Dangerously Irrelevant

8 indispensable items for presenters

I’m getting more requests to come speak to groups. Here are 8 items that are indispensable to me as a presenter (click on each image for a larger version)…

1. Presentation remote

The Interlink RemotePoint Navigator is without a doubt the best presentation remote that I’ve ever seen. It has the usual functions: forward, backward, laser pointer, and “slide hide” (which turns the screen to black). But its aesthetic feel is what distinguishes it from its competitors. This device is designed perfectly for the human hand. I’ve had numerous people borrow this remote, either because they forgot theirs or because they don’t have one. I invariably get some kind of comment like, “Ooh, this is NICE. Where can I get one?” It comes with a USB dongle and a bag and, although a little pricy, is worth every penny. I have three – stashed in my home, office, and car – so that I always have one readily available.

2. Up-down timer

I strongly encourage anyone who presents, including classroom teachers and professors, to invest in an inexpensive timer, particularly one that counts both up and down. A timer keeps you on track, lets you know if you need to speed up or slow down a bit, and sends a message to participants that you consider their time to be important. My latest timer, the Component Design TM15, has extra-large digits for easy reading and a loud alarm, which is helpful to me because I like to roam around when I present and often am not near the podium. I also like the fact that mine has a fold-down stand rather than a clip that sticks out from the back. This gives it a smaller profile in my travel bag. One disadvantage of mine is that there’s no on-off switch, which means I have to take the battery out to prevent accidental operation.

3. Screen timer

I’m a pretty strong believer that, no matter how engaging you are as a presenter, listeners’ brains are mush after 45 minutes or so. That’s why for even short presentations I create opportunities for participants to take mini-breaks. Typically I’ll pause my presentation after 10 to 15 minutes, throw up a 60– or 120–second countdown slide, and ask them to share some thoughts with their neighbors. When I’m doing a presentation or workshop that’s longer than an hour, we take bigger breaks: 10 to 15 minutes, get up and stretch your legs and lips, hit the restroom, get a drink of water, check your cell phone voice mail, and so on. I have found this online screen timer to be absolutely wonderful for getting people back into the room on time (and use this downloadable one as an alternative when I don’t have Internet access). I start it up before I let them loose so they know to keep an eye on the time. This has worked much better than simply telling folks to check their watch.

4. Wireless broadband

I pay a monthly fee for wireless broadband from Verizon (and am grateful for the Iowa State University discount). I carry around this USB dongle and can plug it into any of my laptops or netbooks that have the Verizon software installed on them. Sometimes I need this when I require Internet access on the road but am not near an open wireless access point. Its primary use, however, occurs when I visit schools that either can’t give me Internet access, won’t give me Internet access, or give me Internet access but filter and block everything so tightly that I can’t show anything (you know who you are, people!). So, plain and simple, it’s my school district filter bypass and I’ve had to use it on numerous occasions.

5. USB memory stick

Nothing’s worse as a presenter than bringing your own laptop and then having some technology problem just a few minutes before your presentation starts. This is particularly true if you’re supposed to be some sort of ‘technology expert’ that others might even be paying to listen to. Almost nothing destroys that professional aura quicker than fumbling around with your very own computer! So I ALWAYS bring my presentation files on a USB stick: every slide, every video, every Internet URL. I have only had to fall back on this option a couple of times, but when I have I’ve been grateful that I was prescient enough to load it up and bring it along.

6. Audio and video cables

My move to Iowa has put me in more rural schools than ever before, many of which are quite old. One of the things I am finding i that older school auditoriums typically are not configured very well for laptop-driven presentations. Although, as noted above, I rarely pin myself to the podium, I at least like to be somewhat near my laptop. That’s difficult to do when I am up front and the laptop/projector is in the back right corner, in the projection booth at the rear of the auditorium, or smack dab in the middle of the auditorium rows (and, yes, I’ve had all three of these happen to me). I invested in some audio and VGA video cables - along with 12– to 15–foot extension cables for each. These have proved useful on numerous occasions.

7. Travel speakers

It’s rare when I fail to have some kind of multimedia content in my presentations. But it’s tough to show a video or play an audio file if the audience can’t hear it. I ask the folks who invite me to please have speakers available but time after time I show up and they don’t have any, or they had some but now can’t find them, or they have some but someone is using them, etc. So I started bringing my own. My Griffin Journi speakers are a little large and I know that there are smaller ones out there. They’re pretty loud, though, so I’m hanging on to them for now. One advantage of my speakers is that they have a rechargeable battery that allows usage without needing an electrical outlet. The wrap-around leather cover flips over and slides into a slot on the back and thus creates a self-contained stand to keep the speakers upright.

8. Contractor power strips

I usually encourage my workshop participants to bring their own laptops. I’m not threatened by their presence and understand that people can be both paying attention and also checking their e-mail on occasion. In fact, sometimes they pay better attention because they can keep one eye on things back home rather than being anxious about what’s occurring in their absence. However, rarely are we in a location that has sufficient access to electrical outlets. While this usually is not a problem for a 60–minute session, it’s a huge issue when we’re doing an all-day workshop. I carry four industrial-strength power strips in my car. I’ve used these so often that I’m considering investing in a few more. I like these because the cord is 15 feet long, which is incredibly helpful when existing outlets are far from participants’ tables.

All of this has evolved for me over time. As I run into presentation dilemmas, I try to invest in things that eliminate those problems for future events. What else have you found to be useful for your own presentations?

4 Guys Talking - Episode 4 (Jeff Mao)

Yesterday was Episode 4 of 4 Guys Talking, the new ‘talk radio’ podcast series from CASTLE. We spent the entire time talking about 1:1 laptop programs. Our first 50 minutes was spent with Jeff Mao, Learning Technology Policy Director for the State of Maine. Among other things, Jeff talked about funding models, professional development for teachers and administrators, pedagogical frameworks, challenges faced by the state over the past few years, and, perhaps surprisingly, the relative lack of emphasis on standardized test scores as measurable outcomes for the initiative. He also shared his strong feelings about laptops v. netbooks for 1:1 programs. After Jeff left us, we spent the last 10 minutes debriefing, sharing thoughts, and raising further questions.

You can download the podcast or listen to a Web-streamed version here:

• www.blogtalkradio.com/uceacastle

You also can subscribe to the 4 Guys Talking feed using iTunes or a RSS reader.

Thanks to those of you who joined us live yesterday, either by calling in or listening over the Web. Future dates/times are as follows (all times Central):

• May 11, 9am to 10am
• May 26, 1pm to 2pm

[Yes, I'm still reworking CASTLE Conversations, the old CASTLE podcast channel, which will include all previous and podcasts (including 4 Guys Talking). I'll post about it when it's ready (probably not until summer).]

Happy listening!

Photo credit: An Apple in the dark 2

The Iowa series - Wrap-up

I've had a lot of fun guest blogging over at The Des Moines Register this week. For those of you who would like to have a single link that you can forward to others, you can use this web address:

http://snipurl.com/iowaseries

Here are links to each of the five posts here at Dangerously Irrelevant:

• Iowa - 21st century curricula
• Iowa - A robust system of online learning
• Iowa - A computer in every hand
• Iowa - Invest in leadership
• Iowa - Better information

Happy reading!

Iowa - Invest in leadership

[This is post 4 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.]

Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.” This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this new digital, global age in which we now live. Earlier I discussed the need for 21st century curricula, a robust system of online learning, and providing a computer for every student. Today’s post concerns the need to invest in leadership.

Leadership is absolutely critical to the success of any organization. Whether it be a school, corporation, government, faith institution, non-profit agency, or local community group, every organization lives and dies by its leadership. Organizations with effective, visionary leaders thrive. Organizations with lackluster, ineffective leaders muddle along or decline.

Adapting our K-12 school organizations to the workforce and citizenship demands of a digital, global age is extremely difficult, complex work. We must have leaders in place who can facilitate this transition. Here’s the problem:

That’s right. The people in charge of leading Iowa’s school organizations into the digital, global era don’t know very much about either the digital or the global aspects of the world in which we’re now living. They didn’t grow up in this kind of world, they weren’t prepared for it by their university licensure programs, and, for the most part, they are not receiving adequate training or professional development for it from their school districts, area educational agencies, professional associations, or the Iowa Department of Education. As a result, they’re not active technology users, they’re not immersed in electronic learning environments, and they’re not cognizant of the radical shifts that are occuring in the American workforce.

So we have a critical problem. Iowa principals and superintendents – the folks who are in formal leadership positions in K-12 schools – are the ones who have the responsibility for creating a vision and community buy-in. They’re the ones who have the power to reallocate budgets and other resources. They’re the ones who have the ability to reassign and retrain personnel. They’re the ones who have the authority to realign the various aspects of the organization to meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment. But because most of them don’t understand what it means to prepare kids for this new technology-suffused, globally-interconnected world, the end result is preservation of the status quo or, at best, minor tweaking of our current system of schooling.

It’s important to emphasize that it’s not the leaders’ fault that this is the current situation. There’s no blame to assign here. We just need to recognize that our leaders need a better system of ongoing training and a different kind of preparation in their licensing programs. Unfortunately, we’re lacking in this area as well. In the world of K-12 educational technology, virtually all of the money and attention from the Iowa and federal governments, foundations, corporations, and other entities has gone to teachers and students. Admirable and necessary as this is, we must set aside some of that attention and training money to enable the leadership that will be necessary to initiate and sustain the changes that we need in our school system. 

We pour large sums of money into teacher training, student programs, equipment, and other infrastructure. These are all good. However, we continue to see few tangible, sustainable benefits of technological and curricular reform initiatives in most school organizations. Why? Because even our most innovative, technology-using educators continue to run smack into the brick wall of their administrators' lack of knowledge and/or training. Superintendents and principals are making decisions based on ignorance or fear of the unknown. They don’t know what it means to effectively facilitate rich, deep, technology-enabled learning experiences for students. In this kind of unsupportive administrative environment, it is illogical to expect that major changes will occur in our teachers’ classrooms.

The preference of most Iowa legislators, school board members, and funding entities is to get monies directly to students. If that’s not feasible, then allocating monies to teachers is the next most desirable option. Over time, these preferences have led to our current situation in which we are systematically underinvesting in our leadership. Until we recognize that long-term, systemic change never occurs without good leadership – and invest accordingly – we never are going to see the changes that we say we want to occur.

Transitioning Schools into the 21st Century workshops

I thought I'd share something that we're doing here in Iowa...

The School Administrators of Iowa (SAI), the state leadership association for principals and superintendents, and CASTLE, my center at Iowa State U., are working together to ramp up administrators' knowledge and ability to be effective technology leaders and supporters.

The flyer for the workshops and our wiki will give you an idea of what we're doing:

• http://uceacastle.wikispaces.com/saitraining

Session 1 focused on big picture issues: the world has changed, schools need to change too, how do schools keep up?, how to lead in an era of disruptive innovation, etc.

Session 2 (occurring right now) starts with a little more big picture stuff, then introduces participants to the Social Web (including concrete examples of usage by teachers and students). We conclude with 60-75 minutes of getting set up with Google Reader and loading it up with a few feeds so that they can start immersing themselves in the Social Web too.

Reactions to the first two sessions have been extremely positive. School administrators want to do what's right - they just don't know this stuff and so don't know how to proceed. Helping them wrap their heads around what's happening, showing them concrete examples that spark ideas that can be done back home, and giving them the ability to engage in the social aspects of the Web are all activities that help them move themselves and their school organizations further along...

Session 3 likely will focus on good classroom technology integration (what does it look like? how do you support it?) and fears / concerns (what happens when you open up your school organization to these tools and learning environments?). We'll also likely show them some other stuff that they can do with Google Reader.

Thoughts? Reactions? Suggestions?

Beware outside consultants? - Part 4, hiring organizations

This is my final post in my series on outside consultants. Parts 1 and 2 highlighted two controversial consultants, Drs. Willard Daggett and Ruby Payne, to illustrate some possible issues of concern. Part 3 delved into some professional obligations of outside consultants (like myself) who work with educational organizations. Today’s post will offer some of my thoughts on the responsibilities of the school organizations that hire outside consultants.

J. Dellicolli helpfully pointed us to the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) Code of Ethics for professional development leaders and providers. The code for providers is fairly similar to the National Speakers Association’s (NSA) code that I highlighted in Part 3. Unlike the NSA code, the NSDC code does include an emphasis on alignment with student learning goals. Note that Dr. Payne may fall afoul of Principle II of the NSDC code, which states that professional development providers should “habitually and accurately explain the strengths and limitations of the practices they recommend” (emphasis added). Similarly, Dr. Daggett’s work appears to violate Principle I of the NSDC code, which says that services should be consistent with “high standards of quality.”

More importantly for this post, however, is the NSDC code for professional development leaders:

Principle I: Staff development leaders are committed to achieving school and district goals, particularly those addressing high levels of learning and performance for all students and staff members.

Staff development leaders make decisions based on high academic standards for all students. They ensure that staff development activities make a significant contribution to the accomplishment of school system and school goals for student learning.

Principle II: Staff development leaders select staff development content and processes that are research-based and proven in practice after examining various types of information about student and educator learning needs.

Staff development leaders are informed consumers of educational research. They are familiar with and use research findings and understand the strengths and weaknesses of the research and its applicability to their settings. Consequently, staff development leaders only recommend professional practices that support high-quality teaching and learning. Staff development leaders use data to plan, assess, and evaluate the effectiveness of staff development efforts. Data may be drawn from various valid and reliable sources such as norm-referenced and criterion-reference tests, portfolios of student work, teacher grades, and student attendance and graduation rates. These data are disaggregated to determine the effectiveness of the school program and staff development on various sub-groups of students. In addition, other sources of information, such as data on student, parent, staff, and community satisfaction with schools, are used to guide decision making.

Principle III: Staff development leaders continuously improve their work through the ongoing evaluation of staff development’s effectiveness in achieving school system and school goals for student learning.

Staff development leaders conduct formative as well as summative evaluation of the effectiveness of the staff development content and processes in achieving student learning objectives. They routinely and clearly report in writing the results of staff development to persons responsible for allocating staff development resources. Staff development leaders ensure that adequate funds are available for evaluation and that the evaluation process begins with the establishment of student learning goals and the planning of adult learning activities. They also ensure that members of school improvement teams have the necessary knowledge and skills to evaluate the effectiveness of staff development in improving student learning.

Principle IV: Staff development leaders continuously improve their knowledge and skills.

Staff development leaders read widely, attend workshops and conferences, belong to appropriate professional associations, regularly consult with researchers and professional colleagues, and reflect on the effectiveness of their own practice. They contribute to the development of other staff development leaders through conference presentations, professional writing, and service on professional boards and committees.

Principle V: Staff development leaders ensure an equitable distribution of resources to accomplish school system and school goals for student learning.

Staff development leaders ensure to the extent of their authority that adequate resources of funding and time are available to achieve district and school goals and that the allocation of these resources reflect both fairness and need. They also ensure that resources are invested in those areas deemed most likely to promote high levels of learning for all students.

Principle VI: Staff development leaders advocate for policies and practices that ensure the continuous learning of all students and employees.

Staff development leaders make certain that schools provide a culture and structures that support the continuous improvement of practice and of student learning. These organizations have norms of continuous improvement, collegiality, and experimentation. Organizational structures such as school calendars and daily schedules, labor contracts, and leadership practices advance school system and school goals for student learning.

Principle VII: Staff development leaders conduct themselves in a manner that avoids conflict of interest or the appearance of such conflict.

Staff development leaders do not accept any compensation, gratuities, or favors from staff development providers that may directly or indirectly affect leaders’ judgments about contracting for services with providers. In addition, staff development leaders have no financial investment in or obligation to providers with whom the school system or school contracts.

Some of my quick thoughts on these seven principles include the following:

• In many school organizations, the percentage of staff development time spent on activities having nothing to do with Principle 1 is very high. This is a complete waste of an extremely precious resource.
• NSDC advocates professional development that is “research-based and proven in practice” (Principle 2). This is an admirable goal but difficult to achieve given the often conflicting nature of existing research, the lack of high-quality research in certain areas, and/or the highly contextual nature of education (i.e., certain practices are more successful in some situations but not others and we’re not always sure when or why this is true).
• I would guess that most school districts do an extremely poor job with Principle 3, evaluation of the effectiveness of their professional development practices. This is also probably true for Principle 6, ensuring a climate of continuous learning for employees and students.
• Principle 5, equitable and adequate allocation of funding and time, is intriguing. I’m unclear whether this pertains only to the professional development efforts themselves or whether it’s a broader call for the other supports that must accompany staff development activities in order for those activities to be successful.

Like for the NSA code, I also think that the NSDC code may not be specific or comprehensive enough. For example, here are some suggestions from Darin King:

1. Balance. Has the organization adequately researched the topic to understand the variety of perspectives associated with a specific topic? Sometimes school districts can become enamored with a certain consultant and their ideological and/or philosophical perspective. It is important to seek out information on the same topic that is slightly or significantly different.
2. Situation. Has the organization adequately researched what makes their organization unique from others? A school district needs to identify the uniqueness of their own situation to determine the validity of a consultant’s recommendations. I believe strongly that "one size does not fit all" when it comes to making significant change in a school district. We are sometimes too quick to adopt an entire list of recommendations without recognizing the local presence of the parameters that are necessary for a successful implementation.
3. Capacity. Has the organization adequately assessed their capacity to implement the recommendations? Considering change without a clear picture of the organizational capacity as it relates to the implementation is silly. There are areas in every school district that are weak and/or stressed, so implementing recommendations that rely on weak and/or stressed areas may become difficult to successfully accomplish.
4. Alignment. Has the organization adequately developed strategic and/or tactical plans that focus on specific organizational outcomes? To avoid constantly “jumping on the bandwagon” with the latest fad, school districts should have a clear picture of what they are trying to accomplish. The whole language versus phonics debate comes to mind. Figure out what you believe in, find a consultant that can help, and then make sure the recommendations are aligned to the strategic outcomes of the district.

These are all great ideas and align well with the NSDC code. Here are some additional recommendations that I’d make for hiring organizations:

5. Do your homework. As Ron Houtman notes, hiring organizations “should do some due diligence and see what others are saying” about the people they’re considering hiring. In the Google era, there’s no reason not to spend a few minutes researching proposed outside consultants. Better to find out beforehand than to have participants fact check and undermine the speaker during the session.
6. Avoid unnecessary controversy. Both Daggett and Payne come with too much baggage. There usually are other folks who can deliver the same high-quality content and message who don’t have the accompanying controversy. Why not hire them instead and avoid the negative news story in the local paper?
7. Don’t waste people’s time. As Darin noted, have a clear goal in mind. Assess the organization’s capacity to implement the consultant’s recommendations. Put into place the needed support structures to make the initiative successful. And so on… Otherwise, it becomes just another “sit and get” session with no purpose, no follow-up, and no impact. In other words, a session that erodes your credibility with the people whom you’re suppposed to be serving.
8. Don’t just bring someone in because he’s a great speaker. Unfortunately, what I often see with my own invitations is that someone has seen me present and “thinks I’d be a great speaker for their staff.” As much as I enjoy intersecting with school organizations and other groups, however, it shouldn’t be about me and it shouldn’t be that I get invited just because I’m a dynamic presenter (or because they heard a neighboring school district brought me in so they think they should too). Again, it’s not purposeful and, no matter how great I am, it’s almost guaranteed not to be impactful. Now, I do believe there is some worth in bringing in someone to “challenge the status quo” IF there’s a follow-up plan in mind…
9. Look inside. Some of your best experts already work for you. They’re already doing what you want the rest of your staff to do. Find ways to tap into their experience and expertise. Create thoughtful, structured, ongoing opportunities for them to work with others in your organization. Give them resources to increase their reach and impact. There’s no reason to abide by the old saw that “an expert is anyone who’s at least 50 miles away.”
10. Insist on more for your money. I’ll echo Gary Stager’s beliefs that hiring organizations should ask more of outside consultants. Don’t just bring us in for a keynote talk. Create strategic opportunities for us to interact with educators before and after “the big speech.” Have us do workshops, discussion sessions, training in the classroom or computer lab, etc. In addition to teachers or administrators, have us meet with school board members, support staff, and/or community members (all of which are neglected but important groups for the success of professional development efforts). Most of us charge by the day. Don’t kill us but use us for the entire day (including the evening). Many of us would greatly welcome the opportunity to interact more with your people.

This has been an extremely long post so I will conclude with the observation that lack of follow-up kills the most well-intentioned professional development. If hiring organizations don’t have a plan in place for building upon and extending an outside consultant’s visit, they might as well not even have her come visit.

Like my previous list for outside consultants, this list is not meant to be conclusive but rather a starting place for conversation. What else should I have included?

[Note: If you haven’t read the comments to Part 2 (in particular), or the accompanying conversations on the In Practice blog and elsewhere, they’re well worth a read. See also Miguel Guhlin’s post regarding his own expectations for speakers, Gary Stager’s 2000 article section on False Prophets/Profits, and my previous post, Why is staff development so bad?]

Beware outside consultants? - Part 3, me (and others)

I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous two posts regarding Drs. Willard Daggett and Ruby Payne. Both make a great deal of money and have built mini-empires out of their speaking engagements, writing, and/or consulting enterprises. Both have serious, serious concerns attached to their work. When phrases like ‘riddled with unverifiable assertions’ or ‘[as] full of crap as a Christmas turkey’ get used, that’s not good…

Daggett and Payne aren’t the only ones to experience some criticism. For example, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Rick DuFour and the work that he and his team have done on professional learning communities. I’ve learned a boatload from their books and use On Common Ground as a required reading for my data-driven decision-making class. But I’ve been hearing from some educators across the country that they feel that the presentations are starting to get stale, that there are only so many times the Faces of Hope video can be shown before it loses its impact, that after one institute there’s no need to go back for more. Miguel Guhlin also points us to some criticism of Marc Prensky (whose ideas have been useful to me).

A number of folks in the educational technology community serve as speakers and/or consultants. Will Richardson, David Warlick, and Angela Maiers, for example, do this as their primary vocation. Others such as myself, Doug Johnson, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, Miguel Guhlin, Dean Shareski, Sylvia Martinez, and Wesley Fryer occasionally do this on the side in addition to our regular employment.

What obligations do we have as speakers / consultants?

For those of us who do some professional speaking or consulting, this excerpt from the National Speakers Association’s Code of Professional Ethics is probably a good place to start:

Article 1. The NSA member shall accurately represent qualifications and experience in both oral and written communications.

Article 2. The NSA member shall act and speak on a high professional level so as to neither offend nor bring discredit to the speaking profession.

Article 3. The NSA member shall exert diligence to understand the client’s organization, approaches and goals in advance of the presentation.

Article 4. The NSA member shall avoid using materials, titles and thematic creations originated by others, either orally or in writing.

Article 5. The NSA member shall share knowledge and experience with others.

Article 6. The NSA member shall treat other speakers with professional courtesy and dignity.

Article 7. The NSA member shall limit services to those areas in which the member is qualified to serve, taking into consideration available opportunities for the member to develop new materials or undertake new fields. When unable or unqualified to fulfill requests for presentations, the NSA member shall make every effort to recommend the services of other qualified speakers, agencies or bureaus.

Article 8. The NSA member shall maintain the trust of clients, and fidelity concerning the business or personal affairs of a client, agents and other speakers who may reveal confidential information.

Article 9. The NSA member shall protect the public against fraud or unfair practices and shall attempt to eliminate from the speaking profession all practices which bring discredit to the profession.

Article 10. The NSA member shall not be party to any agreement to unfairly limit or restrain access to the marketplace by any other speaker, client or to the public, based upon economic factors, race, creed, color, sex, age, physical handicap or country of national origin of another speaker.

But these may not be specific or comprehensive enough. For example, the primary criticism of Daggett is that he just makes up stuff. Does that come under Article 2? Article 9? Or not at all? The primary criticisms of Payne are that she is overly stereotypical and makes unproven assertions. Under which article(s) do those fall?

Here are some key things that I think we speakers/consultants owe the organizations with whom we work:

1. Accuracy. Our work should be truthful and accurate. If we make an assertion, it should be based on a source that’s reasonably trustworthy. If it’s an opinion, it should be clearly indicated as such. If we don’t know, we should admit it. Can we make an occasional unverifiable assertion? Sure, but that shouldn’t constitute the bulk of our work. Does everything need to be ‘research-based?’ No, absolutely not, particularly given the inconclusive nature of educational research on many topics.
2. Currency. Our work should be as up-to-date as possible. This is tough, both in terms of monitoring numerous channels of information and in terms of finding the time to update one’s materials. It’s also difficult sometimes to take new approaches to older work; I empathize greatly with DuFour’s challenge of continually needing to find new ways to present, expand, and build upon what’s been done before. I think we owe it to the groups we’re serving to continually update our material and make it as relevant as possible to each organization rather than repeatedly doing the same schtick regardless of audience.
3. Transparency. If we make mistakes, say so. Publicly. If we’re wrestling mentally with an issue or otherwise are not sure of something, admit it. Is there a major line of research contesting our assertions (as is the case with Payne) or do we have a particular ideological bent? Acknowledge it so that the organization can make informed decisions about our work. The more transparent we can be, the better.
4. Service. It’s about the organization, not us. Professional development time and money usually are quite scarce. We can charge whatever we think our time and expertise are worth (and the market will bear), but we should be providing something of value. Usually that means something practical that members of the organization can start using and acting upon tomorrow. Oral presentations, written materials, and other resources should be professional, engaging, and helpful. [Note: I confess I have trouble with the “I was buried by an avalanche in the Himalayas for 2 weeks with nothing to eat but my clothing” or the “I was down and out but now I’m successful and at peace” speeches. Sure, they’re inspiring (and often quite expensive) but they don’t really help me do my job any better…]

This list is not meant to be conclusive but rather a starting place for conversation. What else should I have included?

Beware outside consultants? - Part 2, Ruby Payne

As America becomes increasingly diverse, many school districts are experiencing changes in their traditional student populations. When districts have significant increases in the number of students of color and/or students in poverty, they often try to increase the cultural competence of their teaching and administrative staff. And that means that many of them turn to Dr. Ruby Payne. Dr. Payne’s seminal book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, has sold over a million copies and has resulted in many regarding her as an expert on poverty.

Many academics (and others) have expressed grave concerns about Payne’s work, however. For example, here is an excerpt from a 2006 article in Teachers College Record by Dr. Paul Gorski (now an Assistant Professor at George Mason University):

A casual flip-through of A Framework uncovers dozens of deficit-laden statements. According to Payne (2001), people in poverty are bad parents: “The typical pattern in poverty for discipline is to verbally chastise the child, or physically beat the child, then forgive and feed him/her” (p. 37). They are also criminals:  “Also, individuals in poverty are seldom going to call the police, for two reasons: First the police may be looking for them. . . . ” (pp. 37-38). They are disloyal: “Allegiances may change overnight; favoritism is a way of life” (p. 74). They are violent and “on the streets”: “If students in poverty don’t know how to fight physically, they are going to be in danger on the streets” (p. 100). And, according to Payne, people in poverty are unmotivated addicts: “And for some, alcoholism, laziness, lack of motivation, drug addition, etc., in effect make the choices for the individual” (p. 148). Although research indicates some differences in child discipline practices and levels of day-to-day physical violence between economically deprived communities and middle or upper class communities, the fact remains that most people in poverty are responsible, hard working, drug and alcohol free, and not “on the streets” (a phrase that may also cycle the stereotype that all poor people live in urban communities, when many live in rural communities). These people – the average, hard working, employed, drug free people in poverty – are largely invisible in A Framework and Payne’s other books.

And here’s an excerpt from another 2006 article in Teachers College Record, this one by Drs. Jennifer Ng, Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas, and John Rury, Professor at DePaul University:

[In Payne's] descriptive scenarios, the poor are generally depicted as having a weak work ethic, little sense of internal discipline or future orientation, and leading lives characterized to one extent or another by disorder and violence. In making these characterizations, Payne seems to be unaware of the many studies dating from the late 1960s that challenged the culture of poverty thesis, in many instances directly testing the extent to which traits such as these were more prevalent among the poor than other groups. By and large, these studies found that such characteristics were not more likely to be evident in poor individuals or households. Indeed, people in poverty valued work, saving money, behaving properly, maintaining stable families, and a number of other “middle-class” attributes as much as their counterparts in higher social and economic strata. These results, moreover, held across groups with experiences of differing duration in poverty and across racial and ethnic lines (Roach & Gursslin, 1967; Irelan, Moles, & O’Shea, 1969; Coward, Feagin, & Williams, 1974; Davidson & Gaitz, 1974; Abell & Lyon, 1979; Carmon, 1985; Jones & Luo, 1999). . . . Most educators . . . are unfamiliar with the extensive research literature on poverty and its effects on children, and if Payne’s citations seem to support their own views about the poor, they would hardly be in a position to challenge the interpretation of research that Payne offers. If they are predisposed to believing that the poor are lazy and impulsive as well as unreliable and temperamental, they are more likely to agree with Payne’s analysis than to question it. In short, Payne may be popular simply because she echoes commonplace assumptions about why some individuals appear to succeed in American society while others do not.

And here’s what may be the only criticism of a famous educational consultant by a 14–year-old:

Is this how schools should be spending their scarce professional development time and monies?

So, like my post yesterday about Dr. Willard Daggett, the information gathered for this post raises some important questions.

First, should districts be spending their monies on a consultant whose work has been accused of being riddled with hundreds of unproven assertions? Whose emphasis on students’ need to change is allegedly so reductionist that it basically ignores the school, neighborhood, societal, political, and other contextual factors that influence the life success of students in poverty? 

If the poor are poor simply because they do not know how to behave as if they were not poor, then the middle class and the wealthy should not be taxed to provide public assistance, public health, public schooling, or a public sphere in which the poor might participate. According to such a perspective, neither structural inequality, nor public policy, nor barriers to good jobs, nor lack of money cause the plight of the poor; they just don't have the right story structure, or tone of voice, or register, or cognitive strategies. (Bomer, Dworin, May, & Semingson, 2008)

Who self-describes her foundational work as “the findings of a 30-year longitudinal case study of one neighborhood of poverty” when that actually means that “her expertise on poverty resulted primarily from being married for over 30 years to her husband, Frank, who grew up in ‘situational’ (or temporary) poverty, but lived for several years with others who were in ‘generational’ (or long-term) poverty” (Gorski, 2006; Payne, 1995)? Whose seminal book was admittedly inspired by financial "spirit guides" and written in a single week so that she might “fulfill her dream of ‘a life without financial constraints?’" (Bohn, 2007; Tough, 2007).

Second, are most districts that hire Dr. Payne aware of the criticisms that have been leveled against her work? And, third, even if so, should districts’ professional development work involve a consultant/speaker that’s this controversial, no matter how famous or widespread her message is?

This is important, not trivial, stuff. As Bomer et al. (2008) note:

It is well-established . . . that teacher beliefs have an impact on the ways they teach and on their students’ learning (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996; Nespor, 1987). Since teachers do make decisions and plans on the basis of their beliefs or conceptualizations of their students, students' daily lives are strongly affected by the influences on their teachers' thinking. We have demonstrated through our analysis that teachers may be misinformed by Payne's claims. Poverty in Payne's work is marked only as a negative, only as a divergence from a middle-class norm, and students who are "of poverty" need to be fixed. This way of regarding the children of poor parents has predictable and undesirable consequences in US education (Brophy & Good, 1974; Rist, 1970; Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968). As a consequence of low teacher expectations, poor students are more likely to be in lower tracks or lower ability groups (Ansalone, 2001, 2003; Connor & Boskin, 2001; Gamoran & Berends, 1987; Oakes, 1985), and their educational experience is more often dominated by rote drill and practice (Anyon, 1980, 1997; Dudley-Marling & Paugh, 2005; Moll, 1988; Moll & Ruiz, 2002; Valenzuela, 1999).

How accountable should we be holding outside consultants (and the people who hire them)?

How do you get the conversation started in a disinterested district?

Andrew said:

It often seems like my school's technology curricula are ten or fifteen years behind the curve, probably more, although our technology hard- and soft-ware are utterly up-to-date. the students feel (and are) disempowered, and the administration is uncurious about how to make technology work better for everyone — students, faculty, administrators.

How do you get the conversation started on these subjects?

My initial response (at the risk of every problem looking like a nail to my leadership hammer) is to focus on the administrators. Without their buy-in and understanding, nothing meaningful or substantive is going to happen in that school organization. There are a variety of ways to do this…

Your thoughts for Andrew?

Student-delivered PD: An idea whose time has come?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

A collection of thoughts about P-12 professional development, with a (hopefully) whiz-bang ending…

Big idea 1: Most current staff development is awful.

We have known for decades what leads to powerful adult learning and what constitutes effective professional development. Yet the 3– or 4–days per year, ‘sit and get,’ one-size-fits-all training model still persists on a large scale. Shame on us.

Big idea 2: School vision statements are feckless.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a school organization that doesn’t have a vision, mission, or purpose statement that says blah blah blah life long learning blah blah blah. And yet we don’t really model ‘life long learning’ very well. Administrators feel that they can show no weakness in front of staff or parents. Teachers feel that they must be the experts before they can ‘teach’ students. No one has tried to operationalize the concept or delineate what it actually looks like. In terms of impact on daily practice, it’s a meaningless feel-good aphorism (much like all kids can learn). Shame on us.

Big idea 3: Schools have a great deal of internal expertise.

At the risk of impacting my occasional consulting income, I’m willing to say that most districts would be better served by having in-house experts deliver training rather than paying some outside guru big bucks to come in for a day (or hour). There’s a tremendous wealth of in-house expertise that goes ignored within school organizations. Shame on us.

Big idea 4: Students are experts too.

Tapscott & Williams note in Wikinomics (2006) that this is the first time in human history when children are authorities on something really important (p. 47). In other words, when it comes to digital technologies, our kids often are (or, given the chance, could rapidly become) the experts. We ignore this expertise in most school organization. Shame on us.

All of this leads me to…

Big idea 5: Have students deliver technology-related training!

Put Big Ideas 1 and 3 together and it’s clear that school organizations should do a better job of peer-to-peer training. Throw in Big Ideas 2 and 4 and we see that many school organizations could easily structure technology training opportunities for educators, parents, and students where children and adolescents were the instructors or co-instructors. The kids get the learning power and social/emotional benefit of being teachers and leaders. Adults and other students learn from the true experts.

All we have to do is walk away from our egos and our fear and embrace our mission statements, the ones that say that we all should be learners and say nothing about from whom we must learn.

How about it? You ready to start doing this?

SETDA's Class of 2020 Action Plan for Education

The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) has been on an unbelievable tear this year. Back in February it released its annual Trends Report on NCLB Title II, Part D (Enhancing Education Through Technology, or E2T2). Previous national reports are available at the SETDA web site. You also can access state-level reports at the Metiri Group’s web site.

Now SETDA’s Class of 2020 Action Plan for Education project is releasing its reports. The first three already are available:

• Powerful broadband access for all: Breaking through the barriers
• STEM education: Achievement and innovation
• Technology-based assessments improve teaching and learning

Two more reports are coming out this month and next:

• Empowering teachers: A professional and collaborative approach
• Robust, rigorous, and right-on-time learning through online courseware

Be sure to tap into the incredible wealth of good information on the Reports, Research & Tools page of the SETDA web site [warning: it’s easy to get lost in here for hours…]. There are numerous high-quality resources available for K-12 educational technology advocates and change agents, including the 2007 report, Maximizing the impact: The pivotal role of technology in a 21st century education system.

Keep up the great work, SETDA!

All NECC content should be shareable

There is a lively conversation occurring on the NECC 2008 Ning regarding fair use of NECC sessions. My reply to the original post is below. As you can see, I’m afraid we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture…

ALL CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE SHAREABLE

I would like to see ISTE take a different stance on this. I thought ISTE was in the business of trying to make change in education, specifically around the utilization of technology in K-12 schools. How are we going to make that happen if we allow folks at the ISTE-sponsored conference to lock down content? How are we going to help facilitate true, meaningful technology-related reform if we aren't making important resources like NECC presentations available to the teaching public at large?

Instead of ISTE saying:

"Written permission from the session or workshop presenter is required prior to capturing a video or audio recording."

ISTE should be saying at the time of proposal submission (and when inviting keynote speakers):

"Any presentation given at NECC falls under a Creative Commons and/or other open use license. We encourage you to share this content with educators to enhance their knowledge and facilitate change in K-12 school organizations. Here is a publicly-editable wiki for web addresses of public repositories (such as ISTE recordings, Technorati tags, uStream archives, etc.) that may be useful to you."

All presenters - even the expensive ones - should fall under this rule. If they don't like it, they don't present.

If necessary, ISTE could help speakers understand that their own visibility, reputation, and potential income are enhanced, not hurt, by this policy. Think about the recordings of Clay Shirky, Seth Godin, and others that are out on the Web. Think about all of the TED videos. Are those individuals losing income because their presentations are available on the Web? Absolutely not. Instead, they are gaining bigger audiences and more customers precisely because they're more visible than they would be otherwise.

Charles Leadbeater says in his 'We Think' video that we now are what we share. He's absolutely right.

Given its larger mission, ISTE should be thinking more outside the box on this one.

To sum up: Instead of requiring participants to get permission to record, ISTE should be requiring presenters to give up their copyright for the good of the larger cause.

Do you think I’m right or completely off-base? Head on over to the Ning discussion and participate in the conversation!

DRAFT - Statewide 21st century learning system

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to outline what it takes to get your state or province from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ In other words, what would it take to get from our current system of schooling to a robust, province- or statewide system of 21st century learning? Here’s my first attempt at this task (click on the images for larger versions)…

PART 1

What needs to be done

The first step is to figure out what needs to happen…

1. Curricula that emphasize 21st century skills. Instead of simply adding on 21st century skills to our existing content-based standards, put them at the core of new, more focused curricula.
2. Preservice and inservice training for teachers and administrators. Training in colleges and universities. Training on the job. Regular, frequent, strategic, and ongoing.
3. Robust statewide online learning infrastructure for students and teachers. Because of resources or geography, high-level and credit recovery courses aren’t available to many students. Training opportunities aren’t available to educators. A vibrant system of online courses can help.
4. Computing device in every student’s hands. Laptops. Netbooks. Smartphones. Devices that have some power, are mobile, allow students to type, and can access the Internet.
5. Statewide no-cost or low-cost broadband wireless access. High-speed wireless in every corner of the state.
6. P-20 coordination, cooperation, and vertical articulation. Curricular, programmatic, workforce development, and other alignment across the P-20 spectrum.

Environmental supports

Some supports need to be in place to facilitate effective implementation…

1. Federal, state, and local laws, policies, and funding support. A thoughtful, helpful array of legal, policy, and funding supports for what needs to be done.
2. Monitoring, assessment, and evaluation. Regular, frequent, ongoing. To inform practice, not just for accountability.
3. Mindset shift. The digital, global age is here. It’s time to learn how to survive and thrive in it rather than being afraid of it or ignoring it.

PART 2

Marketing

There’s also a marketing piece to this. Who needs to be informed about what needs to be done in order to facilitate a broad base of support and buy-in?

1. Parents and community members
2. School board members and P-12 educators
3. Postsecondary faculty and officials
4. Employers
5. Legislators and policymakers
6. Media

PART 3

Cost

I’m working on this part…

YOUR INPUT IS DESIRED

I could use some help on this not-so-theoretical assignment. This is a draft. I need a final version by November 5.

• What would your system look like? How would you organize things differently? What did I leave out?
• How can we calculate some rough, back-of-the-envelope costs of these activities (e.g., just how much would it cost to get wireless broadband across the state)? I could really use some assistance costing this out.
• How is my thinking flawed? What am I forgetting? What is particularly important to emphasize? What else should I be considering?

Angela Maiers and Mike Sansone have been of great assistance with this first draft (any mistakes or logic flaws are mine alone!). I hope you will be willing to lend your thoughts as well. Thanks in advance!

[Feel free to download and play around with these files: png1 png2 ppt pptx]

Help wanted: Digital citizenship resources?

I recently got this message from an international school:

I've organized [our] Tech Leadership Team to discuss and develop a Digital Citizenship program for our school. There are 27 members of the TLT and they will be exploring 6 elements, identifying issues associated with the element, brainstorming examples of appropriate and inappropriate use, developing guidelines for use (e.g., guidelines for e-mail, cyberbullying, social networks, piracy, health), and identifying how the concept and guidelines should be shared with the community.

1. Digital Communication
2. Digital Etiquette
3. Digital Law
4. Digital Rights & Responsibilities
5. Digital Health and Wellness
6. Digital Security

I'm looking for a good book for them to read -- any recommendations?

What resources have you found valuable regarding digital citizenship? Here’s my contribution…

• Darren Draper’s edublogger etiquette series

Not so irrelevant 013

My latest roundup of links and tools…

When did the IT staff get promoted above the superintendent?

Will Richardson notes:

[A] school superintendent I spoke with … lamented the fact that his IT staff wouldn’t give him access to YouTube and even Wikipedia.

See also my older post: Principal blogging not allowed.

Math and motocross

Check out this sweet series of motocross math videos at HotChalk. The brains behind the math? Former guest blogger Jason Dyer!

“I didn’t know Sasquatch was real.”

Fun with the Pacific Tree Octopus!

Maybe we should do this for teachers and administrators too

"Seventy-one-year-old Peggy McIntyre needs to learn as much as she can about Windows before 8 a.m. Or else."

Post-Gutenberg economics

It’s now a publish-then-filter world. Clay Shirky notes that “we’re clocking a singularity a week at this point.”

We need to educate our educators

Seth Godin says:

It’s easy to be against something you’re afraid of. And it’s easy to be afraid of something that you don’t understand.

Open your brain, open your model of education

The Education Innovation blog has an interesting post on closed v. open models of education. [Note to self: this might be the world’s longest URL]

Some good thinking going on here

Thanks to Mike Sansone, I recently discovered the Union Square Ventures blog. In Power to the People, they state:

[W]e believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups.

In Why the Flow of Innovation Has Reversed, they note:

[T]he vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. . . . [O]ne reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.

Students aren’t the only ones missing the big picture

The Florida Department of Education is concerned that students are missing the big picture when it comes to science. A task force stated that “teachers should provide a broader focus on scientific concepts and process in a 'big picture' sense.” Hmmm… I wonder if that means the Department is going to narrow down the list of required science standards and also pare down the size of approved textbooks. I’m guessing not. Download the full report if you dare.

Disempowered today = disempowered tomorrow

I left this comment at Jim Gates’ Tipline blog:

Students who aren't fluid technology users today will be the low-wage workers and disempowered citizens of tomorrow.

I want it right THERE

Finally, if you’re anal-retentive about your Windows taskbar like I am, check out Taskbar Shuffle.

Survey results - It's the first day of school (2008)!

About a month ago, I posted my annual Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist and wondered (again) if schools had made any progress since the previous year. This year I also invited readers to fill out an online survey rating their own school organizations. I am pleased to announce that 125 of you took me up on the offer. Here are the results!

As you can see from the mean responses for the items on the checklist, participants rated staff development and principals’ understanding lowest of the ten items (note: clicking on each image gets you a larger version).

While participants felt fairly positively about their infrastructure, I thought that the modes show quite clearly that we have a long way to go in other areas:

I also looked at the distribution of responses within each item. For example, over 70% of the participants gave low responses to their district’s technology integration-related staff development.

I also plotted the responses for each item individually. As expected, the staff development item had the most skewed distribution. 

Finally, I calculated simple correlations for the items. The strongest correlation (.726) existed for the technology plan and vision items (Q8 and Q10).

Here are the results in various downloadable formats. These results include a number of additional charts.

• PowerPoint
• Acrobat PDF
• Excel (raw data)

Feel free to use the results to spark some conversation in your school organization. If you want me to host this online survey for your school or district, let me know!

Advice (and a video) for those just starting

Angela Maiers asked “What advice do you have for those just starting?” Here was my response:

Start with a RSS reader. Seed it with a few select feeds of interest (some professional, some personal). Read. Read some more. Read some more. Click on a few hyperlinks in what you're reading. Leave a comment or two. Return to see if anyone responded to your comment. Read some more. Click on some more hyperlinks. Leave some more comments. Start to participate in the conversation. Read some more. And learn the power of the interactive, social Web...

Also check out David Truss’ new video, which is making the rounds of the edublogosphere:

As I said over at Angela’s blog, the video is extremely well done and, as a techie, I like it a lot. But I also know that there are going to be LOTS of people whose reaction to David’s video is going to be

I DON'T WANT to be that connected.

I’ve added David’s video to the Moving Forward wiki. See also Nathan Lowell’s video, Welcome to Your World!

What's the best way to ensure mastery of low-level content?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

State and federal accountability schemes require that students master low-level academic content. Our decisions regarding how we structure our instruction to facilitate student mastery of that content strike to the very heart of what we believe about teaching and learning. To facilitate conversations about this issue, I made a short video:

What do you believe is the best way to structure instruction to ensure student content mastery?

Music credit: Safe Passage, Freeplay Music

Best online resources for information and/or media literacy?

Last week I had a brand new middle school teacher ask me what the best online resources were for learning about (and teaching about) information literacy and/or media literacy. Since this isn’t the world I live in on a regular basis, I thought I’d throw the question out to you. What sites do you find valuable related to this topic?

It's the first day of school (2008)! - Survey update

So far 85 people have completed the online survey version of the Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist. Initial results are very interesting…

If you haven’t yet completed the survey and would like to do so, it will remain open through this Friday.

It's the first day of school (2008)!

It’s the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa. The past two years at this time, I’ve posted the following checklist, wondering if schools have made any improvement since the previous fall. This year I changed the checkboxes to a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and thought I’d try something a little different…

You have two ways to participate…

1. Download this checklist in Excel. Enter the name of your school organization and fill in your ratings (editable areas are in yellow). Click on the Chart tab at the bottom, then print. Disseminate broadly!
2. Participate in the 2-minute online survey. Fill in your ratings and click on the Submit button. I’ll publish everyone’s aggregated results in a future post! (deadline: Friday, August 29, 2008)

Feel free to use and distribute the Excel file and/or the survey link as desired. If you would like to conduct this online survey within your school organization, contact me about hosting a version just for you (at no cost). Hope you made some progress since last year!

