Sweat the Small Stuff

Photo by See-Ming Lee http://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/3921035528/

I read a very interesting blog post on Linked In by Jon Steinberg.  In his post, he acknowledges that while there is value and a time and place for long term strategic thinking, the real work gets done when we focus on the details at hand.  As he states, “The real work gets done day in day out operating a little bit better.”

In K-12 technology, many districts spend a lot of time devote to creating a technology plan, often driven by the necessity of having one for receiving priority two eRate funds.  These plans can add a lot of value to our organizations, but at the end of the day they can be meaningless if we cannot get our day to day activities right.  Better yet we should always be focused on ways to improve what we do, and how our organizations operate.   If we can’t master the details of the here and now, how are we going to achieve the long term goals in our technology plans?

Too often, I see colleagues, business partners, and other schools miss little details or worse yet, not even worry about the details. Not worrying about the details can make you and your organization look inept and worse yet, can cause projects to miserably fail.  All of this cascades and eventually destroys credibility and ability to execute goals and plans.

In our IT world, with tens of systems being more interdependent each day and thousands of staff, students, and parents relying on us, the details are becoming more important than they ever have been.  Missing a step, forgetting a small piece or data, or misunderstanding system interdependencies can all lead to huge problems, and slow down projects, kill systems, and ultimately put a bad light on IT.

So there may be good reason why we wake up at 3am sweating the small stuff; that small remembered detail can mean the difference between success and failure.

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Tablets, Laptops, and PC’s Oh My

If you were to read any educational technology magazine or site the past couple of years, you might think that there was only one device out there for use in the classroom.  While this may be pure hyperbole, it appears that the market for computing devices is changing again…..surprise!

This week saw Apple’s stock price tumble, largely seen as a barometer of things to come.   Will this also serve as an indication that the iPad’s dominance in the classroom may be waning?  Already it is predicted that Apple will be number two to Android this year in the overall tablet market.

From some of the press about trends in devices, one might think that PCs are a thing of the past, but when one looks at recently published numbers, that is hardly the case.  PC’s sales have been impacted, whether by tablets or by a lackluster Windows 8 reception.  Yet PC sales still are well above tablet sales.  And with Microsoft now executing a tablet strategy, Microsoft is still the major player in this game.  This week predictions surfaced that Microsoft may consider bringing back the Start Menu to Windows 8 with boot to the desktop functionality in an upcoming patch.  This alone could alleviate a lot of the pain association with schools and companies moving to Windows 8.  Who has the time or budget to train our staff on how to start a program, or shut down a computer?

While Apple’s iOS has made great inroads in education, Windows is still a dominant player in the market and it is a safe bet that Microsoft will continue to be a major player in education along with Google’s Android and Chrome OS. 

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Schools and districts should not ignore the mobile app tidal wave

How many smart phone users consume their favorite social media sites like Facebook, Linked In, or Twitter via a mobile web browser?   The answer is very few and usually they only do so if forced to use the browser by clicking a link that opens it.  Why is this?  Why do consumers want to avoid surfing web sites on their mobile devices’ browsers?  The answer is that most standard web sites, when looked via mobile phone’s browser, are hard to see, hard to navigate, and often don’t support mobile browsers well.  The end user experience in these browsers is about as pleasant as a trip to your local Department of Motor Vehicles to renew your license.

Social media providers have long figured this out and built apps for major phone and tablet platforms.  Stores are increasingly figuring this out and following the likes of Amazon with building mobile shopping apps. Banks are all over this bandwagon.  But schools and districts have not figured this out.

Schools typically still only provide a normal web site to mobile devices.  Sure, some provide a parsed down mobile version, but even these are somewhat hard to find.  Are schools’ customers different than retail or social media customers?  Heck no – they are the same people with the same preference for consuming web through mobile apps.  Most school customers are still getting Y2K versions of web sites built for Netscape Navigator delivered to their smart phones.

School CIOs need to address this shortcoming and get mobile apps built with easy to navigate user interfaces.  And to have a successful app, it will need to be for both Android and iOS.  Additionally, it must have data that is personally important to parents and students.  That means grade and attendance data is a critically important inclusion.  Other high value content such as menus, athletic schedules, athletic scores, and assorted news are welcome additions. 

There are many roads to getting this done. Some are expensive, such as hiring a third party to build custom apps or hiring personnel with app development skill, but this may be a fine fit for a large district.  Sometimes more limited apps are included with a student information system (SIS) and are probably the best fit for small districts and schools.  Consider including this as a requirement when adopting a new SIS.  There are also low cost or free ways to get an app.  At Judson ISD we built an award winning app for a low cost without personnel dedicated to app programming, using the low cost web-based Conduit mobile platform.  A full presentation of our app and experience is available on Slideshare.

Or you may use a simple free service such as iSchoolBox, which may be a great way to test the waters and get your school into a mobile app (one app the hosts many schools’ mobile sites).  At the end of the day, the consumer demand is there and as CIOs and technology leaders, we need to stop delivering craptastic web sites to phones and tablets when our customers’ preferences have evolved well beyond this.

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Making 1 to 1 Programs Actually Succeed

There are many schools that have either piloted or implemented one to one student to computer initiatives.  These are nothing new.  The success of these programs, much like other education initiatives, has varied.  Most technology and curriculum leaders now recognize that there is much more to student and school success, than just putting a computer in the hands of a student and getting instant miracle results.   Just as a new hammer will not help a bad carpenter build a better house, a computer in the hands of a student will not turn the tide in the midst of bad teaching or ineffective school leadership.  But there is now fairly convincing evidence that properly implemented one to one computing is a contributing factor to school success, as evidenced in the rather convincing results from the Project Red study.  ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) has published a book about this report called Revolutionizing Education through Technology. A free electronic edition of the book is available at ISTE site.  I highly recommend that any superintendents, curriculum leaders, instructional technology directors or anyone else seriously looking at 1:1 programs read this books and consider all that it takes beyond a device to make one to one really succeed.

