The iPad in Education and the Questions

Posted on 01/10/2011 by William Stites

[New related post – The iPad in Education: The Apps & Deployment – 9/24/2011]

Since the release of the iPad,  there have been a lot of questions about its use in the education space.   As someone who spent the last five years of his life planning a 1to1 Initiative at their school (deployed September 2010), the question of whether the iPad could be used as a primary device for students and teachers has been weighing heavily on my mind.

Recently there have been articles in the New York Times – Math That Moves: Schools Embrace the iPad – and in the Huffington Post – Horrified by Schools That Give Every Student an iPad – outlining the pros and cons of the device in an educational setting.

As I read both of the articles there was one point made in the Hufffington piece with which I couldn’t agree more:

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Posted in 1to1, EdTech, iPad, Teaching & Learning, Technical | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Evernote at my School

Posted on 12/08/2010 by William Stites

With the launch of my school’s 1:1 Initiative we gave every faculty member and every student in grades four through twelve a Premium Evernote account.

Shortly after the start of the school year Evernote came on-site to record how that was going.

This is just part of what they saw:

 
Posted in EdTech, Evernote, Randomness, Teaching & Learning | 4 Comments

My day at EdCamp NYC 2010

Posted on 12/05/2010 by William Stites

What do you do on a beautiful Saturday in December in New York City? You attend EdCamp NYC of course!  On Saturday, December 4th that is exactly what I did and what a great day it was.

EdCamp NYC “is an unconference devoted to K-12 Education issues and ideas” that was hosted at The School at Columbia University.  This, I am ashamed to say, was the first* unconference I’ve attended and the event did not disappoint.

I arrived early and was able to start what was a day full of meaningful discussions.

While people arrived and the session board began to fill up I was also able to have conversations with the attendees, including many I follow on Twitter — this is something I really appreciate about these types of events.  As a result of these conversations I got an idea for a session that I could offer,  I wrote it down on a card, posted it to the session board and would wait to see if people would come.

What I had thought was going to be a day of attending sessions, turned into one with me offering one.

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Posted in Conferences, Schools, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

Design for Distraction

Posted on 11/22/2010 by William Stites

The New York times story “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” point out many of the ways that technology is ingrained in our students lives and what that means for teaching, learning and distraction.

But distraction isn’t anything new. Whether students pass notes, doodle in their notebook, or stare out the window, distraction has always been part of a student life.

Now, you can say that technology has taken distraction to a different level and with social media, text messages, instant messages, smart-phones and games, one would argue that we face a difficult battle.  But it is not one that we can’t win.

One of biggest topics we discussed at my school prior to the launch of or 1:1 initiative was how to deal with distraction.  Students had already been bringing in laptops prior to the start of our program and every kid seemed to have a smart-phone or iPod with them wherever they went, so this was not a new issue for us, per se.  But now, by giving every student a Macbook Pro we would need to take the issue of distraction head on.

How to do it if you’re a teacher. Design for Distraction.  Design your classrooms, your instruction and you conversations to deal with distraction.

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Posted in 1to1, Design, EdTech, Schools, Social Media, Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

I blog and why the hell should you care? (or My Expanded About Page)

Posted on 11/19/2010 by William Stites

“Who the hell is going to want to read what I have to say?”

This was the question I asked myself when I started this blog. It is something I consider each time I write.

There are a million blogs out there and I am sure there are more than a few written by Tech Directors in schools, so why should people read this one?

I’ve said I am not an expert and never want to put myself forth as one — I think that the idea of being an expert implies that you can stop learning or taking in new information — so what’s the draw? If you’re not going to get “expert” advice, why would you want to read my blog?

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Posted in Blogging, Community, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Time Machine and Evernote for Disaster Recovery

Posted on 11/16/2010 by William Stites

Oh my god… my hard drive crashed! What do I do now?!?

How many times have you had a students or colleagues say these words to you? When they do it is as if their lives — their digital lives for sure — have come to an end.

When laptops crash, hard drives fail you need a plan to recover everything. When we were preparing to launch our 1to1 program we spent a lot of time debating how best to solve this problem.

We looked at a number of server-based solutions and cloud-based alternatives, and each solution had their pros and cons. However, each had huge bandwidth concerns for the local network and/or Internet connections. We also needed to figure out what would and wouldn’t backup on every students and faculty members laptop (almost 1000).

Something else we uncovered is that it took the burden of backup off of the plates of the end-user and transferred it to someone else… the IT department.

This made us think… “What are we teaching?”

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Posted in 1to1, Evernote, Technical | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Untag me

Posted on 11/15/2010 by William Stites

I was walking through the halls of our middle school one afternoon and I saw a student wearing this shirt.

I thought to myself what a simple statement and what a powerful message.

I look at the connective power of social media, how it allows to you build on the traditional notion of community and expand the boundaries of that concept.  But… what if you want a smaller community? What if you want to be less connected? What if you want control over your connections?

“Untag me.”

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Posted in Community, Schools, Social Media | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Evernote in the Classroom

Posted on 11/11/2010 by William Stites

You can plan, you can train and you can offer all the professional development you want around a curricular initiative, but you never know how well something will truly work until you unleash it into the wild and have the faculty and students put it through its paces.

After five years of planning we launched our 1:1 Learning Initiative and with it Evernote. There were a lot of discussions and decisions that needed to happen along the way, but one of the best decisions so far was to include an Evernote premium account on every faculty and student laptop.

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Posted in 1to1, EdTech, Evernote | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Talking 1to1 and all things Evernote

Posted on 11/08/2010 by William Stites

On October 27, 2010 I have the privilege to talk to Alex Ragone (@alexragone) and Arvind Grover (@arvind) on edTechTalk’s 21st Century Learning. The topic of the thirty minute discussion was the recent deployment of my school’s 1to1 initiative and our decision to give every student a premium Evernote account.

Our 1to1 initiative involves giving every students in grades 4-12  a Macbook Pro laptop (approx. 800), case and 500GB external drive with each student having administrative rights on his/her laptop.

A complete suite of software is installed on the laptops including Adobe CS5, MS Office, iWork and most importantly premium Evernote.

Hear about how all of this is playing out in the podcast available here: http://edtechtalk.com/ETT21_142

 
Posted in 1to1, EdTech, Evernote, Schools | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Expanding the Definition of Community to a Global Community

Posted on 11/04/2010 by William Stites

Is community just the area in which you live and work or is it something more?

Wikipedia’s definition of community is as follows:

Traditionally a “community” has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. The word can also refer to the national community or global community.

This concept of a global community is where I believe the definition needs to head.

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Posted in Blogging, Community, Conferences, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments