5 Essential Practices for Ed-Tech Startups

During the early days, K-12 technology was about "buying the next thing,” and the cool factor weighed heavily with decision-makers who often had more buying authority than knowledge. Today it is more often an urgent research process by a team of leaders with complicated requirements and piles of new demands for very sophisticated features, especially interoperability and data security.  If you are looking for an institutional purchase, these 5 practices will go a long way to show them you understand their challenges:

1.     Get the feature set out there. State in specific terms what it does. Post full recordings of demos, webinars, etc., not just teasers.  Post a thorough, useful FAQ; don’t omit difficult questions. Decision-makers need to get good detailed information on your product, as quickly as possible.

2.     Be FERPA native.  Address student data security in plain language, up front. Don’t leave it to the fine print. Show that you understand the problem of student data security.

3.     Don’t hog data.  If your product collects user data, provide an easy means to export it in usable form.

4.     Embrace interoperability.  Say if your product interacts with any SIS or LMS, or eco-system or platform… or not. If yes, say how, specifically.  Show that you understand the problem of interoperability.

5.     Clarify migration assistance.  Show how easy it will be to start and stop using the product, especially to export and/or purge user data.

Mrs. Gravely, and contemporary math curricula

Betty Gravely was 92 years old when she passed away this year.  She was probably the best teacher I had in 1968, (a rough year in general.)  I was having trouble with Geometry, (actually the Algebra contained within it, which I had not learned as a freshman) and she got me through it.  When I think of the new math programs (Investigations in Numbers, Data and Space, Everyday Math, Connections, etc.) and the controversy around them, I always think of Mrs. Gravely, because these programs are actually trying to replicate what Mrs. Gravely did on a good day. For instance, she handed me a shoebox for my first assignment.  In it was a disk puzzle and a set of questions to be answered about the puzzle.  There were no instructions, and each kid got a different shoebox.  I spent all evening trying to figure out the answers to those questions.  I described to the class how I had worked them out.  Other kids had done it differently, and we discussed the pros and cons of each method.  None of us was judged as "incorrect" for the method he/she had chosen.  I had never before engaged with a math question at that level of interest.  She had gotten us into mathematical thinking, which is more creative and quite different than much of what goes in the land of "don't ask why; just invert and multiply." I felt like I belonged in a math class; it was OK to be there and I was doing what the other students were doing. I began to read ahead in the math book, especially the side bars about Pythagorus and Archimedes.  What I had seen as an uncomfortable hour of marginal benefit, where the teacher made hieroglyphics on the board and spoke in a foreign language to native speakers, had become interesting, even relevant. As any modern expert can tell you, in K-12 schools, mathematics is basically a psychological game; it's all about engendering a sense of belonging in that disaffected group, so they start to put forth effort again.  The top scorers can survive traditional teaching, but the low scorers are where the opportunities are for the teacher to go from good to great. Mrs. Gravely was the embodiment of the truth that most "modern" methods are not new.

Will change really happen this time?

This short animation of a talk by Ken Robinson does a fairly good encapsulation of the challenges of K-12 education. What's interesting to me is that, for many years people who believed this way mostly spoke and wrote books for, well... each other.  Mainstream policy makers would see a guy like Ken  as a gadfly if not a complete crank.  Today discussions this radical (ADHD rant aside) are taking place in policy circles. And the tools for structural change (especially customization) are on the near horizon. Many voices are saying the time has finally arrived for the "complete retool" we've all discussed for decades.  We've thought this before.  Our old system, especially conventional U.S. high schools, have shown an amazing resilience.  I've been a part of many "school of the future" projects, from modest to mega, and the results of those years... well, it would be kind to call them mixed.  Those schools did some fantastic work, including innovative work, but today they mostly still have that basic high school structure: bell schedule, study halls, lunch period, classes where they have to "put" students who aren't going to benefit that much, stifling group pace, artificial academic tasks, disconnection between disciplines, labeling of students by type, in short the whole, sort-n-select factory shebang.

Trauma Telemedicine on IPod Touch

Rural Maine Telemedicine.... Trauma surgeon on IPod Touch...

Kahn Academy Described

I found this TED talk presentation a better way to understand Kahn Academy, and its progress as a tool for schools.  I think some educators have been hesitant to support Kahn, partly because students would be consuming, rather than producing the videos (which would not technically be consistent with constructivist ideology.) This presentation shows how such a tool can put students in the drivers' seat while respecting and supporting the unique role of the teacher.

