ALL About OUR DIGITAL Work!

• Printer-friendly version
• E-mail this article

Published: November 15, 2006

Funder Seeding Work in the Emerging Field of ‘Digital Learning’

By Rhea R. Borja

At a time when technology has changed how K-12 students learn, create, and interact with others, schools are behind the curve in teaching the skills they need to be savvy consumers and producers of digital media.

That’s the conclusion of a study commissioned by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to kick off a five-year, $50 million “digital learning” initiative announced last month.

The broad-ranging project will support projects to research technology’s effects on students; use social networking and other online tools to help students learn; design and develop online games; and create media-literacy curricula for a digital age.

One of the initiative’s main goals is to figure out what and how students are learning through podcasting, blogging, video games, and other Web-based activities in an online environment, said Jonathan Fanton, the president of the Chicago-based foundation.

For More Info

Learn more about the MacArthur Foundation's digital-learning Web site.

“Given how present these technologies are in their lives, do young people act, think, and learn differently today?” he asked in a statement. “And what are the implications for education and for society?”

One implication is that educators need to recognize the power of the Web’s “participatory culture,” in which anyone can critique student work and offer advice, said Henry Jenkins, the director of the comparative-media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Jenkins, the lead researcher for “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century,” the MacArthur-supported study, said that the virtual worlds that students move around in are unlike anything resembling the traditional learning environment.

Those online communities include the 3-D virtual world assembled on the Web site known as Second Life, at http://secondlife.com. More than 1.3 million people worldwide use the site, where “residents” can buy land with virtual dollars, “attend” live audio-streamed town hall meetings, watch live concerts, and talk to one another via Skype, an Internet phone service.

The MacArthur Foundation simulcast its Oct. 19 event in New York City announcing its digital-learning initiative on Second Life, garnering about 80 online attendees.

But not all students have equal access to the Web or other technology tools, Mr. Jenkins said. In addition, the students who are online have limited analytical skills to assess what they see, read, and create. And no established guidelines govern what personal information students should post online about themselves or their friends, Mr. Jenkins added.

“Kids don’t have a critical vocabulary on the effect of media in their own lives,” he said. “If [students] play a [video] game about history, that’s how history was.”

Given those gaps, educators should integrate media-literacy skills into core academic subjects, Mr. Jenkins said.

For example, he said, teachers can use online robotics simulations to help explain algebraic concepts and introduce students to physics.

“This is about a paradigm shift,” Mr. Jenkins said. “These are skills that can be integrated across the curriculum.”

Considering Trade-Offs

As part of its digital-learning initiative, the MacArthur Foundation has given grants to 18 organizations, some of which had received previous support from the foundation for their work on digital learning.

See Also

Read the accompanying story,
“Grants for R&D.”

See also a related story,

“Technology Helps Teachers Home In on Student Needs.”

The foundation has also set up a Web site to house the project, and next year it will publish six books, online and in print, on innovative uses of digital learning and its relationship to such issues as civic engagement, identity, race, and ethnicity.

“Just as the printing press … changed how knowledge works, we have hypothesized that these new digital media will have the same effect,” said Connie Yowell, the director of education grantmaking for the MacArthur Foundation. “It’s critical that we understand [digital media’s] benefits and its unintended consequences. There are implications for both of those for schools.”

The unintended consequences, she said, could include less physical play and less time to think and explore offline.

“What may be lost?” said Ms. Yowell. “Does something happen to daydreaming? Creativity?”

The LARGER FUTURE PICTURE of Education!

• Printer-friendly version
• E-mail this article

Published: November 15, 2006

Democratic Majority to Put Education Policy on Agenda

College Affordability Tops List; Key Members Back NCLB Renewal

By David J. Hoff

The leaders of the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress say they will make college affordability their top education policy priority, while also working to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, a goal they share with President Bush.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the presumptive next speaker of the House, said last week that Democrats will honor their campaign promise to curtail the costs of higher education by lowering student-loan interest rates and by expanding tax deductions for college tuition.

Democrats won at least 231 of the 435 seats in the House in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, with 10 seats still undecided late last week. The party also won a 51-49 majority in the Senate, counting two Independents who have promised to caucus with the Democrats.

Gubernatorial Results May Signal Policy Shift Democratic Majority to Put Education Policy on Agenda Voters Reject Proposed Limits on Spending GOP Chiefs Fare Well in Elections Local Votes on Bonds Said to Benefit From Turnout View election data map.

Meanwhile, President Bush cited the No Child Left Behind law as the kind of bipartisan issue he and Democrats could work together on once the current minority party takes formal control of the two chambers in January. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who most likely will become the chairman of the House education committee, said in an interview that he would like to have NCLB hearings soon after the 110th Congress convenes.

Yet education policy experts and former congressional aides predict the new Congress will struggle to accomplish both the Democrats’ higher education agenda and the politically difficult task of reauthorizing the NCLB law, which covers most federal K-12 programs.

“It will be an uphill battle, given the logistical demands of the transition and the political demands on the Democratic leadership agenda, which will focus on higher education first and foremost,” said Michael Dannenberg, the education policy director for the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. Mr. Dannenberg worked for Democrats on the Senate education committee when Congress approved the almost 5-year-old education law by large majorities.

The prospects for the reauthorization might also be determined by a group of at least 40 incoming freshman Democrats, many of whom ran campaigns in which they criticized the law that President Bush made one of his top priorities when he took office in 2001. The legislation, which revamped the now four-decade-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requires schools and districts to meet annual student-achievement targets, among other mandates.

“Somebody who is newly elected … will have heard more complaints than praise for No Child Left Behind,” said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center for Education Policy, a Washington-based research and advocacy group, and a former longtime aide to House Democrats. “They will want to voice the criticism they’ve heard.”

Rep. Miller, a staunch supporter of the NCLB law’s requirements holding schools accountable for student performance, said he believes that, in general, the law has as many supporters as detractors.

“I think the fact of the matter is that there’s a lot of critics of the bill,” he said in an interview the day after the elections. “But there’s a lot of supporters of the legislation, in terms of we have an obligation to provide a first-class learning opportunity to poor and minority children in this country.”

During the campaign, House Democrats outlined a six-point platform that included promising to raise the minimum wage, to protect Social Security benefits and workers’ pensions, and to accelerate turning over governing and security responsibilities in Iraq to that country’s government.

Different Lens

The only education item included in the pre-Election Day platform was to lower the cost of attending college. The 31-page book outlining the Democrats’ plans said the party would cut student-loan interest rates in half, simplify federal tax breaks for college tuition into a $3,000 tax credit, and raise the maximum Pell Grant award to $5,100, up from $4,050 now.

Beyond that, Democrats who will play a significant role in federal education policy said last week they would work toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind law on schedule next year.

Rep. Miller, who was one of the architects of the law, said he would like to begin the NCLB hearings while pursuing the college-affordability agenda.

