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.

“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.

Most school districts have only a few IT specialists who are often responsible for both the central office systems and local site networks. What’s more, CoSN’s survey found that a majority of Chief Technology Officers in schools earn about half of the going salary in the private sector. They’re faced with a huge task that will affect the learning of hundreds of children, but they’re understaffed, under-resourced and could make a lot more money elsewhere.

DEN is trying to relieve some of that load by compiling best practices and advice that will be housed on a website. The first tools should be available in June, and DEN hopes to expand its offerings to include a community forum so that IT leaders across the country can learn from each other as they go through the process.

[RELATED READING: What it Takes to Launch Mobile Learning Programs in Schools]

One of the biggest concerns for schools is the quality and security of the network. Another is accommodating the needs of various devices that students and teachers use to access the network, hoping to make all connections solid. “In the network, we have to think of how to get Internet access to a mobile device and how to do it securely,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

One thing they’re considering is more cloud based computing, but that can come with challenges too. “If we move resources into the cloud it’s easier for wireless devices to have access, but it may not meet the learning needs of students and staff,” Atkinson-Shorey said. Many schools are trying to move ahead on many technological fronts simultaneously and they don’t realize how much bandwidth they’ll need.

BYOD policies have been touted as money savers, but in informal surveys Atkinson-Shorey has found that most students bring more than one device to school at a time. Demands on the network might be far greater than anyone imagined.

Another big concern is making sure that everyone, no matter what device they’re using, gets the same speedy and reliable connection, which could hinder learning and affect the outcome of a student’s test. “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,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

[RELATED READING: More School Districts Welcome Cell Phones in Class]

One of the main services DEN will try to provide is a spending resource so districts know just how much they can expect to pay to move online. The tool will compare and contrast different tech models, taking into account the tech requirements for BYOD, laptop carts, or computer labs.

“Early adopters went through all this the hard way, but there’s no reason for all of us to have to do that,” Atkinson-Shorey said.

The initiative is a boost for IT administrators at a time when social media networks are full of concerns that schools won’t be able to provide adequate broadband access in time for implementation goals of the Common Core. Some states are even seeking to delay implementation until they can get adequate tech support in place. As with all new launches, there will probably be glitches as schools role it out. The question will be whether schools are given a break if the technology doesn’t perform.

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.

“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 take care of their own devices better than those issued to them by schools, Fairfax County School district asks parents to sign a liability waiver along with their BYOD permission slips.

Students’ use of their devices to send harassing or otherwise inappropriate messages is another concern. Most school districts already have bullying and behavioral policies in place, but those may need to be further clarified in regards to students’ devices. While some schools prohibit use of devices in areas that are difficult to monitor, CoSN’s report cites experts who suggest a more flexible policy.

“CoSN Chair Bailey Mitchell, chief technology officer of Forsyth County (GA) Schools—a BYOD leader—advises against BYOD policies that are too rigid or restrictive. The BYOD environment is fluid, he says, and policies should be as well. Some districts give flexibility to schools to craft policies that make sense for their student populations,” the report states.

That’s exactly what’s happening at Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep in San Francisco, where administrators see cell phones as tools used to say or do what might happen in the hallways and dining halls regardless of the device itself. The policy there is evolving, says Principal Gary Cannon.

“The challenge is giving [kids] a sense of a digital footprint,” Cannon says.

Other districts handle it in different ways. According to the report, last year, computers and tablets were allowed at the Fairfax County district, but not cell phones. This year, the district is allowing smartphones to be used, but each school must decide where and how they can be used.

Other logistics that must be dealt with:

• The possibility of passing along viruses or malware from student devices to school computers while the devices are being charged.
• Compliance to filtering policies in schools that ban certain websites on broadband, but that can be accessed through students’ wireless service.
• Unintentional access to private content, both on the part of teachers and students.

The CoSN report lists a host of ideas — everything from wireless authentication to how to deal with virtual and remote desktops — as solutions to addressing some of these concerns.

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.

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.”

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 the classroom. You can see this change reflected in a slew of new Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) across the country that emphasize responsibility over mere acceptance and the implementation of school-wide blogs and even the distribution of smartphones for classroom use.

“This isn’t happening in the majority of schools,” said Jim Bosco, principal investigator at the Consortium of School Networking’s Participatory Learning in Schools initiative. “But it’s not the rarity anymore, either.”

Bosco said that while he had no empirical data to track these changes in schools, he estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of school districts were developing more forward-thinking policies. The Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) is working with school leaders from 13 districts to collaborate on creating models for district-level digital media use policies in K-12 education.

COSN released a paper this month called “Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media.”

“The advantages of digital media now greatly outweigh the disadvantages and require that schools update their thinking and policies to provide guidance on the use of these tools to improve student learning and achievement,” the paper says.

It simply makes no sense, the paper argues, to try and keep students out of a world – a digital world – that is going to be paramount to how they live and work as adults. In fact, says Bosco, it’s not even possible to keep them out.

“You can build as big a moat as you want,” he said. “But it’s not going to work if for no other reason than they go home at night. A lot of people say, well, what they do when they get home is not my problem. But I think that seems borderline unethical.”

According to Bosco, administrators at schools ought to be providing safe environments for students to learn how to be responsible digital citizens – not just protecting themselves from lawsuits by keeping the Internet out of the classroom and leaving kids to flail about when they go home.

“One of the most powerful reasons to permit the use of social media and mobile devices in the classroom is to provide an opportunity for students to learn about their use in a supervised environment that emphasizes the development of attitudes and skills that will help keep them safe outside of school,” the CoSN paper reads.

The Children’s Internet Protection Act requires Internet filters, but the changing thinking over the last two or three years is that maybe those “filters” aren’t best enforced by draconian AUPs.

“When I talk to colleagues in Finland, they say, how do you filter?” said Jim Klein, director of Information Services and Technology at the Saugus Union School District in Southern California. “They say, our kids’ filters are in their heads. You do this by giving them a safe environment to educate themselves instead of sticking your head in the sand and pretending these technologies don’t exist.”

This doesn’t mean that students in Klein’s district have unfettered access to anything online. But Klein has a different approach to blocking. Instead of buying a commercial filter that blocks URLs, Klein, who uses only open source software, has created filters based on content. This means YouTube, for example, is available as a site, but a particular page – pornographic or hate-based – won’t be.

Klein also said that when he’s building filters, he doesn’t work with the mindset of keeping out every kid who desperately wants to get around them – those kids are going to get access anyway, he said, whether by breaking through the filter or waiting until they go home. Rather, he sets out to prevent students from accidentally stumbling on something harmful or upsetting.

“You have to understand the purpose of filters,” he said, “and change your assumptions about what you’re doing.”

When Klein was loosening the filter system, he spent a lot of time talking to teachers about what he was doing and why. Teachers have to be responsible for what happens in their classroom, Klein said. And the expectation has to be that students are responsible for their own behavior. His message of responsibility is echoed by the new CoSN paper and by other forward-thinking tech administrators at districts around the country.

DISTRICTS FIGURING IT OUT

The Katy Independent School District in Texas recently changed its AUP to focus on “responsible use,” said Darlene Rankin, director of instructional technology. “Digital responsibility is big.” Rankin said. “We’re teaching students how to operate in this new world. We wanted to change the wording in our guidelines because we don’t want students to accept them; we want students to be responsible for them.”

Do things ever go wrong? Of course. In the Katy ISD, one fifth grader did a search for and found videos of lap dancers. The parents, Rankin said, were irate.

“Things are going to happen,” Rankin said. “We talked to the parents – ultimately it was a great teaching moment.”

Halverson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the problems schools are now facing over responsible internet use is a legacy of the last 20-plus years of what he called an “accountability squeeze” in the school system. There’s been so much focus on “holding schools accountable” that school administrators have been living in a culture of fear – fear of innovating, fear of trying something that might be messy.