News flash: students use technology to break the rules

I often receive an email from a teacher to the effect of "I saw a student defeat our firewall and go to a blocked site.  What is the technology department going to do about it?"  In nearly every case, the teacher had a responsibility to deal with the student, but saw it as a technical matter, rather than a disciplinary one.  I also often receive messages to the effect of "I broke the rules; look how easy it was."  This is largely a problem of school culture, both professional and academic.  We need to build a culture where people understand that doing something wrong is not made right because it is possible.  This has always been true, but the Internet has caused some to become confused (at times hysterical) about it.  Technology departments can do a lot to prevent unintended access to inappropriate material, but cannot transform the Internet into a walled garden.  It is a place where the capability to do both right and wrong is inherent.  While the technology folks appreciate information and can assist teachers in apprehending or ascertaining what students have done, it is the school's responsibility to respond to violations with the appropriate consequences and actions. There is no need for hysteria; we can bring our existing wisdom and ethical sense to the table on this.  Today, many students struggle with this idea: "I can, therefore I may."  When something is against the rules, it is not made less so by the fact that it is technically possible to do it, and it should not be encouraged, even as a way of "testing our security." 

Same old arguments

In twenty years of working with technology in schools, the same arguments always appear in posts about computers in school.  I was following this thread on a recent PBS article and sure enough, there were several posts which:

• Equated technology with bad teaching
• Described computers as a luxury and complained about the expense
• Waxed nostalgic about drill and practice in the old days, and how much more was learned back then (by the 30% of people who completed high school.)

Some obvious points:
K-12 is the last industry which makes a big deal out of using technology.  Every other industry has switched to using it.  The world uses technology to do real work today, so of course we need it to teach those things.

$250 per year per student is not much money compared to the $12,000 or so we spend on each student every year.  Kids will buy their own computers soon.  Most already do.

Learning does require practice and hard work, and wherever this is not present, learning suffers.  (It's an old problem.  Unfortunately, you can do bad teaching with or without a computer.)

Education is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.  Many old-fashioned school practices actually taught kids to hate learning (writing as a punishment, for instance.) School does not have to be like it was.

Printed textbooks will not survive this economy.  E-Reader copies can be updated much more cheaply, contain video, etc.  E-Readers cost no more than one or two textbooks now, and can hold thousands of books.  You can read them in daylight and they don't make your eyes sore. There will always be wonderful books, including paper ones, but for traditional classroom textbooks, It's over.  People complain about filtering the Internet. There is no more egregious filter than a history textbook approved in Texas and California.

Technology does not drive good teaching; it is simply necessary, as a practical matter, for good teaching in today's world for most subjects. 

http://www.edutopia.org/maine-project-learning-schools-that-work

Using Technology to End Boredom in Schools

Prensky says make school less boring

One of Mark Prensky's "Principles for Principals reads:  " Make it your business to eliminate boredom from your school—make 100 percent engagement the goal. Poll students as to which of their teachers and classes are engaging and which are boring and why. Investigate and take action."

I felt this needed some clarification: 

We can make school less boring, but not by making it more entertaining or less demanding. (Some teachers achieve it at the expense of learning, by entertaining at a higher and higher level trying to emulate Bill Nye, which probably cost $400K per show.) It’s about working the students very hard, but on something that has meaning and a real audience, in other words, on real work, instead of work for the teacher. It’s not about inordinate obeisance to their immature subculture, which we enabled when we created schools.  Its also not as dependent on technology as Prensky's article suggests.  The coolness factor is temporary.  I like this little video, which I think deals with the hype quite well:

Yeah but...

I agree that we need to change teaching and learning, and that this involves proper use of technology in education, and teachers need to be aware of and fluent in new technologies.
But...
A strong self image is worth a million retweets.
The ability to work with others and achieve a goal is worth at least 256,000 electronic "friends."
A weak work ethic is still a greater liability than never having posted on youtube.

Much of what happens between teachers and students is intrinsically valuable. Building character is still a primary goal of what we do. What I am asking for folks, is balance.

Are full sized laptops necessary for content creation?

I had an interesting conversation this week about "netbooks," and their suitability for content creation. It was suggested that these small devices are better suited to "consumption," rather than creation of media. Leaving aside the obvious question of creating in words (writing,) I thought this did not fully reflect what is happening in the visual media of journalism, (with YouTube, etc.) In an effort to learn more, I stumbled on this post from Kirk Mastin, a photojournalist who explains it better than I can. As Kirk illustrates well, the old paradigm has shifted, at least as it applies to journalism. Equipment type is no longer a barrier to content creation. If your journalism students have netbooks, or smart phones, for that matter, they can create!

