Peter Schilling, head of the IT department at Amherst College in Massachusetts gathered the following data about the students who attend his college:
* only 0.3% have landline phones (compared to 82% of Americans)
* Half of the freshman own an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch
* In contrast to upper classmen, first- and second- year students were more likely to own a Mac than a PC
*89% of the incoming class applied online vs. 33% in 2003
*94% of email on campus is spam
*99% of freshman joined Facebook before hitting campus
Green, H. (2008). Campus Electronicus. Businessweek, October 27, 2008, 18.
Oct 22, 2008
Oct 18, 2008
Practical Tools for Tech Coordinators
This week while at the ILC Conference in San Jose I came across some great tools for technology coordinators.
Often as I work with school systems, districts do not have a good help desk system. MyTech Desk http://www.mytechdesk.org/product/ is a help desk system that is free to schools in California. It is a web based work order management system. Out-of-state schools can also have access to this tool for an annual fee of about $450. There is a 60 day free trial you can use to evaluate the product.
Another problem I often hear about in school systems centers around software. In my opinion, part of the problem is there is way too much of it causing a multitude of problems: (1) One problem is teachers don’t even know what’s available to them and (2) the more you have the more difficult it is to support and (3) a lot of what district’s have is simply not that good.
I attended Antwon Lincoln’s session on Technology Implementation: Into, Through, & Beyond. Antwon is the author of Confessions of a Technology Leader. This is a great book that I’ve read and reread on several plane trips across the country. It’s been helpful for me in writing job descriptions for districts that want to hire their first technology coordinator. Antwon describes himself as an evangelist for technology and says, “I wanted to write a book that is the bible for the technology coordinator”. During his session he shared with us a process for evaluating software and planning a new software implementation. You can download the template from his site at http://tlconfessions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=133 . One of my favorite parts of this implementation model is the part that asks those considering a new software to think about and be able to explain how it fits into the district’s overall purpose. He also asks vendors to tell him about school sites where their product is failing and why when considering software. Another great tip he gave is to have students try and give feedback on software before purchasing it. Antwon’s website http://tlconfessions.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=64 also has a lot of great resources to support technology coordinators.
Often as I work with school systems, districts do not have a good help desk system. MyTech Desk http://www.mytechdesk.org/product/ is a help desk system that is free to schools in California. It is a web based work order management system. Out-of-state schools can also have access to this tool for an annual fee of about $450. There is a 60 day free trial you can use to evaluate the product.
Another problem I often hear about in school systems centers around software. In my opinion, part of the problem is there is way too much of it causing a multitude of problems: (1) One problem is teachers don’t even know what’s available to them and (2) the more you have the more difficult it is to support and (3) a lot of what district’s have is simply not that good.
I attended Antwon Lincoln’s session on Technology Implementation: Into, Through, & Beyond. Antwon is the author of Confessions of a Technology Leader. This is a great book that I’ve read and reread on several plane trips across the country. It’s been helpful for me in writing job descriptions for districts that want to hire their first technology coordinator. Antwon describes himself as an evangelist for technology and says, “I wanted to write a book that is the bible for the technology coordinator”. During his session he shared with us a process for evaluating software and planning a new software implementation. You can download the template from his site at http://tlconfessions.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68&Itemid=133 . One of my favorite parts of this implementation model is the part that asks those considering a new software to think about and be able to explain how it fits into the district’s overall purpose. He also asks vendors to tell him about school sites where their product is failing and why when considering software. Another great tip he gave is to have students try and give feedback on software before purchasing it. Antwon’s website http://tlconfessions.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=64 also has a lot of great resources to support technology coordinators.
Oct 17, 2008
Oct 15, 2008
Highlights from Chris Dede
This morning I went to presentation by Chris Dede at the ILC Conference in San Jose. A couple of thoughts that I want to hang onto this morning's presentation are:
Handheld devices allow situated learning. Seems simple, but extremely powerful concept.
One of the biggest challenges of professional development is unlearning- “unlearning almost unconscious assumptions and beliefs and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and schooling”.
Handheld devices allow situated learning. Seems simple, but extremely powerful concept.
One of the biggest challenges of professional development is unlearning- “unlearning almost unconscious assumptions and beliefs and values about the nature of teaching, learning, and schooling”.
Oct 14, 2008
Community
Quote I heard today at the closing session, "Communities can build amazing things, but you need to be part of the community".
Oct 12, 2008
NPR Spore Feature
Great feature on NPR this morning on Spore http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95646896
Multiple Communication Streams Cont.
Yesterday our face-to-face professional development team had a marketing meeting. Three of the participants met at a coffee house together in Wisconsin, and I joined the meeting virtually. They had to move to a second coffee house because the wireless wasn't working. Everyone had their own computer. It was interesting to see how we used a combination of Skype voice, Skype chat, email, text messaging and a Google Doc to communicate and collaborate. After the meeting we have our Google Doc to refer to, but also one of the members emailed us a transcript of our Skype chat. The meeting was very productive and I would argue in some ways more efficient for brainstorming than a meeting without these tools. However, even with new technologies there is still a lot of room (and possibly increases) for miscommunication as well.
Oct 4, 2008
New Data Driven Instruction Blog
The Stephens Group has a new blog on Data Driven Instruction. You can view our blog at http://data-driven.info/ .
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