) doing this right requires a lot of effort.

Nussbaum-Beach proposes that educators may, through virtual professional communities, better understand how to teach students 21st century technology literacies.

In our school, teachers normally meet in face-to-face faculty meetings, departmental discussions, and informal conversations around campus. These provide limited opportunities to engage practitioners in thoughtful conversations about using technology to support teaching and learning. I have before experimented with a blog-like format for communicating new resources and ideas to my colleagues, but this became far too one-sided. Teachers rarely replied.

Teachers at our school are innovating uses of educational technologies in remarkable ways but mostly in isolation from each other and based on very different learning objectives. What if we were able to increase the extent to which innovators worked from shared principles and practices?

Could we attempt to create a virtual community of practice within our single school? We have several factors working in our favor. Most of our teachers already know each other. A virtual community could provide more frequent opportunities for discussion than faculty and department meetings. It would overcome obstacles of time and space keeping apart teachers from different divisions (e.g., lower and middle schools).

Challenges are also numerous: the competition for teachers' free time is just as fierce as it is for face-to-face meetings. Email has so dominated in our school for the last decade that it is difficult to get teachers to hold meaningful discussion in another format. So many initiatives have a history of strong starts and then fizzle out.

One idea (from Nussbaum-Beach): to increase the potential success of this initiative, gain the agreement of a big enough core to actively participate in the online community from the start and take responsibility for its success. Others who show up will find an active discussion taking place, and the burden won't fall on a tiny group of people (or perhaps just one) to keep the discussion going. Another idea: use occasional face-to-face opportunities to build synergy with the online discussions. A third: create one online space in which to conduct all discussions schoolwide, so that users will have multiple discussions in which to consider participating.

We had success this year building momentum around discussion of social network sites within our "technology advisory group," a committee that meets monthly face-to-face. We produced two carefully thought-out emails that we sent out to the community, but these on their own did not generate actual discussion, though they did accomplish other objectives.


I field tested the idea of a virtual discussion group for instructional technologies with one teacher the other day and received an overwhelmingly positive response. This encourages me to keep trying with others.

To what extent will we discuss pedagogical theory? I don't know. For one, many of our teachers already practice progressive education. Yet, it is so difficult to disengage many from the traditional emphasis on the technology itself.

Have you tried to generate online discussions among your teachers? Tell us about it.



tags: , ]]> Social studies http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=690 Mon, 19 May 2008 21:45:47 -0700 Explaining Social Network Sites http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=687
Understanding Social Network Sites
Catlin Gabel Technology Advisory Group

Last fall, the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) distributed a survey to solicit your advice about a vision for technology at Catlin Gabel. A number of you asked about social network sites: what are they, why are they popular, and what can we do about them? TAG devoted some time this year to study these questions. While we did not find simple answers, we did find a great variety of “expert” perspectives that helped us better frame the issue. We found several passages in these articles particularly helpful.

Social network sites (SNS) put people in contact with each other. You can maintain a personal profile, create links to “friends,” and share information with them. Online communities have existed since at least 1985, with the founding of The Well. Some of today’s leading social network sites include Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. To better understand one, register a new account for yourself, and then search for “Catlin Gabel!”

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com
Global Education Collaborative: http://globaleducation.ning.com/
Independent School Educators Network: http://isenet.ning.com/


What value do social network sites have for our students? Are they simply time-wasters?

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. 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. [1]

Bridging social capital reflects the benefits we receive from our “weak ties” — people we don’t know very well but who provide us with useful information and ideas. Undergraduates who used Facebook intensively had higher bridging social capital scores than those who didn’t, and our longitudinal data show that Facebook use preceded these social capital gains. [2]


How does classroom management change? The above quotes help explain students’ motivation for using Facebook during class, but they do not help guide us toward particular classroom management strategies.

What effects do social network technologies have on our students’ social interactions with others?

Weak ties (e.g., casual acquaintances, colleagues) may not be reliable for long-term support; their strength instead is in providing a wide range of perspectives, information, and opportunities. As society becomes increasingly dynamic, with access to information playing a growing role, having many diverse connections will be key. [3]

While all humans need to feel connected to each other or to some cause, there are also times when we simply want to disconnect, and disconnecting is becoming increasingly hard thanks to social networking technology. [4]


How concerned should we be about online cruelty and privacy?