Say Yes to global connections

I once facilitated a live videoconference between a group of forth graders in central Maine and one in Belem, Brazil, on the Amazon. There were wild episodes of hand waving, amid sessions of question and answer. For example:
“What kinds of animals do you have?”
“Moose, porcupines, skunks.”
“Snakes and monkeys.”
“What kind of snakes?”
“Anacondas and Boas…”
I especially remember one boy whose eyes really bugged out at the thought he was talking to kids who had to worry about Anacondas. The hour passed quickly and the kids were certainly engaged on both sides. As it ended, this boy asked a simple question: “We could email them, couldn’t we?” And the teachers said, “yes, let’s look into that.”
I’d like to tell you this story ended well, but unfortunately it ended like so many others in our system, where the demands of standards and NCLB and the pressures to do “instruction” often get in the way of the potential for transformational learning. The actual answer was... “We’d like to, but there won’t be time.” The irony is that saying “yes” is actually a well-researched strategy for improving literacy levels as measured by standardized tests, and good teachers have known this for years.
I write this because in Maine we have a new opportunity in the partnership with ePaLs, and I’d like to challenge teachers to take the plunge. I just checked today, and found dozens of classrooms in countries all over the world, looking for English speaking classes to partner with. I know there is some uncertainty, some pedagogical risk, some inconvenience and messiness in getting involved with global connections, but I believe it’s better to say yes, and… (if it becomes the normal classroom culture, instead of a special event,) it will improve literacy levels.

Hear from a Co-author of Disrupting Class...

This webinar by co-author Michael Horne was the culminating feature of a book discussion for ISTE's administrator's group. It's a great help in fleshing out the book if you've read it, or especially if you haven't and are looking to get the gist. I am not a fan of futurists, and don't often promote their books, so many of which seem to be merely capitalizing on the (mostly obvious) changes around us. Naisbitt's "Megatrends" was an exception to that for me in the 80s, I think because he developed his ideas using very sound studies of newspaper clippings. Christensen's book is an exception, also. Disrupting Class deserves our attention. Its most intriguing assertion is that on-line courses will represent 50% of all 9-12 courses by 2018. (By on-line, he doesn't mean "distance," and it's an important distinction.)

One-one laptops

In the wake of Governor Baldacci's speech this evening, I wanted to voice support for Maine's goal of a one-one ratio of laptops for grades 7-12. I understand the costs and difficulties, but I think it's the only answer to the question: "how many computers should a school have?" There's simply no other equitable way to get to where you can assign, collect, provide, share, collaborate or otherwise have students participate in a technology immersed world. It's true that our core efforts should be for "any century skills" such as character, work habits, etc., but we do need to incorporate practical, relevant activities to prepare students for today's adult work and study environments. We need to model strategies for coping with the "information storm," keeping safe on-line, and evaluating what we find there. So yes, in spite of the technical headaches and the need for additional support staff (which we must be honest about) it's important for all students to have a computing device, especially at secondary level.
I am an old English teacher, so I'll use an example from my own field: let's say I have a class today in journalism. There's a lot I can teach about cogent writing, and it's valuable, but if I don't include something about the blogging phenomenon, the new copyright issues, etc., I am negligent. And... how do I do that if they don't all have computers handy? And how do they put together their publication, which is on-line? And how do they post the material from their beats (which consist of digital text and images?) And how do they communicate with their sources, especially the ones in other countries, especially right now, as the news is breaking? Today, teaching in most subjects just doesn't work well without computers, because, working in most fields doesn't either.

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

Today, October 15, 2008, is Blog Action Day to end Poverty. Instructional technology has often been described as a leveler. Here in Maine, we give laptops to every 7th and 8th grader in part to ensure that those in poverty have equitable access. I have seen first hand the changes in kids' lives and aspirations that this project is bringing about. On a wider scale, the leveling effect of Internet access is real and measurable. Check out Kiva. No more excuses there!

