Considerations for deploying the AppleTV in your school or enterprise.

Posted on 04/12/2012 by William Stites

AppleTV is awesome! I’ve had one in my home for years and I am really excited about what you can do with these devices and particularly AirPlay.

We are beginning to look at using the AppleTV in our school as part of our iPad deployment but much like the iPads themselves we are in the position of trying to figure out how to deploy and manage a consumer device in the enterprise (schools to all of you).

The reason for considering the use of the AppleTV in the classroom has everything to do (for us) with AirPlay. The ability to give any student the opportunity to share what they are doing on their device with the class and demonstrate their learning is amazing – – can you say bye-bye Smartboards!

But as I play with this idea and discuss it with my colleagues there are some management issues and questions that I have.

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Posted in 1to1, AppleTV, iPad | Tagged , , , | 31 Comments

Moodle and Blackboard… I’m not worried.

Posted on 03/28/2012 by William Stites

There is a lot of talk out there right now about the fact the Blackboard has purchased both Moodlerooms and NetSpot.  There are numerous blog post about it, including Remote-Learners response (Blackboard Buys 2 Leading Supporters of Open-Source Competitor Moodle – The Chronic & Remote-Learner Responds to Blackboard’s Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot – Remote-Learner) as well as talk on the listservs (ISED) and Twitter.

Am I worried… NO. Am I naive? Maybe, but here’s what I think.

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Posted in Moodle | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

COPPA Discussion on EdTechTalk

Posted on 02/14/2012 by William Stites

Recently I had the pleasure of joining Curt Lieneck (@clieneck) on EdTechTalk (#ETT21) for a discussion with Arvind (@arvind), Alex (@alexragone) and Vinnie (@vvrotny) on the topic of the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Curt and I have been working with our school and vendors to try to come to some understanding of what our responsibilities are as institutions and how to best handle the issue around COPPA.

He is a link to our discussion and the transcript from the chat room from that day. If you have any questions please do hesitate to contact me directly.

 
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Talking all things Evernote on Classroom 2.0

Posted on 02/05/2012 by William Stites

On Saturday, February 4th, 2012 I had the pleasure of taking part in a Classroom 2.0 Live webinar where we were talking about all things Evernote.

I spoke for about 40 minutes and took questions for about another 40 or so.  They’ve posted a recap of the webinar on the Live Classroom 2.0 web site (http://live.classroom20.com/1/post/2012/02/using-evernote.html).

I am including the video from the webinar below, but I encourage you to take a look at their site as they have include a vert large number of related links.

 

 
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Passion and Inspiration in teaching…with great power.

Posted on 01/30/2012 by William Stites

As a kid I played Dungeons and Dragons a lot!

On weekends my friends and I would get together play throughout the night.  We’d spend hours diagramming maps, dungeons, fantasy worlds and coming up with new and outrageous adventures.

We were incredibly passionate about what we were doing.

In 1982 when I about 11-year-old, I introduce a relative of mine, Michael Miller (@M_S_Miller_1000), to the game. I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I can assure you that there were small figurines, dice, books and drawing strewn about the space as we played.

The passion and excitement for what I was doing what and I was teaching – the rules, materials, characters, etc – was transferred over and yet another soul was sucked into the world of fantasy role-playing games (for the younger readers out there this is what you did before Wii, Playstation and XBox).

The passion and excitement for the subject transferred from one person to another.

Learning by playing, learning by DOING made all the difference.

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Posted in Teaching & Learning | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

My day at Educon 2012

Posted on 01/29/2012 by William Stites

This was the second year in a row that I attended Educon for the Saturday sessions.  If you’ve never been to Educon before it is held at the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in center city Philadelphia.

If you have never been to Educon or SLA it is a very unique school and a very diverse conference.

The school is a partnership school between the City of Philadelphia and The Franklin Institute and “…and its commitment to inquiry-based science, SLA provides a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship“.

Educon is a three-day conference which draw presenters from around the country and around the world. You are very likely to see people like Will Richardson (@willrich45) and Gary Stager (@garystager) in the halls talking between sessions with attendees and giving presentations of their own (see below).  The conference’s guiding principles are:

  1. Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members
  2. Our schools must be about co-creating – together with our students – the 21st Century Citizen
  3. Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around
  4. Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate
  5. Learning can – and must – be networked

It is this last point… that “Learning can – and must – be networked” that I think is one of the best parts of the conference and learning.

I attended three-hour and a half sessions from Constructivism to Social Media PD to New Media Literacies and learned something from all of them.

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Who owns the data in your school?

Posted on 01/24/2012 by William Stites

[Part 3 in a series on institutional data]

When an address change comes into your school who owns and enters that data into your system(s)? When standardized testing scores come in, who enters the data? If an alum, who is also a parent has a new email address who makes the change? Which system(s) are involved? How are changes communicated and shared?

When you are trying to make sense of the flow of information within a school you need to be clear about whose responsibility it is and who (domain) owns the information.  In an earlier post (Defining Data Domains for Entry, Ownership and Support) I tried to define the different data domains with a school and answer the question of who owns the data… but what data are we talking about.

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Posted in Administration & Management, Data Management, Schools | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Is there an educational rationale for BYOD programs?

Posted on 01/22/2012 by William Stites

I spent the morning pouring over a number of blog and ISED listserv posts to try to catch up on the latest talk around the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device or BYOT – Technology) debate in education.

I found many comments and questions about support, requirements, a common set of applications, web-based applications and services, along with mention of how a BYOD moves things to a more student-centered approach as the device is of their own choosing.

For our 1:1 Learning Initiative we spent a lot of time talking through the reasons we were going down the road of providing every student with a device.  We wanted to be sure we were talking the learning first, not about the device.  Our focus would be on the learning process and how we would support that through training, professional development and teaching.

We went through a “Strawman” exercise where we looked at three options for our program before making our choice: standardized, a minimum system configuration and a BYOD approach.  We used this approach to play out each of the scenarios for these three program options, eventually adopting a standardized model.

We were very deliberate in how we talked about the program, referring to it as our 1:1 Learning Initiative.

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Posted in 1to1, Administration & Management, Schools | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Pressing Pause on Lion

Posted on 01/21/2012 by William Stites

[UPDATED – 1/26/2012]

There is doing something and doing something right.

When you take on any project, particularly one effecting 1000+ people you better make sure you’re doing it as right as possible.

My school is a year and a half into our 1:1 Initiative.  We provided every faculty member and student (grades 4-12) with a Macbook Pro computer and a 500GB hard drive for TimeMachine backups.  Everyone is an administrator on their own machine – which as one of my techs (@damienbarrett) will always point out to me is part of the problem.  We don’t let student plug their machines into power while in the classroom (not enough outlets & fire hazard) and require that they come to school with their machines fully charged each day, expecting that charge to last the entire day.  We also said that we would keep the machines as up-to-date as possible with the latest OS and software.  As we want to have these machines be the users primary device we want their access to the machine to be as close to 24/7/365 as possible.

To keep to those last goals of power expectations, up-to-date OS and software, along with as close to 24/7/365 access as possible we planned to spend two weeks replacing the battery in every machine along with upgrade to OS from Snow Leopard to Lion.  We figured we would be able to do this over a two-week period, doing a grade level per day (65-105 machine per day).

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I say 1:1, you say…

Posted on 01/20/2012 by William Stites

NOTE: Originally posted on the Educational Collaborators blog on 1/18/2012 – Update for Ultrabooks below – 1/21/2012.

When you hear people talking about a 1:1 program they could be talking about a lot of different things.

A few years ago what you’d hear people discussing is laptops verse stylus-based tablets (“old school”) and whether do go Mac or PC.

Today’s conversations includes the these things, plus: models of ownership and the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device or BYOT – Technology) model, which includes a whole host of options; the type of device, including the “new school” tablets, the iPad and Android based devices; the addition of Linux, Chrome and iOS in the OS debate.

All of these things are in addition to the conversations around learning goals and the reasons for implementing a 1:1 program.  These conversations allow you to plan professional development and the infrastructure pieces that need to be in place to support any of the choices you make.

Let’s briefly look at each of these.

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