CoSN 2015 Texas CTO Clinic Supports K-12 Technology Leadership Growth

Missed the 2015 CoSN Texas CTO Clinic?  Check out some missed highlights at Technology & Learning Magazine's web site at http://www.techlearning.com/blogentry/9469 

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Check out - The Right Connections - how to keep school communities informed

Judson ISD and it's fantastic home grown Parent Center app were featured in Technology & Learning's May 2015 cover story, Now Hear This: The Right Connections - how to keep school communities informed - from @techlearning http://www.techlearning.com/resources/0003/the-right-connections/69286

http://www.techlearning.com/resources/0003/the-right-connections/69286

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My New Year's Wish List for Ed Tech

It's been another fast-paced year in educational technology, with nothing more certain than change. Yet as much as there is innovation and exciting new products and ideas, there is a lot that I keep hoping will change, ideally at a rate faster than the speed of smell. So here is my Ed-Tech New Year wish list in no particular order of urgency: Transparent pricing: We are in education and cost IS important; if we have to use Chinese water torture to get a price for your product or service or to figure some outlandish set of options and upgrades, we may shop somewhere else. Fair contracts: Contracts need to take into account that we get funded by fickle entities. Stop writing auto-renewing contracts with no outs, or worse yet, multi-year auto renewals. Learning content standards: Digital content is exploding everywhere, yet much of it is locked in proprietary content prison cells, inaccessible from our learning management systems. Let's all get behind a common standard, like "Learning Tools Interoperability" or LTI for short. Easy log in: If your company cannot support LTI, at least bless us with some sort of common authentication or single sign-on. We can't bear to have teachers or administrators waste one more second administering accounts or wasting time logging in to a web site. Old web technology: It's far past the time to layout web pages in tables, run Flash animations, and use Java to validate forms. Join this century and leverage HTML 5 and responsive web design, so all of our devices can access your 1999 web site. A common wireless video standard that actually works: Students and teachers all have different devices and all have great things to share with the class, but in most cases, most of their devices cannot share their content to a TV or projector over the same standard. There is money to be made by someone solving this!

Ed Tech - change is for certain

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Getting out of the teaching rut!

With any job it’s easy to eventually find oneself in a rut, doing things the same way over and over. I know back when I was teaching, sometimes the pressures of grading, paperwork, and the real world meant that I didn’t try to teach a lesson differently or try something new with my students. Maybe I blamed it on the fact that I had four class preps, but no matter what the reason, it was always very rewarding to take time to try a new innovative lesson and see it work very well in the classroom.

 

As we start a new school year, there is no better time for teachers to investigate something new. And whether it is something truly transformative to teaching, or maybe just a tool to make teaching a little more efficient, any improvement is a step in the right direction.

 

Maybe a simple tool to motivate good student behavior is what is needed; then try ClassDojo. Or maybe increasing communication with students and parents is a pressing need. Tools like Remind or Class Messenger will help improve communication.

 

Want students to be more involved in class? Then give Socrative or ExitTicket a try. Is it time to find a new way to curate and synthesize web content for students or for students to do so as they learn? Then head on over and try super simple Blendspace or LessonPaths.

 

Sometimes it’s much easier to take baby steps to get out of the rut, rather than trying to climb the ladder and change everything at once. So make a new school year resolution for you or your staff to take a baby step or two on your path of improvement. For more info on these tools, view my blog entry and presentation about them.

                This blog entry is cross posted with the great folks at SchoolCIO

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Fix Your Bleeding Heart

Schools are known for being notoriously understaffed in their IT departments. Probably the last area any school IT department considers adding staff to is IT security. Staffing IT security in schools is an afterthought.  But now everyone reading this should be very concerned about online security and needs to take securing their online identities into their own hands. This past week with the revelation of heartbleed, a bug in the widely used Open SSL, used to encrypt and secure thousands of well known web sites, all of us have potentially had many of our passwords compromised. 

 So whether we have school IT security staff or not, it is up to all of us students, staff, and IT to proactively start changing our passwords for affected sites. But it’s not quite that simple.  You must change the password only after the affected site has patched their servers to fix heartbleed.  How do you know which sites are affected and have been patched?  Check this list at CNET.  Or better yet, run a live check on a server yourself at LastPass. This is a good time to start using complex and unique passwords to protect your online identity and to consider using a password manager to remember them all. Stay safe online!

This blog is cross posted at Technology and Learning

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Judson ISD Connect Mobile App Takes the Bronze Lovie Award

Yesterday we received notification that the Judson ISD Connect! mobile school app for Android and iOS received a Bronze award in the European Lovie Awards.  I am so very proud of my co-workers who worked very hard to make this app what it is.  I am also most appreciative of Conduit Mobile and their fantastic team who worked with us to make the app better and resolve issues to make the app what it is today. More info on the app is available at the app page at http://www.judsonisd.org/district/technology/jisd_mobile.cfm or read about our development experience here in the CTO Technotes blog via Tech & Learning Magazine.

Conduit Mobile

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Tech & Learning Magazine and SchoolCIO cover story on (Not So) Easy Money

Getting funding in times of very tight budgets is certainly challenge for any CIO.   Tech & Learning magazine has a great new issue called "Showing You The Money".  This issue is focused on how you can get funds, as well as save them.

The issue features several fantastic technology visionaries, plus me, give their (my) views on how we now have to work on justifying expenditures, using tools like CoSN's Value of Investment and Return on Investment calculators.  The article is entitled (not so) Easy Money and is found here.

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