A Required Course for School Leaders

I was giving a workshop for administrators about technology costs in 2002, and had just outlined a ballpark figure for core technology (hardware, networks and personnel.) I still remember John, a rural superintendent, who replied with visible disbelief when I said it would take 3.5 % of his operating budget, plus hardware. "Are you saying that I would need to spend $350,000 per year out of my $10,000,000 budget for technology?" For John, this was an impossible figure, yet it was the national average in at least one study, (and it did not include one-one laptops.) "It's just an operating budget," I said. "It doesn't include construction, facilities, capitol projects, etc.)"
"We don't have any of that now," he said, "the teachers do it." John was experiencing something the TCO people call " indirect costs."
For years, we have discussed the idea of having a university course in technology required for Maine certification (like school law, school finance, and exceptionality) which would facilitate conversations like the one above.
The enGauge Framework on funding:
• Reprioritize budgets to ensure ongoing, sustainable funding for wide-scale initiatives.
• Analyze the total cost of ownership and programmatic implementation to predict costs into the future.
• Provide funding for targeted R&D as well as for basic technology infrastructure, administrative and management-software solutions, e-mail and file transfer communications, and proven learning solutions for entire student populations.
The National Standards for administrators
Section IV C: "allocate financial and human resources to ensure complete and sustained implementation of the technology plan."
These bullets say a lot, but they don't say how much. Superintendents want to know how much. I remember saying to Michael, a super from midcoast Maine, that core technology would have to grow to 2% in the budget if he wanted to deploy the Internet to every desktop. "You wanna bet?" he answered with a smile. It's his budget, you see. He later became famous for sayng that technology was a "black hole" in the budget.
The Gartner TCO tool offers a few case histories of different sized districts, so there is a chance to get a picture of actual costs. And it's one good analytical piece; a way of trying to get at your own costs, especially identifying hidden costs.

The cost issues are only one small component. Staffing levels, roles and responsibilities, etc. are another. The course would carry its weight if it addressed these two pieces, and it could accomplish much more. Courses already exist that cover this material, in the UMaine system and at Lesley. They are available in the degree programs, at least as electives. I believe we need to require one for Maine certification as a K-12 administrator. JM

Platitudes and Orthodoxy in Web 2.0

I was re-reading the December 2006 Time Magazine article "How to Bring Our School Out of the 20th Century," by Cladia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe. It's a very good overview of the "new literacies," but it has one quote that worries me:

“Learn the names of all the rivers in South America. That was the assignment given To Deborah Stipek’s daughter, Meredith, in school, and her mom, who’s dean of the Stanford University School of Education, was not impressed. “That’s silly,” Stipek told her daughter. “Tell your teacher that if you need to know anything besides the Amazon, you can look it up on Google.”

     The authors present this incident in defense of the mother. Their point, of course, is that our propensity for memorizing lists of facts has less value than deeper learning, and that there are too many facts today to memorize, so we need the skills to find them. While these are both true, I am not at peace with the example given, especially not with the trivialization of the assignment by a parent. How much trouble would it have been to memorize a group of South American Rivers.? Does Dean Stipek really believe that the Parana is not important enough to remember? The Rio Negro? Even the Orinoco? If my daughter, Grace, had come home with such an assignment and requested assistance, I would probably have put on some Bolivian Fair Trade hot chocolate, and made every effort to share with her (before it is too late) the wonders of the South American land mass. Does she know that the watersheds contain four hundred pound snakes that still occasionally eat people? That these rivers never have winter or summer, just high and low water? That scientists go to the fish markets to discover unnamed fish and still do? That the water is as clean, biologically, as Moosehead lake, and is still fresh a hundred miles out to sea? Is Iguasu Falls not important? The Pantanal or the Hyacynth Macaw? Has she never read the story of Jimmie Angel, and his landing atop Auyan-tepui at Angel Falls? Of course, I would also (as a dad) have taken pride in how many of the rivers she could name when we had finished. We would have used GoogleEarth, Wikipedia, personal travelogues, and other tools. It would have been a very technologically savvy evening, but it would have honored the teacher, and the assignment, (and been a good introduction to the "21st Century themes" of indigenous peoples, deforestation, etc.)  The names of those rivers are in my head, and also in my heart, and that is very, very different from them being handy in Google.  I say this because as proponents of the shift toward 21st Century skills, we need to think before we repeat these platitudes. "Knowledge doubles every millisecond! We can look everything up... so we no longer need to know anything!" I know we don't say that exactly, but that's the way it can sound to regular people. 

    Our kids fail to learn for many reasons, but the assumption that facts are to blame (that memorization of facts in schools exists at the cost of in-depth learning) is an oversimplification. What we all need most in the “information storm” are concentration skills… strategies for keeping an idea in our heads long enough to make meaning out of what we are finding, and finishing what we started to do. Memorization goes along with that, and is thus a skill for any century, including the 21st. (Next time, the teacher should send home a nice paper-and-pencil crossword puzzle (generated by a web applet, of course) to help children memorize the rivers so as not to anger the professor mom. :)

Misconception alert! Please don't accuse me of saying that all people should memorize some huge list like Hirsch's, or that rote memorization is the best way to learn anything, or that we don't need to transform the learning environment. We shouldn't, it isn't, and we do.   In the scenario above, it would be a better lesson to have a study of the malaria problem in the Western Amazon, one that involved role setting, real projects, and live interactions with people living in the river basin.  We all know this.

