Dangerously Irrelevant

TIES - Final thoughts

A few final notes about the TIES conference...

1. The highlight of the conference for me was the hour I got to spend hanging out with Dr. Jim Hirsch, Assistant Superintenent for Technology and Academic Services, Plano (TX) Independent School District. Jim and I talked about a variety of topics, including the need for better technology leadership training for K-12 administrators (surprise!), the difficulty of influencing policymakers, and the potential power of federal (or foundation) investment in free, high-quality, wiki-based, multimedia textbooks. I’ll blog on this latter issue sometime soon.
2. As you know, I like to brag about the people and organizations that intersect with CASTLE. Two of our alumni were honored at the TIES conference. Matt Oswald, a math teacher at Stillwater (MN) Area High School and a member of our third School Technology Leadership cohort, was recognized as a TIES Exceptional Teacher this year. Lisa Finsness, Director of Instructional Media and Technology for the Osseo (MN) Area Schools and a member of our first cohort, was selected as the TIES / Palm, Inc. District Technology Leader of the year. Kudos to both Lisa and Matt!
3. Tim Wilson noted that TIES was very Web 1.0: very few folks tagging or blogging along with the conference. I agree with him that this was disheartening. As Amy Hendrickson noted in her comment to Tim’s post (about my administrative blogging session), many attendees are just now learning what blogs are, how they work, etc. These folks are the ones that actually attended our state ed tech conference; I shudder to think about the folks that didn’t even come.
4. Finally, several people, including Doug Johnson and Miguel Guhlin, said really nice things about my TIES presentations. Thanks.

That’s it from me for this year’s conference. We’ll see where we are next year at this time!

Random thoughts on a Friday

A few random thoughts that have traveled through my brain today...

1. Next week I am giving two presentations at the Minnesota educational technology (TIES) conference. One is on administrator blogging. One of the new bloggers from our Principal Blogging Project, a principal who works in one of the wealthiest, high-achieving suburban school districts in the country, was going to Skype in with a webcam and talk to the audience for 10 minutes about his experiences as a principal new to blogging. He just e-mailed me to cancel - one of the reasons, he was chagrined to admit, is that there isn't a single webcam in the entire district. Yikes!
2. After reading David Warlick's post (and the accompanying comments) on 'fencing in the learning,' I am struck by how many different reasons we educators can come up with for not putting kids' needs first. As David said long ago, instead of asking What should we reasonably expect our education system to achieve in the next ten years?, we should be asking What should today’s children reasonably expect from our education system over the next ten years? Like David, I too think that our children have every reason to expect a lot more. If you haven't yet read The Rise of the Creative Class, check out the first few chapters and then think about this issue again after doing so. Or, alternatively, go watch Consuela Molina's video on digital kids in analog schools. I'm not just picking on K-12 here; it's just as bad, if not worse, in academia.
3. Sometimes people are too touchy. Let the little stuff go, I say. Don't we have bigger things on which to expend our mental energy?
4. If my 6-year-old can learn how to Skype me, and if a blog post is literally as easy as sending an e-mail, and if editing a wiki can be as simple as clicking on the Edit button, can someone remind me again what the learning barriers for adult teachers and administrators are to using these kinds of Web 2.0 tools?

Thankful - Part 2

Yesterday I posted about some folks for whom I'm thankful. I have a few others to add that are a little more local. In addition to those I mentioned yesterday, I'm also thankful for...

• my students, particularly those in our School Technology Leadership graduate certificate program. They stretch me professionally in ways I could never imagine and I am regularly recharged by their dedication, their energy, and their enthusiasm.
• Joan, my CASTLE co-director, and the faculty in my department. Five years ago I said “Why don’t we apply to the U.S. Department of Education’s most competitive grant program to create the country’s first technology leadership graduate program?” None of them even blinked at the notion, and I have enjoyed that unblinking support ever since.
• the many, many wonderful educators with whom I have gotten to work across the state of Minnesota. My academic life would be much less rewarding without the opportunities that I have had to roll up my sleeves and get into schools to help with the difficult work of making meaningful change for the benefit of kids.