Supporters of Chris Murphy, a Democrat who defeated Rep. Nancy L. Johnson of Connecticut, celebrate on election night.

—George Ruhe/AP

Another Democrat who helped craft the law, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, has also said he would push for its reauthorization. Mr. Kennedy chaired the Senate education committee when the Democrats led that chamber before 1995, and once again when the balance tipped in their favor in May 2001 and until Republicans resumed control in January 2003.

Although the Democratic majorities in Congress may significantly change the debate over certain federal economic, budget, and national-security policies, the change in control is less likely to result in dramatic changes to the NCLB law and other K-12 policies, congressional aides and observers say.

If the Republicans had retained control, the debate over the reauthorization would more likely have focused on questions such as how widely to expand school choice requirements for schools failing to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the law.

The Democrats, however, are more likely to look for interventions to help struggling schools improve, and to provide money to help the states improve their testing for AYP purposes.

At the same time, Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy have been steadfast supporters of the testing-and-accountability requirements that President Bush considers essential to the law’s goal of raising all students to academic proficiency by 2014. ("Political Shift Could Temper NCLB Resolve," Sept. 27, 2006.)

The return of Democratic control to Congress will not produce a “sea change” in K-12 policy debates, in contrast to the impact of Republicans’ capture of the House and the Senate in the 1994 midterm elections, argued Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that advocates charter schools and other forms of school choice.

Minn. Teacher Elected

After their 1994 election victory, Republicans set out to dramatically scale back the federal government’s role in K-12 policy by closing the Department of Education and slashing the financing of many of its programs, including Title I and others that are now at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law. Those proposals, however, never became reality because President Clinton and congressional Democrats resisted them.

“This will be a change of lens,” Ms. Allen said of the Democratic takeover. “The modest change in philosophy is not going to make a major difference.”

But the new Democrats could complicate the NCLB renewal.

While Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy, both liberals, joined with President Bush in championing the law and support its central tenets, Democratic lawmakers coming to Washington for the first time are unlikely to have the same commitment to the law or any pride of authorship in it.

Most of the new Democratic freshmen, in fact, have significant reservations about the way it is affecting schools, according to their campaign Web sites.

Tim Walz, a Minnesota high school teacher, won election to Congress as a Democrat. His campaign Web site criticized the No Child Left Behind Act as "an uneven bureaucratic nightmare" that "harms the students and schools who need it most."

—Jason DeCrow/AP

Tim Walz, a high school teacher elected to the House from a southern Minnesota district, wrote on his site that the law is an “uneven, bureaucratic nightmare” that “harms the students and schools who need it most.”

Paul Hodes a Democrat elected from New Hampshire, promises on his Web site “to fix and fund, or to repeal, the No Child Left Behind Act.”

Such criticisms of the law will create political pressure to amend it, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., said in an interview.

“As long as we let that discontent broil and bubble, we’re missing what works with” the law, she said. “If we put [the reauthorization] off too long, we’ll be throwing the baby out with the bath water. We need to fix what’s not working.”

Although Rep. Woolsey is the senior Democrat on the House Education Reform Subcommittee in the current Congress, she apparently won’t become the chairwoman of the subcommittee, which oversees K-12 education issues, when the Democrats take charge.

Rep. Dale E. Kildee, D-Mich., said at a banquet attended by education advocates last week that he would use his seniority over Ms. Woolsey to claim the panel’s chairmanship. Mr. Kildee was the chairman of the subcommittee that spearheaded the 1994 reauthorization of the ESEA.

Republican Helpers

At a White Hosue press conference the day after the elections, President Bush said he would work with Democratic leaders to produce bipartisan legislation, citing the No Child Left Behind Act as a product of the parties’ collaboration in his first term.

Key House Republicans are likely to throw their support behind the renewal, including current Majority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio; Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, who chairs the education committee; and Rep. Michael N. Castle of Delaware, the chairman of the Education Reform Subcommittee.

But Mr. Bush may not be able to count on conservatives in his own party next year.

Conservatives who voted for the law in the president’s first term are not as likely to be as supportive in the current political environment. Many of them voted for the law to support their party’s new president and are less likely to do so as the president nears the end of his final term.

One thing the law has going for it, said Mr. Dannenberg of the New America Foundation, is a core group of powerful lawmakers and Bush administration officials squarely behind it.

“I wouldn’t put anything past the political skills of Senator Kennedy, Representative Miller, Secretary [of Education Margaret] Spellings, and the president,” Mr. Dannenberg said. “They are among the best in Washington at the art of closing a deal.”

Fuzzy, Wuzzy, Wasn't Fuzzy, Wuzzy?

---

November 14, 2006

As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics

By TAMAR LEWIN

SEATTLE — For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.

The changes are being driven by students’ lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians’ warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math — critics call it fuzzy math — has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems.

At the same time, parental unease has prompted ever more families to pay for tutoring, even for young children. Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Where’s the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.

“When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division,” Ms. Backman said, “so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, ‘We don’t teach long division; it stifles their creativity.’ ”

Across the nation, the reconsideration of what should be taught and how has been accelerated by a report in September by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nation’s leading group of math teachers.

It was a report from this same group in 1989 that influenced a generation of teachers to let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.

But this fall, the group changed course, recommending a tighter focus on basic math skills and an end to “mile wide, inch deep” state standards that force schools to teach dozens of math topics in each grade. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that the curriculum should center on the “quick recall” of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals.

The Bush administration, too, has created a panel to study research on teaching math. It is expected to issue recommendations early next year.

Here in Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked the State Board of Education to develop new math standards by the end of next year to bring teaching in line with international competition, and a year later to choose no more than three curriculums to replace the dozens of teaching methods now in use. Ms. Gregoire, a Democrat, also wants new math requirements for high school graduation.

In Utah and Florida, too, state education officials are re-examining their math standards and curriculum.

Grass-roots groups in many cities are agitating for a return to basics. Many point to California’s standards as a good model: the state adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.

“The Seattle level of concern about math may be unusual, but there’s now an enormous amount of discomfort about fuzzy math on the East Coast, in Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and now New Jersey is starting to make noise,” said R. James Milgram, a math professor at Stanford University. “There’s increasing understanding that the math situation in the United States is a complete disaster.”

Schools in New York City use a reform math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, but some parents there, too, would like to see that changed, a step they are advocating through NYC HOLD, a group of parents and teachers that has a Web site with links to information on math battles nationwide.

A spokesman for the New York City Department of Education said that Everyday Mathematics covered both reform and traditional approaches, emphasizing knowledge of basic algorithms along with conceptual understanding. He added that research gathered recently by the federal Department of Education had found the program to be one of the few in the country for which there was evidence of positive effects on student math achievement.

The frenzy has been prompted in part by the growing awareness that, at a time of increasing globalization, the math skills of children in the United States simply do not measure up: American eighth-graders lag far behind those from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international test.