My point:

If the curriculum in a certain year demands the recall of some geographic features from memory, it's not an opportunity for high-hatting the teacher. When proposing technology-based reforms, it isn't always necessary to define "bad" practice, and it is always risky to repeat slogans.  "No sage on the stage, just a guide on the side" "Feed the rabbits, starve the snails" "They don't have to know information, just know how to find it"  All of these are oversimplifications, and can appear suspicious to traditional people (many of whom provide our funding.)

By the way, here are the rivers in Wikipedia. Click a few of those and tell me they are unworthy as items of recall.

Also, as this is a Maine-based forum, I should include a reference to the Maine Counties memorization tool:

Sixteen County Song (To the tune of Yankee Doodle)

Sixteen counties in our state are [Yankee Doodle came to town a']

Cumberland and Franklin,      [Riding on a pony]

Piscataquis and Kennebec,     [Stuck a feather in his cap and]

Oxford, Androscoggin,        [Called it macaroni!]

Sagadahoc, and Somerset, [Yankee Doodle keep it up]

Lincoln, Knox, and Hancock,     [Yankee Doodle dandy]

Waldo, Washington, and York, [Mind the music and the step]

Aroostook, and Penobscot!     [And with the girls be handy]

Constancy and Change

I think educational leaders should approach rapid change from the inner strength that comes from their "universal bones." For instance, those who think change should drive a new understanding of ethics or democracy should instead, let their understanding of ethics and democracy drive their approach to new technologies. I can think of no better example than the confrontation last year between Elliot Schrage, of Google, and a group of congressmen over his defense of Google's practice of helping the Chinese government to oppress its people. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/15/eveningnews/main1321785.shtml
Schrage is a "Corporate ethicist," a lawyer and consultant with a huge resume (and real achievements) on issues where human rights and global commerce meet. With a very agile mind, he attempts to defend Google's actions as working toward the greater good in a complex world. The congressmen had a simpler understanding, and typically expressed outrage at what Google was doing. They were informed not by the "new technological landscape," but by their own sense of democracy and right and wrong. I am saying they were on firmer ground, and Schrage, in this case, was wrong. No matter what the "greater good," it was wrong to participate in oppressing China's people, regardless of whether this was legal in China. I think as teachers we are stronger when we rely on an armature of truths about democracy, morality, human rights, etc., and I am not comfortable with the relativism so many pundits seem to be expressing. Rapid technological change is here, yes. It needs educational leaders with backbone and purpose!

Standards in Chugach

I am always looking for working examples of a standards-based K-12 educational system. For me, this means getting away from the traditional “time-in-grade” system, where time is fixed by semesters, grading periods, etc. according to a group pace for learning. In a real standards-based system, time becomes the variable. You only pass when you complete the work. A “course” is determined by a body of work or a set of “performances” that demonstrate the skills or knowledge needed to pass. You don’t pass or fail when the course is over. Instead, the course is over for you when you complete the work. To me this is common sense. I am sure it would be for anyone who, like me, did not connect well with school. But each day I work with educators who loved school, who loved the way it worked for them, and who think of every change as another hula hoop. Most principals I know also don’t really have a practical understanding of (or frankly much interest in) changing the system. That’s why I think places like Chugach, Alaska, are important:
http://www.competencyworks.org/reflections/driven-by-student-empowerment-chugach-school-district/
Read this series of articles and tell me again why standards can’t work.

Leadership is still a barrier to "Integration."

I believe the biggest barrier to teachers' use of technology is not their oft' bemoaned inability or unwillingness.

I think it is the inability of the leadership, to:
1. Provide solid, reliable, technology with support levels that don't leave teachers hanging for days with a problem.
2. Show the teachers clearly what they are expected to do with the technology provided.
3. Have an accountability structure, to make sure they do it.

I believe it's fundamentally a challenge for leadership. This includes state agencies, superintendents, principals, school boards, politicians, etc. We should stop blaming "reluctant teachers." Where are their supervisors? Step #1 above is not cheap, and most leaders would say we are already spending sufficient funds. We aren't. Also, many school leaders would say the technology works, yet they almost never assess whether it works. Is 90% up time OK? Many public schools don't even have that. Most schools lack support levels that industry takes for granted. There aren't many Bartlebies at L.L. Bean who "prefer not to" use the technology. Industry gets tech done (at a much higher cost than K-12) or fails. We have trouble getting it done, because if we don't, everyone keeps showing up and paying for it. At least for now.