NECC 2008 - SETDA PD Roundtable

Here are my notes from Tuesday’s Professional Development Roundtable sponsored by the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA). This was an EXCELLENT conversation.

Effective professional development for educators

• Peer-to-peer training is particularly effective for teachers and administrators. Training also should be job-embedded. The focus should be the project or task, not the technology.
• Alabama has found that the graduates of their Gates grant initiative constitute the bulk of the innovative school- and district-level technology leaders in the state.
• Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, Executive Director of SETDA, asked me to talk about CASTLE! Administrators need dedicated funding, training, and TIME to learn.
• Coaching models for professional development (PD) work extremely well.
• New York City has a comprehensive PD model that includes principals, teachers, etc. Principals want to see best practices and what’s working in other schools. In contrast, teachers want people to come to their classroom, to discuss ‘what works here.’ Having an in-school professional developer works really well for teachers. It’s important to have both the in-class and the off-campus components.
• A lot of people don’t really know what high-quality PD looks like.
• Brenda Williams, West Virginia Department of Education: If you get professional development right, student learning will improve.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: The politics of cost is incredible. EDC has found that If you can get one PD coach per building, the results and progress are amazing.
• Project-based administrator training needs to involve the team, not just individuals. The principals need their assistant principals, teacher leaders, etc.
• We need to get teachers into other classroom via learning walks, observations, lesson study, etc.
• Principals need to have an actionable theory of change.
• There are a number of strong PD models in existence. SETDA is going to try to collect and then disseminate some of these models.

Barriers to effective, scalable professional development

• Lack of adequate, large-scale Internet access in training facilities. The West Virginia Department of Education forced state hotels to step up or risk losing all of its workshops!
• IT people still aren’t talking to curriculum people, assessment people, etc.
• There is a fairly large number of obstructionist teachers.
• Time, perceptions of endurance, perceptions of efficiency. Teachers wonder if it’s worth investing in a technology because it is changing so fast. Teachers have seen a number of technologies come and go [and they have resisted all of them!].
• Lack of exposure to effective models for technology-related PD.
• Many teachers view technology as a classroom distraction rather than as a meaningful learning tool.
• We don’t bring IT people into the process soon enough. They need more lead time and more involvement.
• Statewide programs have trouble ensuring consistency and implementation fidelity.
• Intentionality is important. Technology training that’s driven by subject learning goals (e.g., we need to get our math scores up) is more successful. Dedicated time and focused assessment also are necessary.
• Leadership turnover and program sustainability are issues.
• Leaders need help translating models of effective PD and time reallocation to their local implementation context.
• Content area people need to be involved in the tech training. Instruction first.
• Tom Carroll, NCTAF: Are we applying the right treatment to the right teachers? One technology PD model does not fit the learning needs of all teachers (just like students).
• Students need to be the ultimate focus of teacher PD efforts. It’s not about the tools, it’s about how it benefits the students. Having students demonstrate and discuss can be a powerful motivator to teachers. Clayton Christenson: The disruptive innovation in education is not charter schools or online schools. It’s student-centered learning.
• New teachers are effective users of personal technologies and are comfortable with instructional technologies. However, they have few models of good technology integration in their schools and they also probably had instructional technology courses in their pre-service program that were separate from their content methods courses.
• Preservice teachers do not come out of college as instructional designers.
• Steve Andrews, Intel: One of the most incredible opportunities of our lifetimes is before us.
• We need to use pride, greed, hope, love, and guilt to get teachers moving.
• Schools’ poor use of technology is having negative impacts on the retention of young teachers.

Policy and practice recommendations

• Specific guidelines of 1 instructional coach per 1,000 students.
• Concrete strategies for changing how we do business (at all levels), maybe differentiated by setting, size, and locale.
• Strategies for informing and engaging parents / community members.
• A comprehensive K-20 vision and agenda – state level and/or national level – that drives forward movement.
• Mandatory interactions between K-12 and higher education. [NCATE requires that colleges work with schools?]
• We need to pay more attention to our leaders!
• Colleges of education are not going to accept any responsibility (for technology training, outreach, service, PD) until legislatures, departments of education, and/or accrediting agencies make them do so. [U. Minnesota performance review: ‘Dr. McLeod’s work with schools is exemplary but inappropriate.’]
• We need to follow up statements of ‘It’s so expensive to do this’ with the reply ‘What is the cost of not doing this?’ We need to think more in terms of investment (not cost) and return on investment.
• We have to figure out what to take off educators’ plates (the idea of prioritized abandonment).
• Most high-functioning companies spend about 4% of their budgets on employee training. We come nowhere close to this in K-12 education.
• We need to remember the interconnectedness of the success of the whole. We don’t want others to cherry pick components of what should be a comprehensive approach to systemic school reform.

Ed tech quarantine?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

This is a picture of the Mobile Quarantine Facility built by NASA for astronauts returning from the Moon. It’s basically a modified Airstream trailer. The idea was to isolate the astronauts until it was determined that they didn’t have ‘moon germs.’ Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins stayed in this quarantine trailer for 65 hours after their return to Earth (Welcome back, heroes. Get in this trailer!).

Of course my pathetic brain saw this and immediately started thinking about educational technology. How sad is that?!

This MQF (gotta love those government acronyms!) got me thinking about whether we technology early adopters need a self-imposed moratorium on talking about new technology tools, at least in certain settings. One of the most common refrains heard from teachers or administrators who listen to us talk or blog about all of these new cool tools is “Why do I care about this as an educator?” In our eagerness to share our nearly-palpable glee and excitement, we often struggle to adequately answer the “So what?” question in ways that are substantive and meaningful to the average teacher or administrator.

So when a new tool comes out – Twitter, Diigo, whatever – maybe we should hold off for a bit before we start blabbing to educators who don’t live as close to the ed tech edge as we do. Maybe we should voluntarily follow a process that looks something like this:

I believe that an emphasis on pilot testing, experimentation, and identification of both mainstream educator use(s) and optimal training mechanisms before introduction to other educators often would help us quite a bit. Instead of turning off the very educators that we want using many of these tools, some time spent in the ed tech quarantine might go a long way toward facilitating our overall goal of greater technology adoption in K-12 classrooms.

I don’t know if I’ve gotten the quarantine process exactly right. And of course many of you already do some version of this. But I think this is a concept that generally should be kept closer to the forefront of our brains. What do you think?

105 (CASTLE summer book club update)

What would happen if you expected that 15 to 25 people would be interested in your online summer book club and 105 showed up instead? I don't know but we're going to find out starting tomorrow!

Social Media in Plain English and Mr. Winkle

I’m a big fan of the videos from Common Craft. I use them constantly in my classes and workshops. Their newest video is Social Media in Plain English:

I also ran across the Mr. Winkle Wakes video today (hat tip to Jon Becker):

Ideas wanted - CASTLE summer book club

Today we officially topped 60 participants for CASTLE's first annual summer book club. That's great! - and many more people than I ever anticipated - but it also presents some challenges...

1. It's clear to me that we're going to need to have more than one discussion group. Even accounting for some attrition, if we don't break up into smaller groups then folks are going to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of comments. I also want to make sure that people have an opportunity to have a meaningful say rather than being the 53rd person on the comment list. Based on my experiences with the online courses that I teach, right now I'm thinking at least 2 and maybe as many as 4 groups.
2. I've been playing with Lefora as a potential discussion tool. I've also considered blogs and/or wikis. I definitely do NOT want WebCT / Blackboard / Moodle or any other kind of course management system (although Moodle's the least objectionable of those three). I'd like RSS subscription capability, maybe for both posts and replies. The ability to see what's new / read / unread would be nice too (I don't think Lefora has this). I'm not sure what else is out there.

If anyone has any ideas on either of these fronts - thoughts regarding group size and/or what good tools might be for this - I'm open to suggestions. I need to make some decisions soon. Sign-up ends June 1 and we start June 9!

Anything else I should be thinking about? I'm excited to get going!

Participants wanted for the first annual CASTLE summer book club

I’m going to try something new this summer. I just finished reading Influencer: The power to change anything. It’s possibly the best leadership book that I’ve read in years and I’m itching to discuss it with someone. So I decided to see if I can get an online book club up and running this summer. If you’re interested, read on…

Getting started

• E-mail me by June 1 that you’re interested in participating
• Buy the book!

Commitments

• Keep up with the reading
• Be an active participant in our online discussion area
• Dissect ideas vigorously but also be nice to other discussants

Schedule

1. 6/9 to 6/15 – Part 1 Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 (44 pages)
2. 6/16 to 6/22 – Chapter 3 (28 pages)
3. 6/23 to 6/29 – Part 2 Introduction and Chapter 4 (38 pages)
4. 6/30 to 7/6 – Chapter 5 (26 pages)
5. 7/7 to 7/13 – Chapter 6 (30 pages)
6. 7/14 to 7/20 – Chapter 7 (26 pages)
7. 7/21 to 7/27 – Chapter 8 (26 pages)
8. 7/28 – 8/3 – Chapter 9 (34 pages)
9. 8/4 to 8/10 – Chapter 10 and Wrap-Up (20 pages)

This offer is open to all leaders and change agents, at whatever level they’re operating (hint: might be a good summer activity for some of your local principals or superintendents?)

I’m looking forward to some powerful discussions. Hope some of you will join me this summer!

Video - Learning to change

I think I may have just found the opening video for my Monday presentation to the Ames Noon Rotary.

Kudos to the Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance and the Consortium for School Networking (and a hat tip to David Warlick) for a great resource!

Blocking the future

My latest article for the American Association of School Administrators is now online. Titled Blocking the Future, it’s only a page long but I’m really excited about it. Here’s an excerpt:

[S]chool district leaders have a critical choice to make: Will their schools pro-actively model and teach the safe and appropriate use of these digital tools or will they reactively block them out and leave students and families to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, many schools are choosing to do the latter. . . . I can think of no better way to highlight organizational unimportance than to block out the tools that are transforming the rest of society. Schools whose default stance is to prohibit rather than enable might as well plant a sign in front of their buildings that says, “Irrelevant to children’s futures.”

Hopefully this will be a useful reading for your administrators and teachers. Feel free to distribute liberally!

Operationalizing the concept of 'teachers as learners'

Stephanie Sandifer recently blogged about the concept of ‘teachers as learners’:

Rather than immediately engage in a technology purchasing frenzy, take some time to begin discussions on your campus about how to transform your school into a place where teachers see themselves first as LEARNERS who are invested in improving their instructional practice through reflection and inquiry

This is an old edublogosphere theme. For example, here’s a post by Will Richardson from way back in 2006:

In a world where knowledge is scarce (and I know I’m using that phrase an awful lot these days), I can see why we needed teachers to be, well, teachers. But here’s what I’m wondering: in a world where knowledge is abundant, is that still the case? In a world where, if we have access, we can find what we need to know, doesn’t a teacher’s role fundamentally change? Isn’t it more important that the adults we put into the rooms with our kids be learners first? Real, continual learners? Real models for the practice of learning? People who make learning transparent and really become a part of the community?

So what do we mean, exactly, when we say we want teachers to be ‘learners?’ The operationalization of the answer to this question is important, I believe. For example, I once asked a group of high school guidance counselors in Minnesota, ‘How do you know if you’re a successful high school guidance program?’ They responded, ‘When every student has a meaningful connection to at least one adult in the building.’ I said, ‘That’s great! Now, how do you know when you’ve gotten there? How do you know where you are now? How do you know if you’re making progress?’ And then there was silence - crickets chirping - because they didn’t know how to operationalize what they said was the ultimate measure of success for themselves.

