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Finding Solutions for Tech Troubles In Schools

April 11, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By

112806574

With the onset of the Common Core State Standards, which teachers are expected to implement next year, and the growth of blended learning, the role of digital resources both for instruction and assessment has come under close scrutiny. The quickly shifting landscape is leaving many Internet Technology directors worrying that they won’t be able to meet the demand for fast and reliable Internet service.

The Consortium for School Networking‘s (CoSN) recently surveyed IT leaders and found their top three priorities are Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, assessment readiness, and broadband access. All of these priorities hinge upon one thing – lots of bandwidth.

Recognizing the substantial challenge facing many school districts, CoSN has launched the Designing Education Network (DEN) initiative to compile best practices for how to quickly and carefully build up IT infrastructure.

“If you’re first grader and you are learning to read and you’ve got a screen that takes 90 seconds to load, you may not be able to sit still that long.”

“One of the reasons we want to identify best practices and vendor neutral resources is because districts don’t have resources to hire consultants for research and development,” said Denise Atkinson-Shorey, project director for DEN. In fact, 80 percent of school districts predict they will have flat or declining IT budgets for the next school year. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, broadband, Common Core State Standards, CoSN

Privacy, Equity, and other BYOD Concerns

September 12, 2012 | 11:32 AM | By

Erin Scott

As the Bring Your Own Device movement continues to gain momentum, allowing students to use their own devices (mobile phones, laptops, tablets) in school, administrators and educators are figuring out how to iron out concerns and issues that crop up.

One of the biggest issues educators continually bring up is equity.

“Especially at the middle school level, not having a device and needing to find a classmate to share with results in further issues (selfishness, resentment, etc.),” writes Kevin, a commenter to a recent post about Katy School District’s BYOD program. “If so, how are these issues dealt with and turned into instructional situations?”

But proponents of BYOD contend that students who have devices should not be prohibited from using them as a solution to the equity issue. Education blogger Lisa Nielsen gives the following example of a school district in Forsyth County, Georgia.

“The BYOD environment is fluid and policies should be as well.”

“Tim Clark, district instructional technology specialist with Forsyth County Schools (GA), explains that in his experience with BYOD, ‘Students who do not have personal technology devices have greater access to school-owned technology tools when students who bring their own devices to school are no longer competing for that access,’” Nielsen writes.

Another set of concerns, according to a CoSN report, are around potential safety and security risks. One prevailing question, for example: Who’s responsible for theft or damage to students’ devices? Different districts deal with the issue in different ways. While some educators say kids Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, BYOD, CoSN

Six Lingering Obstacles to Using Technology in Schools

June 20, 2012 | 11:19 AM | By

Flickr:Marygrove College Library

Though educators are finding smart ways to integrate technology and learning, the road has been and continues to be challenging on multiple fronts. The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 K-12 Edition, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education, takes the birds-eye view and encapsulates some of the significant challenges that must still be addressed and offers the following assessment.

Behind the challenges listed here is also a pervasive sense that local and organizational constraints are likely the most important factors in any decision to adopt — or not to adopt — a given technology. Even K-12 institutions that are eager to adopt new technologies may be constrained by school policies, the lack of necessary human resources, and the financial wherewithal to realize their ideas. Still others are located within buildings that simply were not designed to provide the radio frequency transparency that wireless technologies require, and thus find themselves shut out of many potential technology options. While acknowledging that local barriers to technology adoptions are many and significant, the advisory board focused its discussions on challenges that are common to the K-12 community as a whole. The highest ranked challenges they identified are listed here, in the order in which the advisory board ranked them.

1. Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession, especially teaching. This challenge appears at the top of the list because despite the widespread agreement on the importance of digital media literacy, training in the supporting skills and techniques is still very rare in teacher education. As classroom professionals begin to realize that they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum, the lack of formal training is being offset through professional development or informal learning, but we are far from seeing digital media literacy as a norm. This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that digital literacy is less about tools and more about thinking, and thus skills and standards based on tools and platforms have proven to be somewhat ephemeral.

2. K-12 must address the increased blending of formal and informal learning. Traditional lectures and subsequent testing are still dominant learning vehicles in schools. In order for students to get a well- rounded education with real world experience, they must also engage in more informal in-class activities as well as learning to learn outside the classroom. Most schools are not encouraging students to do any of this, nor to experiment and take risks with Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, CoSN, ISTE, NMC Horizon Report

More School Districts Welcome Cell Phones in the Class

April 6, 2012 | 10:11 AM | By

Innovation in ISD

No longer afraid of giving kids access to the Internet, a growing number of school districts are developing digital media policies that emphasize responsibility over fear.
By Heather Chaplin

Since early 2001, every school accepting federal funding for discounted Internet access through the government’s E-rate program had to do two things – block “harmful” sites and create an Acceptable Use Policy.

