Learning from and overcoming the past to move forward.

Posted on 01/05/2013 by William Stites

When you make a decision about something… anything… big or small you are setting a precedent for things to follow. The bigger that decision is the more people will remember it and turn to it in the future as a guide for other, similar decisions.

As a school those decisions often become part of the institutional memory and students, parents, faculty, administration and the board aren’t soon to forget.

I mention this as I uncovered an old video of a news report that ABC (New York) did of our school’s decision NOT to go with a 1:1 program back in the later 90’s.

Our decision not to go with a 1:1 Initiative all those many years ago was something that we would need to overcome as we investigated and planned for doing something we had already said no to once.

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Google is offering a $99 Chromebook! Wait…does cheap make it right?

Posted on 12/10/2012 by William Stites

This is a quick reactionary piece to two things I read today that have me scratching my head.  Both related to Google and the Chromebook.

As reported on Engadget “Google (is) offering $99 Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks to public schools” and while this seem like a sweet deal I am skeptical for another reason.

Also in the in news today was a report that Google has a widespread outage or “service disruption” as Google reported (ZDNet).

Now these two thing were all the buzz on the Internet and social media today.  I couldn’t help but see something either in my Facebook or Twitter feed (sorry Google+ was looking at you today) about each of these stories.

What concerns me about theses new pieces is that people will jump into these cheap devices and not think about the issues and once they have these them they will be forced to deal.

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Picking the right wireless for your school.

Posted on 12/09/2012 by William Stites

Prior to the deployment of our 1:1 Learning Initiative we spent over a year working on our infrastructure.  Switches, firewalls, access points and other network devices/appliances were demoed and tested to handle DHCP, DNS, RADIUS, content filtering and connectivity.  We wanted to make sure we had the network nailed before we introduced over 1000 devices that would need constant, daily access.

One of the biggest concerns we had was for wireless.

The idea of plugging in devices was and is going away.  We needed to have a wireless network that was going to be able to not only give us the coverage that we needed, but also the capacity and be able to scale appropriately.

We also want to make sure that the network would have the highest degree of uptime possible.  We couldn’t afford to have faculty plan lessons and learning around a resource they couldn’t count on.

“I feel the need… the need for speed” was a line that Tom Cruise used in Top Gun and while we aren’t flying F15s it applied to our wireless planning. We would want to make sure that the network felt like you were flying that F15.  We included redundant Internet connections at each of out locations (3) to provide the fuel to fly (Comcast & FIOS – load balanced).

But what wireless system to choose and how to make that choice?

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Your school, COPPA and Evernote.

Posted on 11/21/2012 by William Stites

In the summer of 2011 while attending the Lausanne Laptop Institute (now the Lausanne Learning Institute) I was having a conversation with my friend Hiram Cuevas (@cuevash) about our use of Evernote.  He told me how excited he was to hear about what we were doing, but had a question about how we were dealing with our younger learners, those under 13, and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

I told him that was a really good questions.

For a good portion of last year (2011-2012) Reshan Richards (@reshanrichards) and I looked at not just Evernote, but all of the applications and subscription services our school used.  We dove into their Terms of Service and Privacy Policies to see just were we stood on the issue.

The result was we now have a COPPA policy, a form for Parental Consent and a page on our website with explicit notification of the tools we are using – http://www.mka.org/techtools.

In a recent email from Evernote they outline some of the update to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

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Evernote Forever on the Out of School podcast.

Posted on 11/21/2012 by William Stites

On November 20th (2012) I had the opportunity to talk with both Bradley Chambers (@bradleychambers) and Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) about “Evernote Forever” on their Out of School podcast.

The discussion moved between many topics including the experience at my school using the application, how it has enhanced not only organization and collaboration, but assessment and feedback as well.  We also discussed the numerous options Evernote provides for the sharing of information and how it can be that transformational tool that allows you to bridge device, OS and learning environments in and out of the classroom.