“Research-driven intervention like changing the curriculum or bringing in new textbooks leaves no room for error,” he said, “which is never going to be the case with digital technology. Of course there’s uncertainty and variation in what they’ve been doing – just look at the state of algebra in inner-city schools. But you can certify a textbook. Everyone wants a magic bullet that will solve all problems, but it doesn’t exist. We need to lay off schools and let them innovate.”

Katy ISD has been innovating by distributing Android phones to students. Three years ago, the district gave 150 phones to fifth graders at one elementary school. The next year, it gave out 1,500 phones at 11 schools; and this year, 3,200 students at 18 schools now have Androids.

In the classroom, students log in and receive assignments, take quizzes and do research on their phones. The school has made certain apps available, including an online catalog for the library and reference books. Teachers also plan specific lessons taking advantage of the phones; for example, when students are studying 3-D objects, they watch a video and then take pictures with their phones. Afterwards, they open a drawing program, where they do work based on the image, and then send the work to their teacher.

Katy ISD, like many other districts that embrace mobile technologies and other digital media, uses the social networking platform Edmodo to facilitate online work. Parents can log on to the site to view student grades.

The Inner Grove Heights Community Schools in Minnesota use Edmodo. Two years ago, the district didn’t even have wireless Internet access. But six months later, administrators made the decision to add wireless to all schools, elementary as well as high school.

“Teachers were using digital tools, and we were getting more and more requests to open online sites and make it possible for teachers to, for example, use video from the web in the classroom,” said Lynn Tenney, director of technology for the district.

Now, Inner Grove offers hybrid classes. Students meet three times a week in the classroom, and twice a week they work independently online. One year after implementing the program in standardized 12th grade English, the failure rate dropped from 63 percent to 13 percent, said Deirdre Wells, superintendent of the school district.

Factors other than technology, including a different set of students, could have contributed to the decline. Wells couldn’t put her finger on one specific reason for the extraordinary drop, but she pointed to factors like increased flexibility and freedom, which students loved. Also, she said, struggling students could stay in class those two days a week and get more one-on-one help from the teacher, while the more confident students were off doing their online projects.

“The depth of thought and level of discourse gets much deeper when you add an online environment,” Wells said. The teacher can present information in class, and then the students are free to explore it online – they can look at other students’ work, or check out videos on YouTube. Time constraints are no longer a factor, the process becomes more individualized, and school becomes more relevant, Wells said.

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL ELEMENT

The social aspect is certainly a big factor in these new learning environments. A fourth grader in the Saugus Union School District in Southern California, for example, posted a plea for help on a Saturday, saying he was struggling with his math homework. His math teacher saw the post and, using his own Macbook web cam, made a video of himself explaining the subject in more depth. He put the video online, and by the end of the weekend his post was filled with comments from students chiming in about the work.

For Jim Bosco of CoSN, these advances are absolutely key to providing real educations, not only to the “haves” but to the “have-nots” as well. Bosco grew up in Pittsburg, the child of Italian immigrants. His father had a fourth-grade education, and the Catholic school Bosco attended was less than ideal, he said. But Bosco happened to live within walking distance of a Carnegie public library branch, where he spent much of his free time. He still remembers being struck by the fact that his cousins, who lived 60 miles away in Newcastle, didn’t have access to all that he did by the simple accident of where they lived.

“By being walking distance to that library, I had access to all kinds of information and really to all that human culture had produced,” Bosco said.

The library of his childhood is like the internet today – a repository of “human culture and knowledge.”

“What you have access to has traditionally been determined by money and location,” Bosco said. “But the internet has the potential to change that.”