This blog was a Tech & Learning Newsletter Intro and is also on the Project Red site at: http://www.projectred.org/latest-news/173-t-l-advisor-guest-post—steve-young,-cto-of-judson-isd,-tx.html 

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Random Musings from the 2013 TCEA Conference

We are blessed in Texas to have one of the premier instructional technology conferences in the world hosted here in our state.  The Texas Computer Education Association, TCEA, put on a fantastic event in early February in Austin.  For me the conference is a wonderfully exhausting set of meetings, vendor interactions, and presentations.  So I thought I would share a few things that highlighted the event for me…

I started out the conference with an all-day meeting of about 100 of Texas’ premier education CTOs, CIOs, and technology directors.  The Texas K-12 CTO Council (part of CoSN) is full of high energy, collaborative, and super intelligent educational leaders from around the state.  If there was one common thread throughout the day, it is that we are all facing a rapidly changing technology landscape.  BYOD, tablets, online learning, and mobile devices are here to stay, and we all need to embrace this change and figure out very quickly how we are going to leverage them for learning, lest we become irrelevant.

Another significant amount of my time at TCEA was spent off site meeting with the Texas Education Agency (TEA), about how the agency can help districts authenticate staff and students through their Project Share gateway, allowing single sign on (SSO) for all state sponsored curricular applications.   While this may not seem exciting, it is a huge first step and one that potentially will save districts thousands of hours of lost instructional time, as students and staff struggle to remember one more set of login credentials.  While this is in the early planning stages, I want to applaud the TEA and Associate Commissioner, Anita Givens, and her staff for listening to the needs of districts, and following up by launching this long overdue initiative.  We all want our staff and teachers doing SOMETHING other than managing user credentials.  I can only hope that other states are this forward thinking in helping out over burdened districts.

So you may be reading this and wondering if I got to see and cool stuff or good presentations.   I had the pleasure of presenting with two of my awesome team members to a packed house on developing mobile applications (anyone can do this – I promise).  School districts having apps may be a new thing now, but I promise you, in a few years if you do not have one, you will be in the minority. Almost everything on the floor revolved around mobile devices, and we all know that apps rule the roost on mobile.  Our presentation is freely downloadable on Slideshare.

A couple of neat things intrigued me as well – certainly there were some great devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Note, which when bundled with Samsung’s Smart School, looks like a great start on a fantastic manageable eco-system, where bundled with MDM, might offer make this a compelling investment over other tablets or devices.

Finally, one software system that caught my eye, because it’s emphasis on BYOD, was DisplayNote.  While this is not an inexpensive solution, it looks like a great way to unify a non-homogenous room of BYOD devices for teachers and students sharing content and collaborating. While the app may seem teacher focused, from what I have read, it looks like you could easily use this app and have students share their work and teach the class or collaborate together in small groups, using whatever device they brought to school that day.

While I have barely scratched the surface of a great event in this post, I promise if you look through this list of the 2013 TCEA convention session handouts, you will find some great things as well.   If you had the pleasure to attend, please tweet your favorite finds or sessions to @atemyshorts.

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We are social beings, so let's start learning that way!

This afternoon after checking into an early showing of Skyfall at the local theater on Facebook, I wanted to know how my drive up to Austin would be, so I opened my favorite driving app, Waze. Most readers are undoubtedly familiar with using Google Maps or other tools for navigation. Waze takes driving social, and leverages the power of connected drivers to predict traffic and travel times, but what is really powerful are the reports that appear on your map from others; there is an accident ahead, an object in the road, a traffic jam, or a hidden police car. Waze let me know that there was no major traffic, but to be careful about all of the police en route to Austin.

This is a fantastic use of social media. The reports of others are making my drives more pleasant, safe, and more on time. I never would have thought social media would be used to make driving better - but it has. Social media (which by most definitions involves a broad range of web sites, technologies, and apps) is a powerful set of communications technologies. Like any communications technology, it can be incredibly powerful, and of course like all others, it can be used for destructive purposes.

The ways which social media had helped are too numerous for a short blog post, but needless to say my travel, eating, professional networking, and learning will never be the same.

To some extent education seems very late to the social media game. Many schools are still just discussing if it should be used and if any social media tools are instructionally relevant. I am not advocating that all schools open up and start using every social media tool. There are many culture, policy, and instructional decisions that must be made at the local level before implementing many social media tools. But I am advocating that we should be leveraging some power of social networks, even if they are just walled garden social networks that we can use with our students to leverage peer learning. If I took one great piece of knowledge away from a great lecture last week by Dr. Abigail Baird, a Psychologist at Vassar College, it is that teens are social beings and that their peers are hugely important to them.

Dr. Baird did not advocate for using social learning with teens, but it really seems to be a great fit with what she talked about. She also pointed out that teens are most definitely not adults, which I think may be where much of our caution with social media in learning starts.

But ultimately social media has transformed many things we do and how we interact with our world and environment, but it has yet to make major inroads into most classrooms, when maybe it should, since social media technologies have improved our lives in many ways. Now it's back to improving my travel with social media; I am going to see what people on Yelp and Urbanspoon have to say about Austin's eateries.

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Presenting on Social Media at the 23rd Learning Disabilities Symposium: HOW TEENS THINK

I have the pleasure of being able to present  on Social Media at the 23rd Learning Disabilities Symposium: HOW TEENS THINK, on Friday, January 25th 2013 at the Winston School San Antonio.  The event promises to have some great speakers (excluding me).  My presentation appears below:

Social Media: Risks and Benefits from Steve Young

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