Both Fraser and Bradley have a wealth of experience in educational technology. Fraser is credited with being the world’s first iPad school at Cedars School of Excellence in Scotland and Bradley is an accomplished Director of Information Technology for Brainerd Baptist School in Tennessee.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

 

 
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Educators! Stacked Shared Notebooks in Evernote 5 is the BEST!

Posted on 11/19/2012 by William Stites

Evernote recently release a substantial update with 5.0.  There are some really cool new features, some amazing navigational changes and a much cleaner and appealing user experience.

After watching the video you  get a quick glimpse into some of what they’ve done, but one of the things missing from the video which was something our teachers was the ability to stack shared notebooks.

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User data migration in our 1:1 scares me!

Posted on 11/18/2012 by William Stites

I am continually impressed by what we have achieved in our 1:1 Learning Initiative.

We planned like no other school I know, we came out of the gates firing on all cylinders, all of our users – 4th-12th & faculty – are administrators on our own machine and they all keep their devices 24/7/365.

We’ve addressed problems and challenges as they have come up such as a mid-cycle OS upgrade and a full-fleet battery replacement.  We’ve learned from each issue we’ve face (will not to the OS upgrade again) and look to the next and try to figure out ways to solve it.

It’s the next problem that scares me… user data migration.

We are coming to the end of our first 3 year cycle of our 1:1 and we are looking towards the next device. As we do we are bringing different machines in and gathering both student and faculty testers to our cause to help us determine which is the better device to meet our learning and usage goals.

Part of this process has involved the transfer of user data from one machine to the next and it is at the heart of what scares me.

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iPad Layered Model more manageable with iOS 6

Posted on 11/18/2012 by William Stites

http://www.macworld.com.au/news/free-apps-can-be-downloaded-without-entering-a-password-in-ios-6-65169/

With the release of  iOS 6 Apple no longer required the use of a password for the purchase of free apps from the App Store and more importantly for your institution, for the updating of apps.

Why is this so important?

In an earlier post I described three model of iPad deployment/ownership: individual, blended  and an institutional model.  These three models each provided their own benefits and drawbacks, but one of the biggest issues with each of these models was dealing with the AppleID used for each.

In our models of deployment for any 1:1 device individual ownership of the device is a hallmark of our program, however this becomes more difficult in an iOS deployment.

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The Tale of Two Posts. Using analytics to talk about writing.

Posted on 11/12/2012 by William Stites

When I talk to teachers about getting them to have their student write and publish online I talk about a number of things.

When you look at the research and writing process the last part of that process is publishing. Writing online is publishing beyond and providing a greater audience then just that of the teacher and possible peer edit that accorded as part of the process.  It allows students to develop a public portfolio of their work and display that to a global audience.

By having student publish online on a blog you allow their work to receive multiple forms of feedback.  A piece can receive written comments as well as being acknowledge via social channels through tweets, Likes and Pins.  It opens up the assessment and feedback loop in a way that couldn’t happen within the confined of classroom and traditional publishing methods.

There are also the backend numbers that provide a level of feedback and analytic assessment.

Let’s look at two posts from my site which will tell two very different tales.

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School Community. In celebration and in crisis.

Posted on 11/10/2012 by William Stites

October brought our school two big community events.

The Gathering, which is a full school (PK-12 – 3 campus) event where we showcase and celebrate all the school, it’ students and faculty have achieved over the year.

Everyone comes together at our Upper School and watches their friends and classmates perform, hear of the many championships and honors bestowed on our athletes, performers and scholars.  There are cheers and songs to be heard throughout the morning and it gives the school the opportunity to come together on and day and for an event that we do not normally have the opportunity to do any other time in the year.

It is an amazing community building event!

The other was Hurricane Sandy. Sandy brought with is a way to celebrate our community in a different way, through our ability to open ourselves up, look out for those in need and empathize with those that are still struggling.

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