Parental discontent here in Washington State intensified after the announcement in September that only 51 percent of 10th graders passed the math part of state assessment tests, far fewer than showed proficiency in reading or writing.

“Math is on absolutely everybody’s radar in the state right now,” said Ms. Backman, whose Where’s the Math? group drew hundreds of parents and math teachers last month to a forum on K-12 math.

Many parents and teachers remain committed to the goals of reform math, having children understand what they are doing rather than simply memorizing and parroting answers. Traditional math instruction did not work for most students, say reform math proponents like Virginia Warfield, a professor at the University of Washington.

“It produces people who hate math, who can’t connect the math they are doing with anything in their lives,” Dr. Warfield said. “That’s why we have so many parents who see their children having trouble with math and say ‘Honey, don’t worry. I never could do math either.’ ”

“In Asian cultures,” she added, “the assumption is that everyone learns mathematics, and of course, parents will help with mathematics.”

But even many of those who admire the goals of reform math want their children to have more drills.

“My mother is a high school math tutor, and her joke is that this math is what’s kept her in business,” said Marcy Berejka, who each week brings Ben, 8, and Dana, 6, to Kumon, a tutoring center based in Japan that has more than a dozen franchises in the Seattle area. “There’s a lot that’s good in the new curriculum, but if you don’t memorize the basic math facts, it gets harder as math gets more complicated.”

The state’s superintendent of public instruction, Terry Bergeson, a supporter of reform math, said in an interview: “I came through the reading wars years ago, and now we’re right in the middle of that with mathematics. It comes back to balance. Of course you need to know your math facts, but you also have to understand what you’re doing. The whole country has been in denial about mathematics, and now we’re sort of at a second Sputnik moment.”

In part, the math wars have grown out of a struggle between professional mathematicians, who say too many American students never master basic math skills, and math educators, who say children who construct their own problem-solving strategies retain their math skills better than those who just memorize the algorithm that produces the correct answer.

After Dr. Milgram of Stanford appeared at a Where’s the Math? meeting, Dr. Warfield, an expert on teaching math educators, wrote in a newsletter that when Dr. Milgram told parents to fight for change, it was “implicit in the instructions that mathematicians who do not agree are classified as mathematics educators (a rung or two below the night custodian).”

The battle here has left many parents frustrated, confused and not sure if they should trust their children’s schools to give them the skills they need. Many have already voted with their feet, enrolling their children in math tutoring.

State Representative Glenn Anderson, a Republican member of the House education committee who has fought for a more rigorous curriculum, said state data showed that Washington residents spent $149 million on tutoring and other education support services in 2004, more than three times the $44 million they spent 10 years earlier.

Kumon, which has a global clientele of more than four million children in 43 countries, focuses on drilling children on basics. Students work their way through hundreds of assignments that move in incremental steps from tracing numerals all the way through differential calculus.

Every week for five years, Tove Burrows has brought her son, Petter, 13, to the Kumon Center in Mercer Island to turn in the worksheets he has done at home, sit down to new drills and pick up a set of assignments for the week ahead.

“If the math curriculum in the schools were different, I would not be doing Kumon,” said Ms. Burrows, whose son is an A student at Islander Middle School. “But I want to make sure he’s mastered the basics, and in school they don’t spend enough time on basics to get that mastery.”

On Mercer Island, an affluent suburb of Seattle that had the state’s best scores on the 10th-grade test, the pendulum has begun to swing toward emphasizing computational skills, especially in high school.

“We’re looking at texts that have more numbers and less language,” said Lisa Eggers, president of the Mercer Island School Board, who at one point sent two of her three children to Kumon. “And we’re one of the few districts where the math scores are going up.”

Even so, seeking outside math help is common in the district, with almost 100 students leaving the high school for math and going instead to nearby private academies for one-on-one tutoring, for which the school give will give them credit.

John Harrison, principal of Mercer Island High School, estimates that as many as 10 percent of his school’s 1,400 students are getting outside math help. “It’s not surprising that math is so important in Seattle, with so many people earning their living at Microsoft or Boeing,” Mr. Harrison said. “Our kids do very well on the state tests, compared to the state averages, but even here, math proficiency is less than reading and writing.”

What's Old is New Again.....The First Time Digital!

Digital Learning Report 2000

http://www.ceoforum.org/downloads/report3.pdf

Virtual Tour of a Digital Learning Collaboratory

Purdue University "Digital Learning Collaboratory" Virtual Tour

http://dlc.purdue.edu/#

Comments?

Digital Learning 101

he big mistake in planning for the school of the future is starting where we are today and imagining how to move forward. With that approach, we necessarily drag along a great deal of excess baggage. Instead, we should begin with where we want to be, where we think we will be, and work back through all the steps necessary to get to that point. Let us begin, then, with a description of the "digital child," the boy or girl who came into existence and lived his or her whole life in a digital world. This child has never known a time when computers were not an ordinary part of day-to-day life, or a time when constant change in the world was not the norm, or a time when it was difficult to access information or to communicate with other human beings with little regard to their actual geographical location. The digital child is the offspring of parents who were not born in a digital world but grew up during the transformation from an analog world to the digital one. Even so, they share with the digital child a number of common characteristics that make them different from the analog parents and analog children from the latter half of the 20th century. Time For the digital child, life is a balance between working, learning, playing, and tending to physical and spiritual needs. These aspects of life are not broken up into concrete and nearly immobile blocks of time, however, as they traditionally have been for most 20th-century children. Instead, working, learning, and playing are interspersed throughout the day and throughout the year. It's not that routine is unimportant for the growing digital child. It's that the timing of these various activities is tailored to the child's individual needs and desires, as well as to the schedules of the child's parents. After all, working and playing are not necessarily best done at the same moment for all children, and digital parents do not necessarily follow the 8:00 to 5:00 work regimen of their forebears. Location Just as time is fitted to the child, so is the location of life's activities. Learning does not always take place in the same building or even at the same longitude and latitude. Learning is something that is a constant throughout the day, as are work and play. All these activities are done at home, at "school," and in the community, both physical and digital. (Of course, safety in both of these worlds is of primary importance for digital children.) Activities In fact, the lines between what is learning, what is work, and what is play are difficult to distinguish. Activities are no longer compartmentalized according to time and place -- the time for recess, the place at school where the computers are housed -- and that has tended to blur the lines. Of course, there are times when the digital child is clearly at play or clearly at work, but there are also many times when these activities are inseparable. Just as 20th-century schooling mirrored 20th-century adult work, with its competition and cubicles and hierarchies, so too does 21st-century schooling resemble 21st-century adult work. The digital parents work at home as independent contractors, or telecommute, or move easily from job to job and career to career, learning as they go and remaining productive as they adjust their hours to their needs or whims. Their work time and play time are often indistinguishable. Relationships For the digital child, relationships with other human beings are the most important aspect of life. Together, family relationships, personal relationships, community relationships, working relationships, and learning relationships form the fabric of the child's existence. These relationships are much less subject to time and place than were the relationships forged by the 20th-century child, however. Digital children learn with and play with people whose age, religion, culture, economic status, and first language are quite different from their own or those of their parents. And, most likely, a significant number of these relationships are with people who live thousands of miles away. This is important because, when they grow up, digital children will be expected to work with people of any age, religion, culture, economic status, and first language -- not just at a local workplace, but anywhere. Technology An old proverb says, "Fish can't see the water." Likewise, our digital child swims in an ocean of changing technologies. The ebb and flow of new gizmos and scientific discoveries are merely punctuated by occasional technological typhoons reminiscent of the Y2K storm. Quite at home in this swirling sea, the digital student learns to take advantage of each new technological advancement, making the most of its contributions to his or her professional and personal life and confidently awaiting the next new breakthrough. Temperament Digital children react to the world rather differently than their 20th-century counterparts did. For example, they are patient with the deficiencies of adults, who often seem hopeless and helpless in the face of emerging technologies. These children have had lots of practice. After all, they are the first generation in history that is, as Don Tapscott has put it, "more comfortable, knowledgeable, and literate than their parents about an innovation central to society." Digital children are more independent, more intellectually open, more tolerant, and more adventurous than most 20th-century children. They hold strong views and expect instant gratification. At the same time, they are at greater risk from AIDS, school shootings, terrorism, depression, and suicide than their 20th-century predecessors. And they represent a larger population segment than those analog "baby boomers" who dominated the 20th century. Their collective voices are heard above all others. Learning style Digital children do not learn in isolation. They might work alone, but they learn in groups (even if some of the group members live in other countries). For them, knowledge is like dropping a pebble in a pond. Waves of understanding wash over the digital classroom. Working out an answer and sharing it with your digital classmate is no longer considered cheating. Cheating is keeping the answer to yourself. Cheating is copying someone else's expression of ideas and knowledge -- not sharing those ideas and that knowledge with others. Learning is collaborative and social, not solitary and competitive. These children abhor being made to jump through arbitrary hoops. Thankfully, 20th-century work sheets and busywork are a thing of the past. Digital children seek relevance. They want to solve real problems. They want what they do to make a genuine contribution to the world. (Yes, even if they are only in digital kindergarten.) And they want recognition for real accomplishments. They are guerrilla learners, learning only what they need at the moment to solve the problem, to complete the project. Although they recognize that some knowledge, some insights, some creative works are timeless, they instinctively understand that today's knowledge might turn out to be useless tomorrow. They do not accept the proposition that they must learn something now because it will be useful 10 years from now. They know better. So what do these digital people want from their school system anyway? They want pretty much what children and parents want today -- only they want the digital version, not the 20th-century analog edition. Curriculum Like all schools throughout history, the digital school must prepare students for life in their own time. Because the 21st century is one of explosive social change driven by explosive advances in technology, this will be a real challenge for teachers, administrators, board members, and parents. There are, nonetheless, some constants. One skill we must help children master is the ability to learn -- to gather knowledge, make use of it, let go of knowledge that is of little use, and then learn new and relevant things. The estimate of the number of totally different careers digital children will have in their lifetime continues to climb. These students must be prepared to perform the tasks of jobs that do not even exist while they're in school. People in the 20th century often had trouble unlearning what they had learned as children, but that process was necessary in order to move forward. Digital children must retain that skill as they grow up -- they'll be called on to use it over and over. Digital children must learn to read critically, write effectively, listen intently, and speak fluently. They must be able to find information, understand the information they locate, evaluate the reliability of that information, and see how to apply it to answer a pressing question or to take advantage of a new opportunity. They must be able to communicate their ideas to diverse groups using a variety of media. They must also be able to understand the ideas of others and see how their own concepts might blend with those of their work-mates to solve problems and create new things. Finally, the digital curriculum must produce citizens who are extremely discerning. With access to an avalanche of information and countless numbers of human beings, the digital child must learn to distinguish the useful from the hype, the genuine from the imitation, the sincere from the con, the quality from the flash, the truth from the propaganda. And to do so quickly and repeatedly. Flexibility What the digital family requires of its school system is flexibility, especially the opportunity to chose from a wide range of educational choices. Digital parents expect to custom-design their children's education. The old "my way or the highway" attitude of 20th-century schools is, thankfully, a thing of the past in the digital world. Parents blend and mix educational opportunities afforded by face-to-face classrooms, home schooling, distance learning, private lessons, travel, and other profit and nonprofit educational institutions in the local community or the Internet community. Choice has been tremendously expanded. The time, place, frequency, and content of instruction is individualized but not isolated. Digital children, as a result, are much more likely than their 20th-century analog counterparts to get what they need or want whenever and wherever they need or want it. Digital parents react strongly if they perceive that schools are getting in the way of their children's education. As a result, schools no longer set policies that put the benefit of their employees above the benefit of their students. Quality The digital community demands quality in education above everything else. Its members know that an excellent education is the key to thriving in the digital world. They are not misled by the educational/political trends of the analog 20th century: "Standards" have been replaced by choice; test scores have been replaced by products and solutions; and diplomas have long since been replaced by the flow from data to information to insight to wisdom. Thomas G. Layton, a self-professed online learning evangelist, is the originator of CyberSchool, the first Internet-based public high school distance learning program. He is a consultant with Clarity Innovations, Inc., in Portland, Ore. Illustration by Robert Liberace. Go to Analog Lessons by Kevin Bushweller.

Copyright © 2000, National School Boards Association. Electronic School is an editorially independent publication of the National School Boards Association. Opinions expressed by this magazine or any of its authors do not necessarily reflect positions of the National School Boards Association. Within the parameters of fair use, this article may be printed out and photocopied for individual or educational use, provided this copyright notice appears on each copy. This article may not be otherwise linked, transmitted, or reproduced in print or electronic form without the consent of the Publisher. For more information, call (703) 838-6739.

Got a comment about this article?
Voice your opinion on our message board!

Want to stay in touch?
Sign up for our e-mail newsletter!

Letters to the Editor: letters@electronic-school.com
Free trial subscription: subscriptions@electronic-school.com
Article submissions: editor@electronic-school.com
Reprint requests: reprints@electronic-school.com
Advertising inquiries: advertising@electronic-school.com
Webmaster: webmaster@electronic-school.com

Google....Wikis.....Schools...,,nice fit.....

http://www.eschoolnews.com
Contents Copyright 2006 eSchool News. All rights reserved.

Google acquires wiki tool
Search giant's purchase of JotSpot could help spur interest in wikis among schools

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
November 2, 2006
Expanding its efforts at providing software that helps users create and post their own materials online, Google Inc. has acquired JotSpot Inc., a California startup that develops online collaboration tools known as wikis. The integration of JotSpot into Google's suite of free online applications could encourage the use of wikis among schools, some observers say.

The announcement came Oct. 31 through separate postings at Google's and JotSpot's web journals. Terms were not disclosed.

JotSpot Chief Executive Joe Kraus said JotSpot would be able to tap into the internet search leader's large user base and robust data centers, which are capable of handling any growth.

"Our vision has always been to take wikis out of the land of the nerds and bring them to the largest possible audience," Kraus said in an interview. "There's no larger audience that you can reach than one you can reach through Google."

Wiki tools, popularized by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, let users create, modify, and even delete information on what others in a group have developed.

In July, JotSpot released a new version that aims to make shared pages similar to spreadsheets, photo albums, and other software people already use. In the past, wiki tools have generally mimicked basic web pages or word-processing documents--photographs, for instance, might appear as a list of attachments, with no thumbnails previewing the image before downloading.

Kraus said Google shared his company's vision for helping groups share information and work together online. As the two companies talked over the past nine months, he said, "we were completing each other's sentences."

Google's acquisition of JotSpot, which closed Oct. 30, comes as the internet search leader is completing its purchase of the online video-sharing site YouTube Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock.

Earlier in the year, Google bought Upstartle, the maker of the online word-processing program Writely. Google has since packaged Writely with an online spreadsheet it developed in-house (see story: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6656).

The free tools could help groups simultaneously work on documents over the web and provide alternatives to Microsoft Corp.'s dominant business-software applications, which run largely on computer desktops rather than the internet.

Kraus said Google's acquisition of JotSpot "validates the notion that people want to do more online than just read. The web is moving from a monologue to a dialogue."

As JotSpot makes the transition to Google's systems, new registrations have been suspended. Existing users can continue using the service, and JotSpot will stop billing for paid accounts.






Kraus declined to discuss future product plans under Google. In the past, Google turned the Picasa Inc.'s $29 photo organizer into a free download, but it sold a premium version of Google Earth, a mapping product that incorporated technology acquired from Keyhole Corp.

JotSpot currently has 30,000 paid users at about 2,000 companies using its service hosted on premise or at JotSpot. About 10 times as many people use the free, JotSpot-hosted service, which restricts the number of pages and the size of the collaborating group.

Kraus said Google has yet to determine whether existing users eventually would have to sign up for free user IDs through Google, as Writely users ultimately had to do.

The universal identity could heighten privacy concerns, making it easier for governments to obtain one's search history, eMail messages, word-processing documents, and now wiki data with just one subpoena. Kraus said users could delete accounts before migrating to Google.

Privacy concerns aside, some users of wikis in education applauded the move, saying it could help introduce more educators to the benefits of using wikis in the classroom. "It's exciting to have [JotSpot] integrated with the rest of the Google tools, probably for free--it's really cool," said Tim Wilson, director of technology for the Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose schools in Minnesota, about 30 miles west of Minneapolis.

Wilson said he has seen educators use wikis for such tasks as collaborating with students in other countries, as well as making a "Frequently Asked Questions" page on a school web site.

Having easy access to a wiki creation tool through Google might allow teachers "to pursue this technology if they are in a district where the tech leadership wouldn't generally have the skill or the interest to install a wiki service," he said, though he cautioned that teachers should be careful if their district's IT department does not support the use of outside wikis for security or other reasons.

"It's a great resource, potentially, but it's also a potential point of contention in districts," Wilson said.

Links:

Google Inc.
http://www.google.com

Google for Educators
http://www.google.com/educators

JotSpot Inc.
http://www.jotspot.com

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page







www.eschoolnews.com
info@eschoolnews.com
7920 Norfolk Ave., Suite 900
Bethesda, MD 20814
(800) 394-0115 - Fax (301) 913-0119

Privacy Policy
Manage your FREE eSchool News eMail subscriptions here
Contents Copyright 2006 eSchool News. All rights reserved.

Detroit Public Schools DIGITAL Educational Technology Plan 2006

"Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail."

"Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan!"

Detroit Public Schools "Educational Technology Plan 2006"

http://www.detroit.k12.mi.us/technology/techplan_educational_2006.pdf

*Award 2006: "Best in Class"
21st Century Digital Learning Environments

A DIGITAL Blueprint for Success Matrix

http://www.eschoolnews.com
Contents Copyright 2006 eSchool News. All rights reserved.


Blueprint for success

How Broward County delivers dozens of world-class IT projects--on time and on budget

By Jennifer Nastu
October 1, 2006

Outside the Broward County, Fla., Public Schools administrative offices, the air shimmers with heat, the sky is hazy with humidity, and by 9:00 a.m. the air already feels stale.

The air inside feels quite different.

Head past the first-floor desk with attendant behind glass who directs visitors to their destinations, past the warrens of gray-walled cubicles, down hallways lined with cardboard boxes filled with report cards ready to deliver to schools, and into a small conference room. There, the air-conditioned air nearly buzzes with enthusiasm.

That's because in the room are gathered the Broward County Public Schools' eight key players responsible for a four-year, $400 million effort to redesign education through the effective and innovative use of technology. Each of the eight seems eager to begin, to share their stories of how they are turning a school district that operated with some systems as old as 30 years, running on an old AS400 mainframe computer, into a leader in technology.

Broward County Public Schools, with 264 schools and more than 275,000 students, boasts 39,450 permanent employees and is the sixth-largest public school district in the nation. It has an annual budget of $4.14 billion, with more than $100 million of that designated for technology.

"Typically, schools use blackboard and chalk," says Vijay Sonty, CIO of Broward County Public Schools and administrator of the mighty budget. "We wanted to take a new approach, to reinvent education."

With that in mind, he and the rest of the Education Technology Services team created a four-year plan--an Information Technology Blueprint--that outlined 82 projects.

Now two years into the program--and with nearly 40 of those first 82 projects fully completed as of press time--the team can confidently predict completion of the projects at the end of the projected timeline.

In fact, the success of the program seems nearly guaranteed, in large part because of one of the projects implemented--a project management process created by Microsoft and Pcubed and heavily customized for Broward County schools.

The initiative, called Project Management Office (PMO), allows Sonty and his team to easily manage the various and often-changing ed-tech projects. District administrators can track projects via a web-based system to see exactly where they stand--what percentage of a project is complete, who is responsible for it, the date it started, the date it is expected to be finished, and so on.

Since the implementation of the PMO, more than 90 percent of IT projects get finished on time, says Becky Schmaus, PMO manager. "Before that, it was a lot less," she says, drawing out the word "lot" to indicate just how few projects actually met their deadlines.

The PMO is just one of the dozens of innovative projects in Broward County. The district reportedly operates the largest video conferencing network in the world, with more than 350 interconnected conferencing systems--at least one in every school. Each school building also has wireless internet access and laptop carts, and the district operates its own virtual middle and high schools, which have enabled it to bring home-schooled students (and the funding that accompanies them) back into the fold. What's more, administrators have access to a wealth of school and student data, and teachers have access to lesson plans and curriculum content, through a single sign-on portal.

Where did these initiatives come from, and how was the Blueprint--the original list of 82 projects--prioritized and created? The process began about five years ago.

Creating the Blueprint

"The district has a huge reserve and is able to fund all of our projects, but we have a mechanism in place as part of our funding that we have to show a five-year plan of what we're embarking on," Sonty explains.

Sonty, previously senior vice president and CIO at the Interpublic Group of Companies Inc., reportedly the world's largest advertising and marketing communications organization, joined Broward in the fall of 2004. At that point, the Education Technology Services team had been two years into a three-year research project, working with consultants to look at the school district's current applications, technology, organization, and staffing.

During the third year of the research, and Sonty's first year at Broward, he rearranged staffing a bit. "We organized ourselves into how other industries did it, becoming more 'customer'-focused, creating process owners, realigning the department," he explains. He added a number of IT positions, including managers for information security, projects, conferencing services, and instructional technology.

Then, the team created the Blueprint, or list of steps necessary to complete the designated IT projects, each of which would effectively use technology in the teaching and learning process. The ultimate goal of all projects is to enhance student achievement.

The school system "had already done a lot of work, and that allowed me to zero in," says Sonty. "We have a great staff, they're dedicated, and they're motivated." And they had plenty of brilliant ideas, he says. These ideas--most of which have been carried out already--covered areas such as:

Development and delivery of curriculum content--Through partnerships with technology vendors such as Cisco Systems, Broward has deployed wireless network solutions to classrooms and campuses for projects such as using video on demand to deliver digital IP video content--including curriculum content, training, video conferences, and synchronous and asynchronous meetings--to the district's desktops. In addition, multiple school sites can sign up for daily scheduled video conferencing classes that correspond with ancillary materials and lesson plans--thereby extending learning beyond the classroom.



Assessment--Teachers can access the district's data warehouse instantly to see a student's history record and apply this knowledge to aid in the student's future success. Information maintained in the data warehouse includes attendance, test scores, and overall classroom performance. A Virtual Counselor resource also provides a self-service application, allowing students and parents to check records and receive basic guidance feedback.



Professional development--A technology certification program gives staff members the chance to improve their technology competencies. Educators learn strategies for integrating technology and using internet-based curriculum, digital tools, handheld computers, scientific software, and more.



Virtual instruction--Students have the opportunity to enroll in virtual courses taught by Broward County teachers to earn high school credit. Broward County also implements an adult online eLearning program that offers instruction toward career, technical, and adult community education.

However, the first--and most necessary--project was to focus on infrastructure.

"We wanted to leverage our investment in our old environment," says Sonty. The old systems were running on mainframes, and it would be cost-prohibitive simply to take them out and replace them with new ones. "So we left the core systems and surrounded them with new technology," he explains.

The team created a service-oriented architecture (SOA) using IBM's WebSphere technology, allowing users to access information from the mainframe using a portal and web services framework.

Once the Blueprint had been approved, senior management met multiple times to look at the plan and prioritize its projects. Each person ranked these projects individually, and then everyone agreed upon which were the highest priority.

To gain buy-in from the school board for this Information Technology Blueprint, Sonty created a simple, 9-square "Blueprint Action Plan Matrix." The matrix, three squares across and three down, showed the number of projects identified by the Blueprint, their priority (high, medium, low), and their time frame (short, medium, long).

Each square within the grid showed the number of projects completed, in progress, and not started. This was a simple way for stakeholders to glance at the grid and see immediately that, for example, 16 high-priority, short-duration projects existed, with four completed and 12 in progress.

"I come from an environment where I had to respond quickly and get results in a quick time frame," says Sonty. "The concept was simple: get some quick wins."

At the time of Sonty's arrival, the district's Education Technology Services division "wasn't viewed well," he says. "My predecessors didn't get along with senior management, with board members."

But with the clearly outlined Blueprint, along with simple visuals such as the Blueprint Action Plan Matrix, the district's tech team made it clear that the necessary research had been done, the correct projects had been identified, and they were ready to begin moving forward.

Now, says Sonty, "We're making things happen."

Proactive IT management

A key project that recently was completed is the PMO. Sonty was "passionate" about being able to monitor projects closely, "to know where we were and to have it all rolled up into an accountability list," says Schmaus. "It had never been done at that level."

The PMO can be sorted in any number of ways, so that anyone interested in learning where a tech project stands can simply look it up. Reports can be generated based on start date, closing date, person in charge, priority of project, duration, and other criteria (story, page 18).

"Before, we couldn't say off the top of our head what was going on, what projects were needing top priority," Schmaus says. But that's changed. The new system also has improved inter-departmental workflow and communication; often, one person's job relies on what others have accomplished, and with the new system it's easy to track what others have done, Schmaus explains: "Angela, who handles one piece and Chuck, who's doing his piece--she can't do her piece until Chuck is finished, and this way she doesn't have to chase after him."

The tool is not meant to manage minutiae. Projects that take an hour or two are not entered, but anything with a scope of more than a few weeks is tracked. After the tool was implemented, staff meetings began to change. "Vijay goes around the room and says, 'Tell me the status of your projects.' And if you tell him something, it better be 100 percent what's on the system," says Schmaus.

Another area Sonty is passionate about is minimizing the resources necessary at each school. Because Broward has about 110,000 machines (about 80,000 Macintosh-based computers and 20,000 Windows-based computers, as well as other devices), the time spent helping end-users work those machines could be prohibitive if not managed well.

For inventory control and asset management, the district last year installed the LANDesk Management Suite from LANDesk Software, a system that allows tech-support staff to take control of the machines, issue patches, and resolve problems remotely. Before LANDesk, "the biggest problem was, we didn't know how many devices we had," says Chuck Stanley, director of technical support services.

The LANDesk software is used within Broward County's outsourced network operation center (NOC), where officials monitor the status and performance of all the thousands of routers, switches, appliances, and even applications on the network--live, in real time.

The NOC resides in a windowless room deep in the heart of the district's main administrative building. There, three JDL Technologies employees sit in front of computers watching data scroll down the screens. On those screens, they can spot any problems; if a server goes down, or if service is interrupted for any reason, they can see it and respond to it.

Before LANDesk was implemented, about 40,000 machines were being serviced per year--and the district was spending approximately $20 per machine each time it was touched.

"Forty thousand times $20, that's a big deal," says Sonty. Now, all of that support is done remotely. LANDesk required an initial investment of between $2 million and $3 million, says Sonty--meaning the system will pay for itself in tech-support savings alone in about three years.

The tech team's Quality and Customer Service department has nine full-time agents on the help-desk phones, with two additional "floor supervisors." Then, there are four more help-desk staff members with a specific focus, such as server-administration support. Because each school has its own server, each school also has an IT "liaison."

These liaisons are teachers who receive a stipend for serving as the conduit between school-level teachers and administrators and the district's tech team. The liaisons reduce the amount of back and forth needed to solve tech issues. If a teacher has issues, he or she can contact the liaison, who then works with the tech team to solve the problem.

Plus, technicians in the NOC know beforehand what problems teachers might encounter and what they should be looking out for. That's because Broward is using a framework called the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL--and reportedly is the only school district in the country currently using it.

ITIL was a movement that started in the United Kingdom. It describes the processes that should take place whenever IT change is implemented, helping IT technicians provide the best service possible to the end user by reducing downtime.

"Our theory is that everything affects everything," says Mary Baker, director of quality and customer service, who controls change management for Broward's IT team. Team members needed a process to help them avoid problems, such as "when the tech guys want to put in a new operating system on the servers and they think now is a good time to do it," Baker explains. "Then, they find out that the application group is planning on doing something else on the same day."

The ITIL framework allows for change management by setting forth, in essence, a checklist that asks a series of questions addressing both service delivery, and support, procedures. It's a process that asks: Does the change require training for end users? If so, what is the training plan? Who do we need to notify about the change, and when do we notify them?

For example, Baker explains, district tech staff might have planned to upgrade internet services and would need to take internet service down for a time. But if there were some teachers who had decided to do some scheduling at that time, they wouldn't be able to accomplish their tasks.

"Communication was a big part of our learning process," says Baker. Often, she says, "when we asked, 'Who needs to know about this change?' the tech people would say, 'Nobody needs to know, it's transparent,' but actually it affects lots of people."

Normally, says Sonty, help desks are reactive: "Something goes wrong, and you call them." With ITIL helping Broward manage its ed-tech changes, district officials are able to be proactive, knowing about potential problems before they happen.

Focus on achievement

Broward's Education Technology Services team has an overarching mission toward which it strives with every project: To use technology effectively in the teaching and learning process to advance student achievement.

Within that mission are four goals: (1) that all stakeholders work together to build a better school system; (2) that all operations of the school system will demonstrate best practices while supporting student achievement; (3) that all schools will have equitable resources; and (4) that all students will achieve at their highest potential.

One of the projects the team implemented to meet these goals was the development of video conferencing capabilities. With its 350 video conferencing systems, Broward County operates the largest such system in the world, according to Sonty. Each school has at least one video conferencing hookup, which educators can use for instruction, teacher training, and more.

The district uses the TANDBERG Management Suite of software and hardware for this system, which has a centralized bridge housed and managed in the main administrative building.

"With school-based people, you want to minimize pulling them out of the schools for meetings," Sonty explains. "Video conferencing is important."

The conferences look, on screen, like the Hollywood Squares, Sonty says. The system is voice-activated. Six attendees appear at a time, and when someone speaks, his or her picture pops up. But far more than six can attend: for one meeting, 45 people were conferenced in.

Video conferencing has been used for a number of different projects, including an eMentoring program, in which students receive credit hours for helping other students in their studies. Broward also has partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, and other agencies to provide virtual field trips for students.

Another way the district's tech team is striving to fulfill its mission is through 24-7 learning, which gives students and teachers "anytime, anywhere" access to information. To do this, it has created virtual middle and high schools. The virtual high school--which offers a fully online, diploma-granting program--was launched three years ago as part of a distance-learning pilot, and it was so successful that now the district's middle schools participate.

The virtual schools are a vital piece of the educational puzzle for students who fail classes, for example. Kids who fail a class can continue with their studies the following semester even as they take the problem class over again, online.

The virtual schools also are a vital element in the district's goal to retain students.

Home-school parents can download accredited class materials. That way, those home-schooled students can be considered full-time students taking their classes online--which means, in essence, those students are members of the Broward County school system, and the district is able to receive the state and federal funding that goes along with them.

Broward County also offers a virtual university program, with online training for teachers. The teacher training comes from a partnership with Atomic Learning that creates training from videos on how to use the district's various software applications. But Broward took Atomic Learning's technology platform and delivery system and uses it to create its own "home-grown" how-to videos that it streams via the web.

Now, Broward County teachers have access to materials that are fully integrated with Sunshine State standards, so they can continue the training they need to stay accredited.

Along with the "anytime, anywhere" initiative come two portals. One, called the Broward Enterprise Education Portal, or BEEP, houses the teacher training videos, as well as an enormous number of curriculum resources. An "Instructional Organizer" includes a unit-plan bank with lesson plans for any instructional unit a teacher might be working on. (Broward County employs 200 curriculum specialists who create these resources.)

Students also can access the BEEP system. "There is already a lot of information there for them," says Jeanine Gendron, director of curriculum integration. She adds that the student information is not yet available under a single sign-on: "That's next year's project."

The second portal offers information geared toward the needs of district principals and other administrators. The portal, called Knexus (a combination of the words "knowledge" and "nexus"), gives administrators access to all the information they need for seamless review and reporting. Principals can access the database to look at specific schools to discover, for example, exactly what the school's class-size average is. Because Florida has a class-size requirement, the principal can then add staff or make other adjustments to get under the required threshold (story, page 24).



Then, there's an automatic notification system, offered through Parlant Technology's ParentLink, which places calls and sends eMails to parents about absences or emergencies automatically. When Hurricane Wilma hit last year, for example, Broward was able to put out a district-wide call announcing its school cancellations.

However, district officials have found that the system can be used for much more. When administration of the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) is scheduled, school leaders can place calls to all parents to remind them that their children should be present if at all possible. The system is site-based, so if administrators at a particular school want to send out a message to parents that, for example, the band bus broke down and the students won't be home until 10:00 p.m., they can do that.

"One school said the best thing they've done is stopped rumors," says Angela Coluzzi, director of network integration. "There's a rumor at school, and before it even makes it home, the parents hear the rumor and the truth, and it stops all the calls that have always come in from parents saying, 'Is this true...?'"

She adds that the system, which was undertaken to assure policy and statute compliance, improve attendance and student achievement, and improve school-home relations, has attempted 11 million calls and delivered about 7 million messages since its integration.

The district's tech team also recently implemented an ambitious technology refresh campaign--a massive, $68 million Digital Learning initiative designed to replace equipment that was reaching the end of its useful life in all elementary, middle, and high schools and centers. As part of this program, Broward bought 2,000 laptop carts, each loaded with 20 computers.

The cart program was the result of a study, conducted by the University of Miami, of four pilot schools in the district. In those pilot schools, every student was given a laptop he or she could take home.

But, because of the potential for theft and the fact that students (and, in many cases, their parents) did not know how to use the computers effectively, the study found it was more efficient to have carts with laptops available as they were needed in class (story, page 22).

Looking ahead

Moving forward, Broward is working on an initiative to make all of its available via iPods, Sony Playstation Portables, and other mobile devices through Apple Computer's iTunes University. The initiative, reportedly dubbed "iTunes eSchool," will see an iTunes portal built specifically for Broward County schools. This portal will include all of the district's digital content--from the videos for technology teacher training, to the eMentoring program's content and more.

For example, when a space shuttle blasted off during the last school year, Broward had a direct feed, and students were able to watch the launch. The district also is in the process of securing a district-wide license to be able to stream content from the Discovery Network.

"Our goal is for the content server to be populated by video conferencing," explains Daryl Diamond, project manager for technology and instruction. All of that content ideally will be available via iTunes eSchool.

The implications of this are enormous. For instance, teachers could create videos of their classroom lessons, and "kids who missed the class or who need modifications could take the lesson home and watch it over and over [via iTunes eSchool]," says Diamond.

However, to make this happen, all existing content must be catalogued and indexed, which will happen as part of Knexus Phase II. "Then, teachers can say, 'I'm teaching a segment on volcanoes,' and they can get two- or three-minute videos" pertinent to that topic, says Sonty.

Halfway through the Blueprint, Sonty is optimistic that Broward's tech team can deliver the remaining projects on time and on budget and can "manage customer expectations," he says. The main projects left to finish are those of long duration--such as Broward's enterprise resource planning (ERP) portal.

At least one major challenge remains, and that is bringing teachers up to speed on the new technology. With more than 17,000 teachers and no way to train them on a mass level, the certification process is slow. To date, only about three thousand teachers have been trained. "Our technology is so advanced that our teachers are scared," Sonty admits. "Getting them trained is part of the Blueprint."

Sonty and his team are exploring solutions that will easily scale to the size and scope needed to get all teachers trained quickly. In the meantime, Broward continues to move forward with initiatives that are both creative and cost-cutting.

For instance, the district is working with IBM to track how much its servers are being used, and which can be consolidated; district officials recently took 26 Windows NT servers out of individual schools and consolidated them to a single server at the district level.

"We have to run our schools like a business and allocate resources wisely," Sonty says. Only then will the true return on investment--student achievement--be realized.

Jennifer Nastu is a freelance writer living in Fort Collins, Colo., who writes frequently about education and technology.

LINK:

Broward County Public Schools
http://www.browardschools.com

Building an Online Community

Tips for Building an Online Community
By Susan Taylor
Nov 1, 2006
URL: http://www.techlearning.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193401799

Attention school administrators: using technology to support virtual collaboration and establish an online community can serve as a useful tool to “keep the fire burning” among a planning group and help bring positive resolution to the task at hand.

The value of bringing the school community and various stakeholders together to address problems, find solutions and generally contribute to improving situations on the campus cannot be overstated. The most common way to bring people together is to host a face-to-face meeting. However, most issues are not resolved during a one-time meeting and follow up is usually required. In today’s world of competing priorities, it is difficult to find the space and time amenable to everyone’s schedule to allow for follow-up and ongoing conversations. To the rescue comes Virtual collaboration, and it can make a real difference.

Virtual Collaboration Tools

Virtual collaboration may be either Synchronous or Asynchronous. The difference: if it occurs during real-time activities like video teleconferencing or audio conference, where people are in different places participating at the same time, it is Synchronous; but if it enables participants to join in from different places at different times, then it is Asynchronous.

Some strategies to support virtual collaboration include the following:

Establish regular times for team interaction
Send agendas to participants beforehand
Designate a team librarian
Build and maintain a team archive
Use visual forms of communication where possible
Set formal rules for communication and/or technology use


Establishing an Online Community
To accommodate an online community, it is useful to think about the media being utilized and its effect on group dynamics. Kimball (1997, p. 3) provides some useful questions to help you with this process:

Media
Questions for Facilitator/Manager

Electronic Mail
What norms need to be established for things like: response time, whether or not Email can be forwarded to others?
What norms are important about who gets copied on Email messages and whether or not these are blind copies?
How does the style of Email messages influence how people feel about the team?

Decision Making Support Systems
How does the ability to contribute anonymous input affect the group?
How can you continue to test whether “consensus” as defined by computer processing of input is valid?

Audio (telephone) Conferencing
How can you help participants have a sense of who is “present?”
How can you sense when people have something to say so you can make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard?

Media
Questions for Facilitator/Manager

Video conferencing
How can you best manage the attention span of participants?
Where can video add something you can’t get with audio only?

Asynchronous Web-Conferencing
How do you deal with conflict when everyone is participating at different times?
What’s the virtual equivalent of eye contact?
What metaphors will help you help participants create the mental map they need to build a culture, which will support the team process?

Document Sharing
How can you balance the need to access and process large amounts of information with the goal of developing relationships and affective qualities like trust?

Building trust and establishing relationships is cited as a challenge for online communities, so begin with a face-to-face meeting and then pursue the online community. During your face-to-face meeting, let people know that you want to continue the conversations and ask people to join your online community by submitting their Email addresses to you.

To reach as many people as possible, keep things simple in the beginning. Initiate your online community with listserv messages. Begin by sending a message to your group thanking them for attending your recent meeting. One way to begin interaction is to post a question and ask people to respond.

Consider if you want responses to go out to everyone on the listserv or if you want all responses to come to you and you will compile the responses and send back to everyone. Compilation of responses may help ensure anonymity for your members and encourage participation in the beginning when the trust level may not be where it needs to be.

As your online community grows, it will be useful to host an audio conference or another face-to-face meeting to continue the work on building trust.

Remember to offer content and information focused on participants’ interests. Provide resources to help participants make informed decisions. Although information sharing does not encourage community interaction, it may serve to reinforce continue use of the online community.

Use opportunities to share success stories and reward or recognize members.

As your group becomes comfortable with the online community, you may want to consider providing more sophisticated methods to support and maintain your community. Of course, this will be determined by your members’ level of expertise and ability to meet the technology requirements.


Email: Susan Taylor


REFERENCES

Kimball, L. (1997). Intranet Decisions: Creating your organization’s internal network, Miles River Press.

YES Expo Today! STEM Focused Practicum

YES! Expo to Include 20,000-Plus Students, Organizers Say

A key part of attracting and retaining businesses is developing a workforce that understands and loves science. That's why events like the one coming up at Detroit's Ford Field are so important.

A capacity crowd of more than 20,000 is expected to head into the football palace Thursday for the 2006 YES! Expo, an event aimed at inspiring middle and high school students to pursue education careers in science and engineering. The expo will bring together companies and universities from throughout Michigan for a day of presentations, speakers, exhibits, a visit from Bill Nye, the Science Guy (pictured) and more. Participants include dozens of corporations and other organizations, including all 15 of the state's public universities and a number of private colleges.

The YES! Expo is sponsored by Michigan Technological University. For more details, click here.