The mantra of schools back then was pretty simple: Keep it out. The standard approach to this government mandate, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), was to build the equivalent of walls, fences, and moats to keep kids from the web.

“It’s a historical hiccup in the history of learning,” said Rich Halverson, a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the lead researcher on KidGrid, a mobile app that helps teachers study and analyze student data. “Here we had the most sophisticated advances in the history of learning banned from schools out of fear.”

GUIDE TO MOBILE LEARNING: Part two of a series exploring mobile learning co-produced by MindShift and Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning. The first post in this series: Amidst a Mobile Revolution in Schools, Will Old Teaching Tactics Work?

Fear was definitely the word you heard when talking to school administrators – no doubt partly because in the age of the Internet, 2001 was a long time ago, and the Web was still unknown territory for plenty of people back then. Also, all it takes is one student downloading pornography and sending it around the school, or one case of sexting that makes it in the news, for a school to find itself in serious hot water.

But recently – in the last two or three years – something has changed. Schools seem to be getting over their fears and want to bring the Web and social media and all the attendant digital tools into Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, CoSN, Internet filtering, Mobile Learning

Four New Initiatives from the Department of Education

June 28, 2011 | 2:48 PM | By

data.ed.gov

Interactive map on data.ed.gov

“Now is the time,” said Karen Cator, director of education technology at the Department of Education. “We’re at this incredible inflection point as we go from print to digital.”

Cator enumerated the ways in which the D.O.E. is helping to make the shift between the print and digital world at the ISTE conference yesterday.

1. TRANSPARENCY. Data.Ed.Gov is an interactive map that pintpoints which schools in the U.S. have broadband. It’s a collaboration with the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Inofrmation Administration. “If we can build those kinds of maps that we can layer on what’s happening in all these schools around country, that provides transparency and something that people can aspire to, follow,” Cator told me late last year.

2. DIGITAL LITERACY. DigitalLiteracy.gov was recently launched by a group of federal government agencies to help build computer and Internet skills, a free resource for anyone. A description from the site: “To provide librarians, teachers, workforce trainers, and others a central location to share digital literacy content and best practices. These trusted groups can, in turn, better reach out to their communities in providing them the skills today’s employers need.” Educators have their own dedicated link.

3. BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE ADVICE. For educators who want to find the best way to leverage their students’ devices, whether it’s their mobile phones or home laptops, CoSN’s newly launched Access4ed provides a host of resources about working experiments. From the site: “It will include conversations around key issues, case studies from districts addressing them, discussion of policy issues and how to address them, and opportunities to connect with education leaders in districts similar to and different from yours.”

4. CLEARING HOUSE FOR PROFESSIONAL NETWORKS. Cator described it to me this way: “If I’m a teacher, I maintain a profile, I let others into my professional learning network to see the conversations and the communities I’m a part of. I can follow fellow educators that might be involved in interesting projects and trying new projects in the classroom. So it goes beyond just following people on Twitter, but creating a profile for professional educators.” The idea of this “persistent online profile” is the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Teaching With Tech, CoSN, Department of Education, ISTE, ISTE11, Karen-Cator

Games, Gadgets and the Cloud: Coming Soon to a School Near You

June 10, 2011 | 12:30 PM | By

Flickr: Môsieur J. [version 5.1.1

Computer games and mobile devices will be prevalent in schools within the next few years.

Cloud computing and mobile learning: That’s the way of the near future in education, according to the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report: 2011 K-12 Edition.

Released by the NMC’s Horizon Project, the report distills current trends, challenges, and emerging technologies in K-12 education. “There are so many things to pay attention to in the world of emerging technologies,” says New Media Consortium CEO and Horizon Project founder Dr. Larry Johnson. “What we’re saying is, ‘Pay attention to this small list and you won’t go wrong.’”

The report is full of specific examples of what’s really happening in schools, but Johnson recommends keeping a close eye on the following trends.

FILED UNDER: Research, cloud computing, Consortium for School Networking, CoSN, International Society for Technology in Education, ISTE, Mobile Learning, New Media Consortium, NMC Horizon Report 2011 K-12 Edition