I’ve asked similar questions of school administrators:

If, like 98.7% of all schools and districts in the country, your mission and/or vision statement says something like ‘blah blah blah blah lifelong learners blah blah blah,’ how do you know when you’ve gotten there? How do you know if you’re making progress? What does that look like? Can you tell me?

And, again, crickets chirping - because they can’t operationalize what they say is the ultimate intended outcome of the organization.

So what’s your answer? If we want teachers to be ‘learners’ - if that’s important to us - how do we define that? What do we look for? How do we know if we’ve got it?

If we can’t define it, we can’t recognize it / hire for it / reward it / remediate for the lack of it.

Anyone want to take a shot at it?

One year ago: Don't hold your breath

The importance of educator perceptions

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Last June, during Change Week at Dangerously Irrelevant, I blogged about Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory. In that post I mentioned that one of the most underutilized aspects of Rogers’ work was the concept of perceived characteristics of innovations (PCIs). PCIs are those things considered by potential adopters that affect how likely they are to move from awareness to adoption. Rogers noted that issues of relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and usability were important when thinking about innovation adoption. The key is that the perception - what’s inside the potential adopter’s head – is what’s important.

Rogers’ work ties in nicely with another concept that I’ve recently been thinking about: technology affordances. As Gaver (1991) noted, affordances are aspects of an object ‘that are compatible with and relevant for people’s interactions.’ In the context of digital technologies, affordances are the characteristics that let us answer the question, ‘What do these tools do for me?’ For example, the digital camera has a number of affordances that a traditional film camera does not, including easier manipulation/alteration of raw images, ease of sharing, and elimination of the need to print unwanted pictures.

The idea of affordances intersects with the idea of perceptions. Gaver has a useful diagram in his article:

Quadrant B represents the situation when the affordance of a digital technology is actually there but is not perceived by educators. For example, essay grading software can do some powerful things but I have seen educators simply refuse to believe that the software works the way it does. In contrast, Quadrant C occurs when educators believe a digital technology might do something for them that it actually cannot (ever bought a technology that didn’t live up to its promise?). In an ideal world, educators would be in either Quadrant A or Quadrant D, rejecting or adopting digital technologies with full understanding of what those tools can or cannot do for them.

Of course we don’t live in an ideal world. In fact, it’s difficult for non-technology-savvy educators to have accurate perceptions about digital technologies’ affordances simply because their level of knowledge and understanding is so low. This leads to vendor pitch susceptibility, inappropriate buying decisions, improper implementation, incorrect rejection, and a host of other issues.

Those of us who are using these tools – who are often living and breathing these tools – need to internalize the diagram above. Although a tool may fall into Quadrant D for us, it may fall into Quadrant B or C for someone else. Indeed, for many, residence in Quadrant A is quite appropriate for the instructional task at hand, even when we might say it falls into Quadrant D.

So is this all a fancy way of saying ‘don’t use technology in unthoughtful or inappropriate ways?’ Maybe. Or maybe it’s a way of saying that teachers will reside in Quadrants A or B unless we help them navigate the implementation dip that’s required to get to Quadrant D. Either way, I believe that it’s a useful framework as we think about school staff and where they fall regarding the innovations we often ask them to adopt. If we technology advocates can’t both show and persuade our potential adopters that a particular digital technology falls into Quadrant D for whatever they want to do, we’re not doing our job. And it’s not enough that the technology actually would be helpful, that it actually has the affordance. When it comes to adoption, the perception is as important as the actual capability of the tool.

Citation: Gaver, W. W. (1991). Technology affordances.

Related links

• Diffusion of innovation
• Change Week wrap-up
• The aggregate impact of individual choices
• Implementation dip

ITEC 2008 - My proposals

The Iowa Technology Education Connection (ITEC) conference each year is fairly small. Despite its size, however, it tends to bring in some really big-name speakers for its keynote addresses. Last year the keynote speakers were Steve Wozniak and David Pogue (I also had a chance to finally meet Dennis Harper, which was super fun for me). This year’s keynotes are Hall Davidson and Alan November.

Below are the proposals I just submitted to ITEC 2008. Hopefully some will get accepted. Hope to see you in Des Moines in October!

Getting your principals and superintendent on board

If the leaders don't get it, it's not going to happen. This highly-interactive workshop will focus on some techniques and strategies for getting principals and superintendents to be better supporters of technology integration efforts. Bring your laptop!

Establishing an effective online presence in an attention economy

In an attention economy - when there is more information than people can possibly pay attention to - it's hard to get noticed. Learn why an effective online presence is now necessary and how to get started.

Why aren't you having a bigger impact?

Feel like you're working hard but making less of an impact than you'd hoped? Join us for an interactive discussion about technology, school change, and informal leadership.

(In)Effective presentations

Death by PowerPoint. Everyone knows the phrase and yet dry, boring, ineffective slideware presentations continue to be the norm. Both educators and students can learn how to create and deliver memorable presentations that leave audiences wanting more!

Creativity fatigue: Is it really possible to stop learning?

Wesley Fryer has an interesting post on ‘creativity fatigue’: the notion that over time we get tired or more unwilling to continuously be creative / innovative (i.e., do new things). I agree with Wesley that at some level we need to actively combat inclinations to get set in our ways and to do things in ways that we always have or that are comfortable to us. I think a little discomfort keeps us moving forward…

That said, I have some other thoughts on the concept of ‘creativity fatigue.’ Here is the comment I just left at Wesley’s blog:

I think there's a larger, underlying issue here: 'innovation fatigue.' School districts keep rolling out new programs / paradigms that aren't well thought out, understood, or supported. Teachers rationally get tired and skeptical after years of this. And then we outside folks roll in saying 'here's the next big thing!' and their eyes begin to roll back in their heads...

Second thought: no one stops learning. Seriously. I'm not sure as a human that it's possible to stop learning. Teachers just might not be learning what we want them to (because they're not interested / engaged)...

Final thought: one cause for 'creativity fatigue' in K-12 educators may be the constant quashing from above. Learners / innovators tend to want to implement what they learn! The school systems that are set up to systemically support innovative, out-of-the-box thinking (or even simple, useful suggestions) by classroom teachers are few and far between.

What do you think?

Videos from Nathan Lowell

I just discovered, courtesy of Kim Cofino on Twitter, these videos by Nathan Lowell. They definitely deserve greater attention…

A view of 21st century learners

Welcome to your world

Free range learning

Nice work, Nathan! I’ve added these to the Moving Forward wiki…

Musings from Mumbai: Fostering a climate of innovation in the middle and high schools

ASB Unplugged is a 1:1 laptop conference for international schools, hosted by the American School of Bombay and the Laptop Institute. These are notes from a session I attended on technology-related change at the secondary level…

• Andrew Hoover, middle school principal
• Devin Pratt, high school principal
• Dianna Pratt, middle/high school tech coordinator

[the educators in this room are from more countries than you probably can place on a map!]

• Change is not linear
  • Expect both bursts and delays
• Complacency and resistance come from…
  • Being busy
  • Maybe being risk adverse
  • Perceived (and actual) threats to professional identity
• DyKnow software really takes advantage of the tablet PCs’ functionality, making it worth the tablets’ extra cost
• Key implementation stages (from John Kotter)
  • Establish a sense of urgency
    • Generate cognitive dissonance!
  • Create a guiding coalition
    • The leadership team has to be on board
  • Develop a vision and strategy
  • Communicate the change vision
    • Repetition of message, vision, goals, etc. is key
    • Lead by example
  • Empower educators for broad-based action
    • Lots of just-in-time professional development
    • Ongoing instrucational support
    • Reliable technology and infrastructure
    • Small, frequent, purposeful meetings
  • Generate short-term wins
    • Teacher-sponsored demos and highlights, tied into concept of enduring understandings
      • Repetition of this gradually overcomes the resisters
    • Teachers are asked to use DyKnow just once and have the lesson observed to get feedback
    • There is a curriculum to foster a sense of responsibility among students
      • Students carry around eggs first; if an egg breaks, the student has to go through a process before she gets another one
      • Later students graduate to laptops but have to leave them at school
      • Finally students get the laptops 24–7
  • Consolidate gains and produce further changes
    • “You don’t know how comfortable you are until you start moving on”
    • Keep stressing ‘here’s where we were 2 years ago and look how much progress we’ve made’
    • Andrew is using a blog to keep staff, students, and parents informed of progress
    • Work on facilitating dispersed leadership
  • Anchor new approaches in the culture of the school
    • Recognize how culture already has changed and build upon it
    • Foster a climate of continuous improvement (kaizen)

Scott’s trip to Mumbai: pics at Flickr, movies at YouTube.

Push or pull?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Do you respond to PUSH or PULL? How about your students and staff?

David posted last week about the recent discussion in North Carolina regarding raising the minimum dropout age to 18 instead of 16. Apparently students are dropping out in increasing numbers, so folks want to mandate they stay in longer. Forcing students to go to school when they don’t want to? That’s a PUSH.

In her comment to Dave’s post, Carolyn Foote responded:

I was thinking of something Marco Torres said today in his keynote at TCEA. He said that it was his job to infect kids with enough curiosity today that they would want to come back tomorrow. And that if they came back tomorrow, he wanted to give them enough curiosity to come back the rest of the week. I don’t think this is about entertainment. I think it’s about inviting students to learn, about creating an environment so compelling that they want to be a part of it. It’s not that there aren’t many excellent educators making a dedicated effort. It’s that institutionally, we aren’t inviting students in.

Creating inviting learning environments and empowering students to do interesting things? That’s a PULL.

The Center for Education Policy has determined that 22 states require students to pass a standardized test before students can graduate from high school. Most of those exams are more difficult than they were a few years ago. Making it harder for students to graduate? That’s a PUSH.

Education Week recently noted that some schools are paying students financial ‘awards’ for increased performance on assessments:

[T]he $110 is not nearly as much they could earn working after school. (It amounts to about 18 hours of work at the minimum wage in Maryland of $6.15 an hour.) But it could be enough for students to take a few days off to attend tutoring sessions.

Paying students for performance? That’s a PULL.

The National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools keeps tallies on the number of states that allow corporal punishment of students that violate school rules. In Mississippi, 8% of students were subject to physical discipline in the 2002–2003 school year. Hitting students for not following the rules? That’s a PUSH.

In Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, Alfie Kohn discusses letting students make real choices (rather than pseudo-choices like ‘you have chosen to sit by yourself at the table’) so that they can internalize, rather than externalize, moral development and self-direction. Giving students authentic voice and opportunities to participate in meaningful decision-making? That’s a PULL.

Which of these resonate best with you: the PUSH or the PULL? What are your primary approaches to facilitating change in schools? And, more importantly, what are the preferred approaches of your audience? Because, as John Maxwell reminds us, the true measure of leadership is influence (i.e., whether you have followers or not)…

One year ago: Narrowcasting (one of my favorite posts ever!)

Bass ackwards tech planning?

My colleague and good friend, Dr. Jon Becker, has a new blog, Educational Insanity, that’s worth checking out. Here are some excerpts from a recent post on technology planning:

There have been many great sports coaches who were successful based on a “system” they installed. . . . I think educational leaders/policymakers are guilty of installing systems without regard to the personnel. . . . In other words, the “systems” have been installed and the leaders are then forced to try to fit the personnel into the system. . . . Make the system fit the team, not vice versa.

FYI, Jon’s post references the allegedly nightmarish technology implementation at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, VA, which is the school that my two sisters attended (before the tech makeover / building remodel!) and also is the basis for the movie, Remember the Titans.

Happy reading!

Hanging change agents out to dry

At the request of her principal, Pam delivered a presentation to her staff on technology tools. At a follow-up meeting, she faced a lot of criticism from members of the Faculty Council who claimed that she ‘wasted their time.’ Rather than supporting Pam, her principal simply sat there and nodded her head as Pam absorbed the blows.