For teens, who can be viciously competitive, networking sites that feature a list of one’s best friends and space for everyone to comment about you can be an unpleasant venue for social humiliation and bullying. These sites can make the emotional landmines of adolescence concrete and explicit. [5]

It’s a lot harder to accept that social media is mirroring and magnifying all of the good, bad, and ugly about today’s society, shoving it right back in our faces in the hopes that we might face the underlying problems. Technology does not create bullying; it simply makes it more visible and much harder for adults to ignore. [6]


Our students are growing up in an increasingly interconnected world, mediated by social web technologies. The better we understand this landscape, the better we will be able to adopt the pieces that best support teaching and learning, relate to our students’ social needs, and manage a changing classroom environment.



Resources Cited

1. boyd, danah. “The Economist Debate on Social ‘Networking’”. Zephoria January 15, 2008 http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/01/15/the_economist_d.html
2. Ellison, Nichole as quoted in Dubner, Stephen J. “Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum” New York Times February 15, 2008 http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/?hp
3. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid.
4. Chazin, Steve, as quoted in ibid.
5. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid
6. boyd, danah, as quoted in ibid.


Further Reading

boyd, danah, and Ellison, Nichole. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html>

Lenhart, Amanda. Madden, Mary. Macgill, Alexandra Rankin. Smith, Aaron. Pew Internet Life Report: Teens and Social Media <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/230/report_display.asp>

VanPetten, Vanessa. For Parents: Why do Teens Use Social Networking Sites? (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YT6sEDZiE

The Economist: Debate: Social Networking. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=summary&debate_id=3




tags: , ]]> Social studies http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=687 Thu, 15 May 2008 12:24:17 -0700 Theory/practice divide grows http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=685
Marc ShandroThings are heating up in anticipation of the summer. Simultaneously, we are wrapping up the current year and starting work summer work. I have the following going on now.

Evaluations: It's time to write annual staff reflections for the IT department. Each individual completes a self-evaluation, I write a performance review, and then we meet to discuss.

Laptop Survey: We should perform an annual review of our 1:1 student laptop program so that we adapt and improve it over time. Unfortunately, we have not taken a close look at the program since its inception in 2003. This year, we will resurrect three comprehensive surveys from 2003, for parents, teachers, and students. This should provide us with useful information to reflect back to the community in the fall.

Arrivals and departures: Unbelieveable. We have about 30 personnel changes to make, what with the annual arrivals, departures, leaves of absence, long-term substitutes, and internal transitions.

Communicate fall plans: Present at closing faculty meetings to share new plans for the fall.

System replacement: Collaborate with laptop and desktop replacement for users.

Summer training workshops: Finalize schedule, teaching assignments, and open signups.

Web application programming: I am updating the bookstore, admission inquiry, curriculum map, and signup/volunteer applications. I am also going to migrate and adapt my community service script to this school.

insideCatlin redesign: Our intranet has grown like crazy this year, now comprising dozens of courses, tools, links, media galleries, and hundreds of pages of content. It is proving impossible for newbies to find what they are seeking on the site. We plan to transform the home page to provide clear guides to the content that users seek.

Public-facing web site platform migration: We hope to move our public-facing web site to Drupal with the help of a development/consulting firm.

AppleScripts: Finish developing AppleScripts to speed up laptop cleanup and deployment.

Core switch refresh: Follow the progress of this major project and participate when needed.

(I'm sure I've left off something important!)


While I am impressed with the manner in which the "blogerati" continue to raise the conceptual level of the ed tech discussion, I fear that this also makes it increasingly irrelevant to the daily work of practitioners like us. Last night, I caught up with my aggregator. Today, I have put together this list of urgent projects and routine tasks. The contrast struck me. I am all for questioning assumptions and redesigning education, but let us not forget the incremental changes that practitioners can make today to improve their work.

Theorists continue to raise the bar for the changes that we should make. They are right, but we also need to answer how to facilitate such discussions within the busy structure of daily school life. Our school is stable, successful, and thoughtful. We are not a technology school. We would like to improve broad aspects of our school -- student workload, weekly schedule, global education, experiential learning, service learning, and affordability, among others. It's hard to find time to focus just on technology, so we squeeze it in where we can, like so many other initiatives. As such, we must make changes over the long term, making technologies available to innovators and helping them share their work with colleagues. We measure progress over a span of years.