Of course the folks for whom I am most thankful are the members of my family. My kids don't always understand why I'm away sometimes ("when will Daddy be home?") but their unrelenting love and support are constants. They also are some of the few folks that really, truly understand that my "work" is anything but.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Thankful

In the past few weeks I have received thank you notes from three current or former students. Here's one example:

During this week of giving thanks, I am certainly thankful to have you as an instructor, advisor and part of my doctoral program. I have learned so much from you and you have inspired in me a stronger interest in technology than I had before. You have also reinforced my love of learning, which I came into the program with, but your classes were (and are) the challenge and the spark that keeps me wanting to know more. Thank you for all you do. I appreciate you more than you'll know.

Of course this note made my day! Like K-12 teachers, it's always great for us professors to hear positive comments from students, particularly after they've left the program and are out in the world.

So this recent flurry of unexpected gratitude got me thinking... for whom am I thankful this Thanksgiving season?

Read the rest of this post at the TechLearning blog.

RFID chips and schoolkids

Miguel took exception to my ISTE point/counterpoint article on using RFID chips to monitor schoolchildren in school. I knew my stance would be controversial when I wrote the piece, so I'll take this opportunity to respond to Miguel's criticisms. Here's my thinking, using the Brittan Elementary (Sutter, CA) program as an example...

1. There's nothing on the RFID chips except a number. No demographic information. No address information. No personally-identifiable information whatsoever. Nothing except a unique ID number that's meaningful only to the specialized school software that matches kids with attendance records (and, maybe later, lunch records). There's a big difference between the information stored on the kids' RFID cards and what was on the British passports. Anyone who stole the info from the kids' RFID chips literally would get bupkis...
2. We already have to monitor the whereabouts of kids on school grounds at all times. There is no right of students to roam freely. As such, I'll stick by my argument that using technology to do this instead of expensive human personnel is at least arguably defensible.
3. Given #1 and #2, that's why I said that RFID chips as used in Brittan Elementary are a non-issue. They're no more invasive than student IDs (with or without bar codes) or biometric readers for school cafeterias or libraries. They're arguably less invasive than networked security cameras, metal detectors, drug dog sniffs, or extracurricular students' urine testing for illegal substances, all of which are commonplace.
4. Finally, I'm wary of the slippery slope argument that Miguel use ("RFID chips ... are a precedent for using technology in ways that violate our privacy"). If we decide to go down this path, wouldn't we also be against Internet cookies, secure login databases for financial web sites, GPS in cars/cell phones, Internet form-filling software, toll booth passcards, biometric scanners, security cameras, and all of the other technologies I mention in my article? Why is RFID so different than these other technologies?

The students who take my school law courses would tell you that I'm actually a pretty strong privacy advocate. That said, I also recognize that, as technology-using individuals, we make choices every day to sacrifice privacy for convenience. That trend is only going to intensify as the benefits of divulging certain types of information outweigh whatever privacy concerns most folks have.

We need to be careful to protect students' private information from theft and other improper uses. That said, I'm not sure that a meaningless number on a students' RFID chip is the red flag that others make it out to be.

Be active. Be involved.

Although this quote from Worldchanging doesn't pertain directly to education or educational technology, I thought it was pretty relevant to what we're trying to make happen in the next few years...

Check out the WorldChanging web site. It's pretty nifty.

Fear

The day after Halloween is probably a good day to write about fear.

I just finished reading The Culture of Fear by Barry Glassner. In this highly-acclaimed book, Glassner points out that Americans spend vast amounts of time, energy, and mental space fearing the wrong things. For example, airline accidents (22 deaths last year) receive much more media attention than the dangers of everyday driving (43,443 deaths last year) (see NTSB, 2006). We spend billions of dollars trying to curb illegal drug use but spend less than 1 percent of the nation’s antidrug budget on curbing prescription drug abuse, which accounts for over half of drug-related medical issues and deaths (Glassner, 1999, pp. 131–132). Teen pregnancies are labeled as America’s “most serious social problem” despite the fact that teenage birth rates are declining and that the highest teenage birth rates were in the 1950s (p. 93). We are more alarmed about homicides (11th-ranked cause of death) than about heart disease (leading cause of death) (pp. xx-xxi). We spend enormous sums of money responding to public panics over low-frequency incidents like operating table fires or flesh-eating bacteria or the dangers of vaccines or sexual abuse by daycare providers or razor blades in Halloween apples while poverty and low levels of education and unhealthy diets continue to have significantly greater impacts on our daily lives. We worry about road rage rather than drunk drivers. And so on.