Here is the comment I left at her post:

Your administrator cut you off at the knees. She essentially set you up. NOT cool. Does she do this to others or is it just you? Either way, it should be a huge warning sign that you're not going to get the kind of support you need. I suggest you either call her on it (and judge her reply very critically) and/or start looking for another building. As an educational leadership professor, I say be very, very wary of a leader who breaks trust with you like this.

Do you think I was too harsh?

ASB Unplugged

My colleague, Dr. David Quinn, and I were invited to come help with the ASB Unplugged 1:1 laptop conference for international schools in late February. We'll be working with the folks at the American School of Bombay in Mumbai, India. They're sponsoring the event along with The Laptop Institute. Hope some of you will be there too!

At the Schoolhouse Gate: Re-launch

After a hiatus of several months, I am pleased to announce CASTLE's re-launch of At the Schoolhouse Gate, a group blog dedicated to legal and policy issues in K-12 schools. We have several new contributors. Recent posts have addressed states' teacher discipline databases, cyberbullying, students' rights to post pictures taken in class, and a boy's right to wear a dress to prom.

I hope that you will join us. We welcome all new readers, commenters, and contributors.

This stuff is too easy not to use

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I talked my department chair into letting me do a 10–minute technology demonstration to my faculty colleagues at each of our monthly department meetings. My last one was titled ‘Fun With Audio.’ It went something like this…

Hi everyone. You know how you open up your word processor software, type some stuff, and then hit Save and your file’s somewhere on your hard drive? Let’s take that same thought and extend it to audio…

[open up Audacity with the LAME MP3 encoder already installed]

This is audio software. It’s like your word processor but for voice.

[hold up tabletop mic]

This is a microphone. $30 at Best Buy. I plug it in here and I’m ready to go. I click on this record button, start talking [blah blah blah], hit stop when I’m done. Voila! A sound file!

[play back file]

What can I do with this? Well, I don’t know about you but I can talk faster than I can type. So maybe I’d like to send a message to my class…

[demonstrate a quick voice memo to students - blah blah blah]

Click on Export as MP3, put the file where I want it, and send it as an e-mail attachment. Ta da! I’ve just freed up 20 minutes of my day. What else might we do with this?

[talk about voice instructions for online course management systems, sending voice e-mails instead of text e-mails, doing interviews for research studies, interviewing local experts for department web site, etc.]

[expand my faculty colleagues’ horizon by quickly mentioning Skype and the ability to record long-distance phone calls for free; offer to help anyone install Audacity and get up and running; drop a hint that I’m going to do a hands-on podcasting clinic in the spring]

Done! Thank you very much!

[next month: YouTube QuickCapture!]

This stuff is getting too easy not to use. Faculty members in colleges of education don’t tend to be very tech-savvy. With the right approach, however, we can get them using, and thus exposing future educators to, these tools. My audio demonstration took about eight minutes, I never mentioned the word ‘podcast,’ and I had a ton of questions and interest at the end.

We can do this. Share the love, share your knowledge: adopt a professor today.

Responsibility for asking the right questions

The American Association of School Administrators (AASA), the national organization for school superintendents, asked me to write a column for its monthly magazine, The School Administrator. That article is now available:

• Responsibility for asking the right questions

In the article, I recommended that superintendents ask some key leadership questions:

• When and why do we use digital technology in our classrooms?
• How does our usage of digital technologies align with our curricula and instructional goals?
• How do we know whether technology is being used effectively in the classroom?
• What positive results are we seeing from our use of digital instructional technologies?
• What are the barriers to effective technology usage by students and teachers?
• How can technology better facilitate student learning?

What would you add to the list?

Technology usage and overlap

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

We can imagine a continuum of frequency of technology usage that looks something like this (click on image for larger version):

People use digital technologies at various levels at both home and work. We can arbitrarily categorize the frequency of their technology usage as a range of very low to very high. Of course individuals may fall into one category at home and another at their workplace.

We can imagine a second continuum of technology usage overlap that looks something like this:

In other words, the digital technologies that people use at work will overlap to various degrees with those used at home. Some folks will have little to no overlap, using one set of tools at home and another at work, while others will utilize similar software and hardware in both locations.

[There’s at least a third possible continuum: type of technology usage. However, I’m not smart enough to figure out how to incorporate into this post how people use their digital technologies so I’ll leave that for someone else. There probably are other dimensions of this as well. Maybe we’ll hear from the tech integration folks!]

We can conceptualize different individuals or job classes by using these two continua. For example, we probably would be safe in guessing that someone working in the information technology industry is likely to use technology a lot both at work and at home. That IT professional also may have substantial crossover between home and work in terms of tool usage. In contrast, a secretary might have a technology-intensive work life, using a computer nearly every minute of every day, but have a less-intensive technology experience at home. Finally, a fast food worker may not use technology much at work or at home, the latter perhaps because of income challenges. Lest I offend anyone, let me note that these are just generalizations to illustrate the use of the two continua; we all can think of many exceptions to these examples.

If we use these continua to think about K-12 schools, then I believe the issue probably looks something like this:

Speaking generally, the people in charge of implementing technology initiatives likely are high users at both home and work, with a fair amount of overlap in terms of the tools that they use. Teachers and administrators, on the other hand, probably are not using technology near as often. Also, they likely have relatively little crossover between the specialized technology systems they use at work (e.g., student information systems, electronic gradebooks, PowerPoint, parent portal software, and “clickers” for formative assessment) and what they use at home (e.g., digital photo management, games). What overlap does exist is probably mostly in the arenas of e-mail, word processing, and browsing the Internet. Finally, as we know, students’ personal lives usually are much more technology-rich at home than at school. They use many more tools, most of which are not allowed during the school day.

It would be interesting to discuss these continua with a school staff, ask educators to draw their own diagrams, and then compile the results in some way. For example, if we assign the numbers 1 (very low) through 5 (very high) to the first continuum and 1 (no overlap) through 4 (high overlap) to the second, we can think of individuals as numeric triads (home-work-overlap). Using the examples above, an IT professional thus would be 5–5–4, a secretary 3–4–3, and a fast food worker 1–1–0. A media specialist might be 4–4–3, a principal 1–1–1, and a student 5–1–1. Once the triads were determined, they could be analyzed for purposes of sparking discussion.

I’m not strongly invested in these continua. There probably are better ways to think about these two dimensions and, if so, I’d love to hear them. But I do think it’s helpful to try and diagram issues in a way that makes sense to people. If we believe that moving schools forward on the technology front is desirable, we have to help educators create mental models that are easily understandable and useful.

Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

UCEA 2007 - How national technology policy REALLY gets made

Friday was the first day of sessions at the UCEA convention. CASTLE sponsored a panel discussion on national K-12 educational technology policy, moderated by Drs. Sara Dexter (U. Virginia) and Matt Militello (U. Massachusetts-Amherst).

 Listen to the podcast! (73.9 Mb, 81 minutes)

Panelists

• Hilary Goldman, Director of Government Affairs, ISTE
• Dr. Mary Ann Wolf, Executive Director, SETDA
• Doug Levin, Senior Director of Education Policy, Cable in the Classroom

Some main themes

• In the mid– to late 1990s, there were LOTS of national funding initiatives aimed at K-12 ed tech – all were replaced by EETT, which is much smaller and more limited – today, EETT has declined from over $700 million to $272 million – in the past, the Bush administration has even attempted to zero out the EETT budget – Congress has saved the program but at increasingly lower levels
• There is a perception that the job is done
• Teachers have not been trained how to use technology to improve student learning outcomes
• Educators are moving slow – lots of missed opportunities – extremely incremental change in a revolutionary environment
• TPCK model – preservice teachers should not take separate ed tech classes – should be integrated with content-specific methods courses
• We are finally starting to get research that is helpful for policy purposes – for example, the eMints program in Missouri and other states
• The amount of education that people need is astounding – state and federal policymakers, education associations, the public – they make major assumptions about what is happening that just aren’t true
• Example: because nearly all schools are wired, people truly think that means that all kids have access to the Internet – far from being true – only buildings and teacher computers are wired – every student is NOT wired and connected
• Example: lots of money has been poured into student information systems – as a result, people think that teachers are getting data that informs their day-to-day instructional practice – again, this is far from true – in most districts, the data that are in these systems are not that granular
• You have to use sexy vocabulary – the terms of art – that capture policymakers’ attention – right now it is global competitiveness
• High school reform and other change efforts – technology is not specifically articulated as a component – it thus gets lost or left out
• Ed tech policy is still fairly immature - we’re in our tweens
• Groups like NEA, AFT, NSBA, AASA, NASSP, and NAESP are not knowledgeable about technology – they advocate for Title I, IDEA - they don’t advocate for ed tech
• The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is trying to change the conversation rather than trying to figure out how to fit ed tech into existing paradigms / models / laws - this is a real herky-jerky process
• There is not, and has not been, a systemic long-term research agenda, funded by policymakers, to answer key research questions about K-12 educational technology
• What kind of research is needed to further the cause of K-12 educational technology?
• Most education academics are naive about how policy gets made – don’t really understand the policy process – much educational research is not pertinent or helpful to policy conversations and the questions that are being asked by policymakers - we have to remember that ed tech is only one voice of many
• ETAN – www.edtechactionnetwork.org – you don’t have to get to DC – can plug in your e-mail and zip code and get resources and information – just 12 letters can make a difference – meeting in local offices back home also make an impact – asking questions at local town halls sponsored by legislators
• We were blessed in the 1990s with the folks that were in the U.S. Department of Education (US DOE) – there are lots of places where this can break down – there are not strong advocates there today – one place to focus advocacy efforts is the US DOE, not just legislators
• Why has school leadership been left out of the ed tech policy conversation and policy efforts? – historically, efforts were focused on affecting the classroom, not on changing the system – promising levers appear to be 21st century skills, data-driven decision-making, and cybersafety
• We could draft Title II legislation around professional development for administrators regarding technology leadership

[left to right: Sara Dexter, Matt Militello, Hilary Goldman, Mary Ann Wolf, Doug Levin]

Creating digitally-interested administrators

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

Here is a suggested five-step conversation plan for creating greater interest in digital technologies by your school administrators…

Step 1. Acrobat

“Can I have 10 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about tomorrow at 3pm?”

The next day…

“I am guessing that you run across things on the Web that you’d like to save for future reference. I know I do. I often bookmark those in my Web browser but sometimes they disappear and aren’t there when I return later. I thought you might be interested in how to capture a web page in the full version of Adobe Acrobat so that you have it forever in a PDF format. I use this a lot myself.”

Demonstrate Acrobat…

“Thanks. Let me know if this is something you’d like me to install on your computer. Also, I know I went through this fast, so I’m more than happy to come back anytime and walk you through how to do this.”

Step 2. Podcasts

“Can I set up a one-hour meeting with you to go over some technology stuff?”

“Sure. How about next Thursday at 1pm?”

A week later…

“Hi I brought this CD with an interesting interview I heard with three data-savvy principals in Minnesota. I thought we could listen to it together and then talk about it.”

Listen to the CD. Have a conversation about the administrator’s reactions to the podcast and how you can help with some of the data-driven issues raised in the interview.

“Thanks. By the way, here are a few more CDs with some other podcasts related to data-driven decision-making. I thought if you liked this one you might want to have some others to listen to while you’re driving around, working out, or whatever. Oh, and there’s lots more good stuff like this on the Web. Let me know if you’re interested in seeing what else might be out there for you.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the administrator.

Step 3. Online videos

“Can I set up a one-hour meeting with you to go over some technology stuff?”

“Sure. How about next Friday at 10am?”

A week later…

“Hi. I have a few online videos I wanted to show you. None of them are very long but they’re all really good. Some of these might be great discussion starters with our staff.”