I question the focus and timing of the K12 Online Conference this year. It takes place for ten consecutive weekdays. Who can leave school for ten days of professional development in October? Who can follow hours of video presentations while continuing to work at school? This conference is no longer designed for practitioners. Sure, it's possible that I might view these videos later on, but then the online community has moved on to other pastures. The strands seem more abstract than last year -- will practitioners find enough meat to inform their practice?

(rant complete)

tags: ]]> Strategic Planning http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=685 Wed, 14 May 2008 21:40:57 -0700 Senior Project Blogs http://www.kassblog.com/?itemid=683 blog feed
Senior project blog entriesThis week, 25 students begin their "senior projects," volunteer internships around town in environmental, bike, journalism, and many other types of organizations. The senior projects coordinator asked me some weeks ago whether students should blog about their work. I replied, "of course!" First, I asked what the students used to do in past years and attempted to determine how well that would translate to blogging. Students had before completed weekly reflections and sent them to their advisors for comment. The coordinator wanted these reflections to be more visible within the school, so that other students could gain ideas for their work. Blogging seemed like an excellent fit.

I had been waiting for an opportunity like this. We run both Moodle and Drupal on our intranet, both within a "walled garden" -- restricted to our students, employees, and parents through authentication. Moodle is for discrete groups within campus (classes, clubs, committees), whereas Drupal is for community-wide content. This clearly fit the description of "community-wide," and Drupal automatically provides a blog to each user. It seemed ready to go.

I provided a how-to article to explain blogging to new users. I was pleased to include blog writing tips gleaned from a variety of sources.

  • Write a distinctive subject line.
  • Use a conversational tone.
  • Keep paragraphs short.
  • Vividly describe your experiences. Which of your experiences are most compelling?
  • Link to organizations or articles you reference.
  • Post images when you can. They really do say a thousands words.
  • Invite your readers to comment.
  • Determine a writing schedule and stick to it.


I found it a little tricky to explain to teachers how to directly find the blog of a specific student. Drupal's default search looks for content, not users (does anyone know how to modify this default behavior to include user names?). Thinking that most people would miss the Users tab in the search results, I created a new menu item that links directly to user search. I didn't want to use the node profile module, which would take on a lot of overhead and unwanted features just to make users searchable. At our school, students don't need to modify their profiles much -- they don't rely on the intranet to describe themselves around school!

Nearly all teachers prefer to find out about new student blog posts by email notification. We use the subscriptions module to add "subscribe blog" and "subscribe post" links to each post. This also permits the author of each post to automatically receive email notifications of comments to their content. This is essential in this environment, in which blogging is new and people are unlikely to check the web site frequently to notice new blog posts and comments.

If blogging takes off here, RSS subscription may increase in popularity. Given that our entire site is login protected, we require the HTTP auth module to use HTTP instead of web authentication for specific URL paths. This allows RSS readers and "podcatchers" such as iTunes to subscribe to login-protected Drupal feeds.

I didn't require students to tag their posts with particular keywords to separate them from other types of blog posts, mostly because no one else is really blogging at this time. I don't really see an easy way to do this, as requiring people to select from a list of tags would seem too strict. Does Drupal have a group blogging feature other than Organic Groups? It would be great if blog posts off a specific link automatically gained a particular tag.

A half-dozen students have posted in the first day. One challenge is completion -- the system does not have a strong disincentive for those who do not post regularly. After all, the students have volunteered to undertake a senior project in the first place. The writing itself has been pretty lively and interesting so far -- one student even included an image! I will watch closely for the development of each student's blogging voice and look for signs of impact from writing to the community in this fashion.

Reflective blogging occupies the middle space in the senior project, between proposal and final project. We may extend the online support for senior projects by collecting proposals and final projects online as well and linking all three content types together for others to review in the future.

Do let me know your lessons learned from similar student blogging or Drupal configuration experiences.


tags: , , , ]]> Curricular integration http://www.kassblog.com/index.php?itemid=683 Tue, 6 May 2008 22:07:51 -0700