In education, we too are often ruled by fear.

Read the rest of this post at the TechLearning blog.

ISLLC revisions

Forty-one states use the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards for School Leaders as the model for their administrator certification and preparation programs. The ISLLC standards currently are under revision and input is being solicited regarding needed modifications. Here is the note I sent Dr. Nona Prestine about ISLLC:

As Director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), I would like to see ISLLC better reflect the technology leadership-related needs of school administrators. All sectors of society are being radically and rapidly transformed as a result of digital information and communication technologies. Although K-12 schools are moving more slowly on this front than other societal sectors, nonetheless I think that any standards document that is meant to guide administrative preparation and practice for the next decade or so must explicitly recognize the unique leadership challenges and considerations related to digital technologies.

When I say there needs to be a greater and explicit focus on technology leadership, I'm not talking about skills training (e.g., how to use PowerPoint or a PDA). I'm talking about the leadership necessary to facilitate effective and appropriate technology usage by teachers and students; efficiently utilize administrative technology systems to run the organization, communicate with stakeholders, and organize data; understand important legal, ethical, and policy issues; adequately support employee technology usage; and so on. In short, the leadership skills necessary to create schools that are adequately preparing students to live in what we know will be a technology-suffused, globally-interconnected world.

If you have some thoughts or beliefs about what administrative standards ought to look like for the next decade or two, I strongly suggest that you send Dr. Prestine a note of your own. Feel free to cc me - mcleod@umn.edu - I’d love to see what you say!

Gallup questions

It's important to acknowledge when you have made a mistake. I made one that I definitely should have caught - as an attorney, I'm a little embarrassed about this one.

Michael Ayers of The Commonwealth Practice, Ltd. has helped me determine that the twelve Gallup questions I posted about in Are schools vibrant workplaces? are actually copyrighted by The Gallup Organization with the United States Copyright Office. Not only are the questions under copyright, apparently they're big business for Gallup. Gallup even sued another company to prevent it from using the questions in its own work with corporations. Apparently they're not just any questions, they're THE questions that corporations should ask to retain talented employees. Companies pay Gallup to administer employee surveys and/or for permission to use the questions. This means that I can't host an online survey for a school organization that wanted to ask its employees these questions without getting Gallup's permission first.

I don't usually find copyright issues very interesting, but this one has been illuminating for me (I guess because of my personal involvement). As an attorney, I think it's interesting to hear that Gallup is so protective of those questions. As I told Michael in an e-mail exchange, I think the concept of being able to copyright sentences or statements is a strange one. For example, could someone lay claim to the phrases, "How are you doing?" or "What do you think are the biggest challenges facing your organization?" It's not like this is a marketing / branding / commercial slogan ("Where's the beef?").

Nonetheless, even under a four-factor copyright analysis, Gallup would win if I used these questions without permission and it decided to sue me in court. It has an economic interest in this set of questions, one that's apparently large enough to justify it going all the way to the federal Eighth Circuit Court (one level below the United States Supreme Court) to uphold its claim.

Obviously I wasn't trying to set myself up in economic competition with Gallup. Indeed, I was actually trying to plug the concepts behind the questions and the book by Buckingham and Coffman (which is excellent, by the way, if you're interested in company climate / employee satisfaction issues).

In the end, it's too bad this is true. Schools aren't going to pay Gallup for this but some of them would really benefit from the information. It may be possible that I can work something out with Gallup for the occasional request by a K-12 organization.

So read the book if this is the kind of thing that interests you. It's superb. And please support Creative Commons.

We need DDDM evaluation panel participants

See below - a message I sent out over a few listservs - thought I'd post it here too. Please forward on to others and consider participating yourself (if appropriate). Do some good - earn $50!