Watch some or all of the following online videos together (make sure they’re not blocked!):

• Teacher movie
• Administrator movie
• Introducing the book
• Did you know? 2.0
• A vision of students today
• The machine is us/ing us
• Information revolution

Have a conversation about the issues raised in the videos, how they might be useful with school initiatives, etc.

“Thanks. By the way, here’s a link to some other videos that may be of interest. You might be particularly interested in the administrator’s guide to cyberbullying. Oh, and there’s lots more good stuff like this on the Web. Let me know if you’re interested in seeing what else might be out there for you.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the administrator.

Step 4. Sheetfed scanner

“Can I have 30 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about next Wednesday at 2pm?”

A week later…

“Hi. I wanted to show you this thing. It’s a sheetfed scanner. What you do is you insert it between your keyboard and your monitor. Then, anytime someone hands you a document that you want to save, you stick it through the scanner, give it a title and some keywords, and click on save. This saves the file as a PDF document on your hard drive. Anytime you need it again, you can open up the software and pull up the document by doing a quick search on the title or keywords. Then, best of all, you can throw the paper away! This is a great way to stay organized and reduce all of the paper that’s laying around your office. I use this all the time in my own work. Would you like to see a quick demo of how it works?”

Demonstrate the scanner and software. Highlight how quick it is to scan and save, and how easy it is to retrieve scanned documents.

“Thanks. Let me know if this is something you’d like me to install on your computer. Also, I know I went through this fast, so I’m more than happy to come back anytime and walk you through how to do this.”

Step 5. RSS [Note: I've changed my mind somewhat regarding this recommendation]

“Can I have 30 minutes of your time?”

“Sure. How about next Tuesday at 9am?”

A week later…

“Hi. I know you’re interested in woodworking and hiking. Plus you’re always raving about those pugs of yours. I wanted to show you something.”

Show RSS in Plain English. Then show the administrator the RSS aggregator you’ve created for him, with feeds already set up for woodworking, hiking, and pugs (replace with whatever the administrator’s interests are!). Show that you’ve also seeded the aggregator with some administrator-oriented blogs too, so that the aggregator can be used for both professional and personal interests.

“Thanks. Here’s the URL for the aggregator. I showed you how to open up posts in both the aggregator and the original web site, but let me know if you have any difficulty. I’ll leave this for you to play around with for a few weeks. By the way, if there are other web sites that you visit regularly (e.g., CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, ESPN), they probably have RSS feeds too and we can add those into your aggregator. Let me know if you’d like to make any changes or additions to this.”

Follow up a month later if you haven’t heard from the administrator.

And so on…

Conversations like these can go a long way toward facilitating administrator buy-in and support for technology initiatives. Too often technology workshops and demonstrations focus on student or teacher needs and neglect the very real needs that administrators have for professional growth and increased efficiency or effectiveness. The key is NOT to show administrators what you think is cool but rather what will be USEFUL to their own learning needs and day-to-day work. Remember that the most important person in your administrator’s life is herself. Once she’s engaged personally, then you have a much better chance of getting her interested in what teachers and students might do with digital technologies. Until you’ve set the hook, much of this will be abstract to her. Create opportunities to make digital technologies concretely real for your administrators. Help them feel in their gut that this stuff is useful and powerful.

Hopefully this five-step conversation plan will spark some ideas regarding your own work with administrators. If so, please share with the rest of us!

iLEAD in San Antonio

I had a great trip to San Antonio. It was fun hanging out with Miguel Friday afternoon and evening. As you can see, we are not above making idiots of ourselves (one thing to know about Miguel: he has no qualms about only asking for one sombrero (for you, of course)). Like all good outside consultants should, I helped Miguel and his team move their office by lugging boxes and I got to see their new digs next to the Curriculum and Instruction department. Miguel has a great team: a shout-out to Sue, Sylvia, Josie, and the rest of the folks I met (Malinda, that means you!).

On the more serious side, Miguel videoed my opening keynote for iLEAD and also recorded my breakout session conversation about administrator blogs. Maybe he’ll post one or both on his blog. All of my materials from my visit are available at my SAISD web page. The very best part of the trip was our ongoing discussion about how to facilitate change from an informal leadership position (i.e., one without much authority or power) within a large, complex, hierarchical, bureaucratic urban school district. I hope that I gave Miguel some productive food for thought. I know that I came away from the trip with a number of takeaways that hopefully will bear some fruit over the next month or two.

I’ll be back in San Antonio for NASSP and for NECC. Hope to see you there!

Duty of care

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

I have been reading with great interest the conversations that have been sparked by Kurt Paccio’s post on Internet filtering. As my brain has swirled around the issues involved, it has returned to an experience I had earlier this year.

As some of you may know, I was the recipient this year of one of the cable industry’s Leaders in Learning awards. It was a phenomenal experience and I highly encourage you to nominate someone for next year’s awards (the due date is January 16, 2008). As part of that June trip back to my home town of Washington, DC, I had the wonderful opportunity to hear a presentation by Dr. Tom Carroll, President of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF), on teacher supply and demand. Here is a slide from his presentation (click on image for larger version):

As the graph shows, the number of ‘entrants’ into the teaching profession increased somewhat beginning in the mid-1990s but the number of ‘leavers’ rose even faster. My first reaction was that the numbers reflected the growing numbers of Baby Boomer teachers that are nearing retirement. But look at the next slide:

Although there has been the expected increase in the retirement numbers, the growth in the number of ‘non-retirement leavers’ has been much, much larger. As the first graph illustrates, the end result is that nearly twice as many teachers are leaving the profession than in the late 1980s.

Look more closely at the x axis of the second slide. Tom noted that these time spans roughly reflect the entry of Generation X and Generation Y into the education work force. As he talked with us, his basic message was that

Increasing numbers of young teachers are deciding that schools are not personally- or professionally-fulfilling workplaces and are taking their skills and talents elsewhere.

The way that schools operate is not working right now for many creative, talented young adults. They look around at how things work in schools, they might even give teaching a try because they want to make a difference in children’s lives, but then they become disenchanted and they leave. This has always happened, of course – the statistics on new teacher attrition have always been appalling – but new teacher departures are occurring at an ever-increasing rate, with the following impact on the average age of the teaching workforce:

As the third graph shows, the average age of our teaching force is getting older and older. These teachers can’t teach forever. Who is going to replace them?

It seems to me that the issues that underlie Kurt’s post and the new teacher attrition rate are intertwined. The comments surrounding Kurt’s post ultimately revolve around this question:

Similarly, is it schools’ responsibility to provide viable and palatable working environments for new employees or is it not? Whether we’re talking about schools’ obligation to meet the future life needs of students or their need to retain new, talented educators, in both cases the issue is one of duty of care. What is our duty to care for students responsively and responsibly? What is our duty to care for new staff in ways that are embracing and empowering? What is our duty to care for young adults in ways that recognize their power and potential? What is our duty of care to our communities to adequately prepare the next generation?

Schools can’t continue to have more employees leave than enter. Schools can’t continue to ignore the fact that increasing numbers of students and families are rejecting traditional paradigms in favor of alternative learning structures (magnet schools, charter schools, home schooling, cyberschooling, etc.). If schools are to survive, they have to start addressing their underlying lack of engagement for both students and new staff. Otherwise they will be relegated to the dustbin of history as something more responsive takes their place.

Moving forward - Example wikis to use for presentations?

In August I announced a wiki, Moving Forward, that is intended to provide technology-related resources for everyone who gives presentations or delivers training workshops for K-12 or postsecondary educators. I asked readers to contribute blog-related resources and URLs to the wiki, including good classroom blogs and other blogs that can be used as models for educators.

A big thanks to everyone who contributed to the blogs page. We still could use some more model classroom blogs. It would be particularly nice if some of our ‘superhub’ bloggers could throw in a link or two. I know that many of these folks show examples to schools all the time and they’re extremely well-versed on cutting-edge stuff that’s occurring in the world of K-12 ed tech. The average educator who’s trying to facilitate technology-related change in his/her school or district could use some help. Can we give those folks a few choice links that they can show their staff as examples rather than making them dig around the Web trying to find their own?

In addition to my plea for more blog-related resources, I’ll now request some links to some good K-12 wikis. If you have some good examples of how teachers, students, and administrators are using wikis to facilitate their work, please add them to the Moving Forward wikis page.

Thanks in advance. We’re all in this together. Let’s help each other out?

2007 recipients of the Technology Leadership Research Award

It is my great pleasure to announce that Dr. Chris Gareis and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach are the recipients of the 2007 Technology Leadership Research Award. Here is the abstract from their co-authored article, Electronically Mentoring to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers:

With nearly half of all new teachers leaving the classroom within five years, schools are faced with the challenge of retaining early-career teachers while simultaneously providing them with the support they need to develop into effective professionals. Mentoring novice teachers by pairing them with experienced teachers in schools is a widely adopted practice for addressing these needs; however, face-to-face mentoring is subject to challenges. A promising complement to face-to-face mentoring may be found in the innovative use of computer-mediated communications, such as online forums. In an effort to support, develop, and retain novice teachers, The College of William and Mary has partnered with the Center for Teacher Quality to create ENDAPT – Electronically Networking to Develop Accomplished Professional Teachers. ENDAPT is an asynchronous online forum that brings together novice teachers and teacher leaders in a virtual mentoring community. This article provides an overview of the program model and presents research findings from a study of participants' postings using content analysis methodology to identify and describe the nature of professional conversations among mentors and novice teachers.

Although we can’t share the actual article with you (because it’s currently under review by a journal), Chris and Sheryl will be giving a presentation on their paper at the UCEA conference in November which we will try to make available to folks.

I would like to publicly thank the other practitioners and academics who took the time out of their extremely busy schedules to participate in the anonymous review process this year:

• Kurt Bernardo, Technology Coordinator, Orange City (OH) Schools; 2005 Ohio Technology Coordinator of the Year
• Dr. Jim Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
• Dr. Chris Sessums, Director of Distance Education, University of Florida College of Education; Best Individual Blog, 2006 Edublog Awards
• Dr. Jon Voss, Coordinator, Northern Star Online (MN) Schooling Collaborative

The Technology Leadership Research Award is jointly sponsored by CASTLE and the UCEA School Technology Leadership Special Interest Group.

Kudos to Chris and Sheryl. I'm looking forward to the submissions for next year!

Why is staff development so bad?

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog]

We have known for a long time (decades!) about what constitutes effective staff development. As the latest version of the National Staff Development Council Standards for Staff Development notes, effective staff development

• has small groups of educators working together over time in professional learning communities;
• is based on principles of effective adult learning; and
• deepens educators’ content knowledge.

Yet what does staff development look like in most school districts? Typically it involves three or four one-shot “sit and get” (or “spray and pray”) sessions spread across the year, each on a different topic than the one before, that are attended by most or all educators in the organization. A “one size fits all” model is used, meaning that there is relatively little differentiation between, say, music teachers and math teachers and industrial arts teachers. Sometimes schools spice it up a bit and have a buffet day where educators can pick from multiple choices throughout the day, much like a professional conference.

Rarely is there follow-up. Rarely is there sustained, focused conversation about a specific learning issue over time. Rarely does educators’ staff development satisfy any of the three bullet points listed above. In fact, schools make deliberate structural choices that directly violate the three bullet points above. The end result, of course, is that most school organizations’ staff development practices have little to no meaningful impact on instructional practice and/or student learning outcomes.

This is a shame, because staff development time and monies might possibly be the most scarce resources in schools. Staff development also is one of the only mechanisms that schools have for giving employees new skills and turning the organization in new directions. It’s embarrassing and disappointing that schools take this precious, limited resource and squander it.

So the question is… Given that we know what effective staff development looks like, why is most staff development still so bad?