Death knell for proprietary tablet ecosystems?

This past week has seen a lot of news on the tablet front. While it may be old news that tablet sales are declining, this past week two negative major stories broke about school-focused tablet companies. 

The first involved high profile Amplify, which created a school-only tablet with big subscription dreams, the idea being that schools adopt a relatively low-cost proprietary tablet system and then spend annually on a management and other content subscriptions. Past news for Amplify had not been positive, with a large scale high profile mess in Guilford County schools in North Carolina, where a very high percentage of the devices suffered from hardware issues, such as cracked screens and overheating device chargers. Now News Corp is ready to unload Amplify, which is ending production of its tablets. 

Then came the news that the KUNO tablet, that had been named the iPad’s biggest competitor in 2012, had its own problems and that several districts were suing CurriculumLoft over a multitude of issues with the proprietary tablet. 

Is this the tablet death knell in K-12? Probably not. But it’s no secret that tablets (or any other device) are not the secret to transforming learning, and that in many use scenarios students prefer having a keyboard, which both KUNO and Amplify sold as accessories. This begs the question, why not just buy a device with an attached keyboard? 

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Innovation is Not About the Technology

A reporter recently asked me, "Are any of the new technologies being introduced into K-12 education actually causing student test scores to increase?" While the question has been asked a lot, her point was that with all the venture capital being poured into educational technology now, investors and the public may start wanting products to show actual data on how they actually improve test scores. In the case of many products, a lot of which focus on remediating students for particular subjects, this is certainly a valid question. But I think many times we are hoping software, hardware, remediation systems, and other assorted educational technology products will magically transform education, when they will not.  Read the great article at ISTE One of the best pieces I've read this week was written by Grant Lichtman and published by ISTE. The author traveled to tens of schools across the country and visited with teachers and students and observed the learning process at many innovative schools. The author concludes that the innovation is really not about the technology at all, but rather about how learning is structured where the students are the leaders in learning. Of course this does not mean that technology can't play a role in the process, but the critical factors include how classes are structured, how students take charge of their learning and investigation, and how teachers and administrators must release control of learning to students. I urge you to read this great piece and join the conversation by sharing your thoughts.

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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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Dell World 2014 Report

Michael Dell and company judging ed tech startups at the Pitch Slam at Dell World 2014

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Dell World 2014, an event that showcased Dell’s commitment to its education customers and continued support of education innovation. This was especially evident in Dell’s sponsorship of the “Pitch Slam,” where three chosen edtech startups pitched products to the judges, headed by Michael Dell. The three products were very different, but all had lots of potential to be used across K-12:

·        BeeLine Reader helps readers use color grading of words to make it easy to follow sentences. 

·        EduCanon helps teachers create videos to flip their classrooms. The product includes an embedded check for understanding, which students must complete before continuing on with the video, giving teachers a great formative assessment dashboard.

·        PenPal Schools, which won the Dell Pitch Slam, enables students from different parts of the world to write and learn together. The students learn new languages and cultures in a safe and secure online system, which includes pre-made assignments that make it easy for teachers to get their classes writing to peers across the world.

Overall, this and other events at Dell World 2014 confirmed that the company is in the education market for the long haul.

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Buying buses without drivers - and computers without support

Our local group of K-12 technology leaders shared some interesting numbers this past week about how many devices each one of their technicians usually supports. The numbers were very telling, especially when looked at in the light of the increasing spend on educational technology, which topped out at over $13 billion this past year, up over 11% from the past year.  Several districts shared that their technicians were now supporting between 1,100 and 1,300 devices each.  By any measure, this is a daunting workload for one person. One district shared that its workload for each technician was more than 1,900 devices. This monumental workload is only being increased as schools increasingly turn to technology for almost all back office functions and instructional use. 