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Dear colleagues,

We are looking for teachers, principals, assessment directors, and district technology coordinators who are interested in formative assessment and are willing to participate in an evaluation panel. The purpose of the panel is to review and contribute to the design of a formative assessment tool. This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Education - its purpose is to design an affordable tool that would assist teachers with data collection and analysis on teacher-created and other formative assessments to help improve student achievement.

Each session will be no more than 1 hour long and will be conducted via webcast. Educators will receive a $50 stipend for participating.

Teachers from all subject areas are welcome. Sessions will be conducted in early October and early November. Please view the schedule at the end of this message for exact dates and times.

Educators can participate from home or from school. To participate in the webcast, each participant will need a phone to call into the discussion (toll-free) and a computer to see the presentation. Most individuals should be able to easily get into the web conference, but you may wish to check these system requirements:

• A stable 56k, cable modem, ISDN, DSL, or better Internet connection
• For Windows users: Internet Explorer 5.0 or newer, Netscape 6.0 or newer, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or newer (JavaScript and Java enabled)
• For Mac OS X users: Safari 1.3 or newer, Firefox 1.5 or newer on PowerPC G3/G4/G5, Firefox 1.5.0.2 or newer on Intel (JavaScript and Java enabled)

If you are interested in participating, please reply to this e-mail as soon as possible by clicking the reply button and typing in your answer to each of the questions below - please address your e-mail to amuller@4roi.com. A confirmation message with the toll-free phone number and the web link you need to access the webcast will be sent to you.

• Your name?
• Your position? (teacher, principal, assessment director, district technology coordinator)
• If a teacher or principal, are you in an elementary, middle or high school?
• If you are a teacher, what subject do you teach?
• In what state are you located?
• Session date/time that is your 1st preference? (see below)
• Session date/time that is your 2nd preference? (see below)

Thank you in advance for your assistance with this important project that aims to create helpful tools to meet educators’ data-driven accountability needs. Please share this message freely with other educators.

Dr. Scott McLeod, Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota

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Session Dates / Times (all times Eastern)

Elementary School Teachers:

Oct 16 - 7:30 to 8:30 PM EST 

Oct 17 - 8:30 to 9:30 AM EST 

Oct 23 - 7:30 to 8:30 AM EST

Oct 25 - 9:30 to 10:30 AM EST

Nov 6 - 7:30 to 8:30 AM EST

Nov 8 - 9:30 to 10:30 AM EST

Nov 9 - 8:30 to 9:30 AM EST

Nov 10 - 10:30 to 11:30 AM EST

Nov 13 – 7:30 – 8:30 PM EST

Middle School/ Jr. High Teachers:

Oct 16 - 8:30 to 9:30 AM EST

Oct 16 - 7:30 to 8:30 PM EST 

Oct 17 - 10:30 to 11:30 AM EST

Oct 23 - 9:30 to 10:30 AM EST

Nov 8 - 7:30 to 8:30 AM EST

Nov 9 - 10:30 to 11:30 AM EST

Nov 10 - 8:30 to 9:30 AM EST

Nov 13 – 7:30 – 8:30 PM EST

High School Teachers:

Oct 16 - 3:30 to 4:30 PM EST

Oct 17 - 6:30 to 7:30 PM EST

Oct 23 – 8:30 – 9:30 PM EST

Nov 13 - 3:30 to 4:30 PM EST

Nov 14 - 5:30 to 6:30 PM EST

Nov 15 - 4:30 to 5:30 PM EST

Nov 16 - 8:30 to 9:30 PM EST

Principals:

Oct 16 - 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST

Oct 24 – 6:30 – 7:30 PM EST

Nov 13 - 10:00 to 11:00 AM EST

Nov 14 - 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EST

Nov 14 - 7:30 to 8:30 PM EST

Nov 15 - 12:00 to 1:00 PM EST

Nov 16 - 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST

Assessment Directors:

Oct 17 – 8:30 – 9:30 PM EST

Oct 24 - 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST

Nov 6 - 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST

Nov 7 - 4:00 to 5:00 PM EST

Nov 8 - 3:00 to 4:00 PM EST

Nov 9 - 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST

Nov 15 - 7:30 to 8:30 PM EST

Technology Coordinators:

Oct 17 – 8:30 – 9:30 PM EST

Oct 25 - 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST

Nov 6 - 3:00 to 4:00 PM EST

Nov 7 - 2:00 to 3:00 PM EST

Nov 8 - 1:00 to 2:00 PM EST

Nov 9 - 4:00 to 5:00 PM EST

Nov 15 - 7:30 to 8:30 PM EST

Note: If none of the above dates/times work for you but you’re interested in participating, please e-mail amuller@4roi.com with preferred dates and times. We may be able to add more sessions.

Internet Resources

I have enjoyed serving as the first guest blogger for Dangerously Irrelevant.  I have benefited from the time to reflect on issues relevant to technology leadership in schools and I am reminded that thoughtful reflection takes time, something that many of us do not have much of.  I am going to use my last blog referencing a few websites that I have used in my teaching and service work with school leaders and teachers.  I am sure you have seen some of these, but I hope this introduces some of you to new and useful sites. As a parent of two young girls, I wanted to reference the starfall website because my daughters love using it as they learn to master reading.  Thanks for the opportunity Scott! DMQ

http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/

The IRIS (IDEA and Research for Inclusive Settings) Center for Faculty Enhancement was designed in response to a request from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. This national effort, serving college faculty working in preservice preparation programs, aims to ensure that general education teachers, school administrators, school nurses, and school counselors are well prepared to work with students who have disabilities and with their families.

http://reinventingeducation.org

The Reinventing Education Change Toolkit, based on the work of Harvard Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, is a Web site created by IBM to help education professionals be more effective at leading and implementing change. The Reinventing Education Change Toolkit was created through the collaborative effort of Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Goodmeasure, Inc.  The Change Toolkit helps you to: Diagnose your situation, Get quick, relevant advice, Poll your colleagues and get anonymous feedback about your progress, Read real-life vignettes from other educators about their experiences leading and managing change, Plan for your change initiative or project, Collaborate with your team and hold on-line discussions.

http://www.starfall.com/

The Starfall learn-to-read website is offered free as a public service. We also provide writing journals and books at a very low cost that can be used with the website or separately. Teachers around the country are using Starfall materials as an inexpensive way to make the classroom more fun and to inspire a love of reading and writing. Primarily designed for first grade, Starfall.com is also useful for pre-kindergarten, kindergarten and second grade.

http://www.readplease.com

Read Please is a free downloadable text reading software program (PC only) that reads any text file aloud to students, e.g., text scanned into the computer with OCR (optical character recognition) software or downloaded from web sites, information posted on web sites, etc.

http://www.tumblebooks.com/library/asp/home_tumblebooks.asp

Animated and narrated storybooks and games.

One month anniversary

I started this blog a month ago. Since then I’ve discovered the difficulty of coming up with something meaningful and interesting at least five times a week. I’ve also discovered the joy of interacting with folks across the country that I never would have met otherwise. I extend my gratitude to all of you who have helped spread the word about this blog and/or contributed to this online community.

How can you help celebrate the one-month anniversary of Dangerously Irrelevant? Simple. If you like what you’re reading, pass on the URL, www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org, to one person in your network. In addition, submit a comment to one of the posts and spark a conversation - the community wants to hear from you, I promise!

Thanks for a fun month.

The Pulse

District Administration unveiled what looks to be a very interesting new resource last Friday.

Like the Ed-Tech Insiders at eSchoolNews and the TechLearning bloggers, The Pulse is an online area where many leading and provocative education thinkers will post their thoughts on various issues and actively encourage interaction and debate. Here's just a few of the folks they have lined up:

• Will Richardson
• Susan Ohanian
• Alfie Kohn
• James Popham
• David Thornburg

There are a bunch of other folks not listed above, so there should be a little something for everybody.

The contributors don't appear to be holding back any. For example, the title of Gary Stager's initial post is BS and the Art of Crap Detection. Of course I was attracted to this post by Linda Polin: Legislate This: Integrating Technology into School Administration!