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 premise behind  Connected Online Communities of Practice, a directory of professional teachers networks created by the D.O.E. and the American Institutes for Research. The organization aims to launch new online communities of practice, conduct design experiments, undertake case studies, and develop ideas about new designs and infrastructure. After reviewing all the nominated online professional networks, the organization’s technical working group, a who’s who of innovative education thinkers, will produce a report about best practices.

Other goals on the horizon for the D.O.E.:

• Equity of access to all Americans. If schools are able to provide access to technology, Cator said the goal is provide the same access at home, as well as teach them how to use the technology so they can “fully participate.”
• Connect basic research to the marketplace. With all the research and development that’s being done in government agencies, the goal is to connect that knowledge to those who create products.
• Connect entrepreneurs to investors. Through organizations like Startup America, a way for smart ideas to find their way to those who can bring it to life.

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.

• IN THE NEXT YEAR: CLOUD COMPUTING AND MOBILE DEVICES

Schools will start incorporating mobile, hand-held devices in the classroom in significant ways. Mobiles (read: smart phones), Johnson says, were placed “pretty far out” in past Horizon reports — in the four- to five-year category, mostly because of policy concerns. “Schools didn’t have the right policies in place to even think about it; [phones] were still considered disruptive,” he says. But now, “we think mobiles are finally going to tip in education.”

Cloud computing will replace data storage on school servers because using free data centers that host thousands of servers, like Google, is becoming more prevalent. Not only are these cloud computing services more convenient for schools (Google Docs, for instance), but it’s “increasingly seen as a way to save money,” Johnson says.

• 2-3 YEARS: GAME-BASED LEARNING AND OPEN CONTENT

Games are gaining more traction in education — primarily for the potential of highly sophisticated video games to “foster collaboration and engage students deeply in the process of learning.” Open content is perhaps not yet as widely employed as cloud computing is to save money, but it’s on its way: open educational resources have been offered by institutions as renowned as MIT for a decade and are increasingly seen in the K-12 community as a way to increase student choice and access to learning.

• 4-5 YEARS: LEARNING ANALYTICS AND PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

It might still be far out, but there’s a glimmer on the horizon that standardized tests may not be the only widely approved form of student assessment. Analytics technology is becoming sophisticated enough that schools may start providing personalized assessment systems for students over the next five years. And while a “personal learning environment” is still very much in its conceptual phase, the idea that “student-designed learning approaches that encompass different types of content” — like videos, apps, games, and social media tools — can meet his or her learning style and pace goes a long way to making education more personalized, and therefore effective.

The report also cites key trends and critical challenges. Among them:

• A NEW DEFINITION OF “THE DIGITAL DIVIDE.” Today’s digital divide is “less about the devices that you have than the knowledge and capability you have to use them when you need to,” says Johnson. “We use the Internet as if it were air. Doing a Web search is something we do without even thinking. That, more and more, is how employers expect their workforce to be. The people who have those skills are going to be relatively more successful than people who don’t.”
• LACK OF DIGITAL MEDIA TRAINING FOR TEACHERS. Despite widespread agreement about its importance in schools, schools of education and professional development programs for teachers are still not providing the training necessary to make tech integration a reality.
• THE NEED FOR SYSTEMATIC CHANGE. “The fundamental structure of the K-12 education establishment” is one of the greatest obstacles to innovation, write the report’s collaborators. “As long as maintaining the basic elements of the existing system remains the focus of efforts to support education, there will be resistance to any profound change in practice.”

This last idea is potentially controversial, but Johnson is matter-of-fact.

“Everything about the way that teachers are evaluated and the way their work is evaluated is based on old models,” he says. “It’s really very difficult to change. When your lesson plans have to conform to a specific structure, and when your creativity is limited to making sure your students pass high-stakes tests, the ability of a teacher to encourage students to become self-directed learners is hampered.”

Nevertheless, he insists, “I’m an optimist in this. I understand that change takes time. Schools are not early adopters. They tend to look for technologies that are proven in the rest of the world — in the business, entertainment, or other industries. Once they’re established elsewhere, schools bring them in.”