The Pulse has a RSS feed for those of you using aggregators. See you in the discussion boards!

Helicopter parents

My local paper, the Star Tribune, had an article today on helicopter parents, those overinvolved moms and dads who hover closely around their children's school, teachers, and/or administrators. Helicopter parent behavior might include standing outside classrooms listening to teachers teach, sending long daily e-mails to teachers or administrators, etc. Wikipedia has some additional (and sad) examples of helicopter parenting.

So am I wrong for wishing that each school in American had a handful of helicopter parents who were pushing that school to do a better job of preparing students for their digital futures?

Who advocates for technology leaders?

Most educators have a national association that advocates for the educational, work, and political interests related to their particular role in schools. For example,

• teachers have NEA and AFT,
• counselors have ASCA,
• elementary principals have NAESP,
• secondary principals have NASSP,
• school business officials have ASBO,
• superintendents have AASA, and
• school board members have NSBA.

Similarly, there are national organizations for state ed tech directors, chief state school officers, state boards of education, public relations officers, school personnel administrators, and so on.

Who advocates for technology coordinators? CoSN has about 500 school district / state / intermediate unit institutional members and another 2,000 or so individual members. However, although CoSN has a wealth of resources that are applicable to smaller settings, it self-admittedly focuses primarily on the concerns of districts large enough to have a CTO or CIO. ISTE sponsors a technology coordinator special interest group (SIGTC) that has about 3,500 members. NSBA sponsors the Technology Leadership Network (TLN), which represents almost 400 school districts. As a point of reference, there are over 14,000 school districts and about 90,000 public schools in this country. Obviously not all of the technology coordinators who work in these organizations are members of CoSN, ISTE, or NSBA.

While CoSN, ISTE SIGTC, and NSBA TLN all do good work, none of them can be said to represent the interests of the profession on a wide scale and/or in large numbers. I believe that this fractured organizational landscape reduces the efficacy of advocacy efforts for those individuals who are primarily responsible for supporting information technology in their districts and/or schools.

Some states and/or regions have organizations that facilitate meetings of, information sharing between, and advocacy for technology coordinators (see, e.g., the MEMO Tech SID and WKATC). We need to find a way to scale this up to a national level - somehow combining and building upon the efforts of CoSN, ISTE, and NSBA while simultaneously recognizing the need for a larger, nationwide organization. Policy, political, and workplace advocacy all stem from strength in numbers.

Coming out swinging

We know - we know! - that sustainable success in schools never occurs without effective leadership. And yet, when it comes to digital technologies, our nation's school leaders are sorely lacking.

Yes, we have a few visionary principals and superintendents. Yes, we have some creative tech coordinator / CTO types that also understand the leadership aspects of their position. And yet, at ed tech conferences and in the literature, we hear about the same dozen or so school organizations time after time. Why? Because they are the ones that have leaders that "get it." Most of the rest of our schools have innovative, technology-using educators whose potential impact runs smack into the brick wall of their administrators' lack of knowledge and/or training.

I have the highest respect for districts like Plano, TX and Lemon Grove, CA and Montgomery Count, MD. They are doing wonderful things and are providing exemplary models for the rest of us. But it sure would be nice to feel like the other 14,000 school districts in the country were doing something noteworthy too. I'm sure a few are and we just don't hear about them. As Director of CASTLE, however, I know that most school organizations struggle with the technology side of things.

This blog is intended to highlight and help with the leadership issues related to K-12 technology. We can (and do) pour ungodly sums of money into teacher training, student programs, and infrastructure - these are all good. However, we will see few tangible, sustainable benefits in most places until they have leaders who know how to effectively implement, build upon, and sustain those initiatives. We need more effective technology leaders. We need them in formal leadership positions like principal and superintendent rather than informal, often powerless positions like media specialist or technology coordinator. We need them now.

As David Warlick has noted here and here, we are failing to prepare our nation's students for their technology-suffused futures. Principals and superintendents have ceded the field to technology companies and students, and our schools are increasingly at risk of being dangerously (and ludicrously) irrelevant to the future in which our children will live.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Thanks for joining me in this wild and wonderful ride.