 

Can we really expect that teachers and students are getting the attention they need and work-order turnaround times they deserve, when they rely so heavily on technology? In what other industry should a professional have to wait a week to have his or her technology operational again? Yet in K-12 this happens all the time, as schools buy more software and hardware, yet fail to fund the personnel needed to ensure high availability and quick repair times. 

 

Many technology departments have even faced personnel cuts, as budgets have been tightened. Is this really setting K-12 up for success in implementing technology, or is this a recipe for disaster? What district would add 100 buses to its fleet without more mechanics and bus drivers? Of course this would not be done, as it is plainly ridiculous. Nonetheless, districts do this with technology every day, without assessing the real impact on teachers and students of having poorly supported technology.

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

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Some tools to bring new life to your classroom

If your classroom is looking a bit too similar to this:

Image used with blog permission from tomfishburne.com

Then it's time to try something different.  Check out the recommendations in the presentation below.

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The e-rate overhaul

As I vacationed last week, I curiously watched the news to see if the overhaul of the e-rate program would pass. While there was widespread agreement that the program needed to change, there was less agreement about how it should change. The FCC commissioners passed the changes with a whopping 3-2 vote. It is amazing and terrifying at the same time that five people—strike that, three people—can have so much authority to drastically change one of K-12’s largest funding sources. And even scarier is that so much of the money will be dedicated to be spent over two years, without what seems to be a clear path for long-term funding sustainability. Undoubtedly, some companies (i.e., overpriced K-12 web hosting companies, for one) are quaking in their business suits and some are rejoicing (major network equipment providers), while us in K-12 are wondering what happens in five or six years when the thousands of subsidized access points we installed in our schools need to be replaced? 

 

I applaud the support for technology in education and the acknowledgment that the program needed changing, while I am terrified that it is just a one-time spend with a tenuous plan for ongoing support and sustainability, making it smell more like D.C. politics than true long-term reform. And let’s be clear, many areas cut out of e-rate are costs that schools and districts will still have to bear, so while it helps e-rate provide funding for wireless, schools will have to fund these cut services out of local budgets.

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

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An inspiring story that says a lot about education

November 2013 Issue of Wired magazine

If you have not picked up the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine and read the cover story, “The Next Steve Jobs”, then you missed out on a truly inspiring story of a teacher, struggling to get by with little to no resources in the drug war ravaged Mexican border region.  While the star of the article is an impoverished young girl, 12-year-old Paloma Noyola Bueno, who responds to her teacher’s radical change in teaching methodology and becomes one of the best students in all of Mexico, the real story is about the teacher, Sergio Juárez Correa.

Correa struggled to reach his students and meet state testing standards (sound familiar?)  He knew that with virtually infinite access to information online (which his students did not have access to), the days of him being the bearer of knowledge for his students were numbered, and it was not producing results for his students.  So as Correa struggled to learn about how teachers are changing their instruction and having tremendous success, he decided to make a change in his classroom. So he told his students that they do have it extremely difficult and have none of the modern advantages, such as laptops and high speed internet, which students across the river in Brownsville, Texas have.  But he knew his students had potential to learn and to love doing it, which often seems to be lost on students and teachers neck deep in state and national mandates.

The methodology employed by Correa was at least partially modeled on the pioneering and increasingly cited work of TED darling Sugata Mitra.  But rather than leaving students unattended, Correa changed his role and now took a back seat in the classroom, as his students became investigators, cooperatively working on problems and debating answers in order to find solutions.  He largely did this without the use of technology, and had amazing results.

Would technology have hurt or enhanced what was done is his classroom?  I think it certainly could have assisted in enhancing a great teaching and learning environment, but I would also argue that if Correa had unleashed his students to lookup facts using Google, his results would not have been the same.  The power was in asking the students to think about problems and work cooperatively on solving them.

Teaching and leadership make a huge difference in student learning – clearly shown in this story, but they also too often stifle it: sadly, the article the quotes the chief of the Regional Center of Educational Development in Matamoros as saying “The teaching method makes little difference.” 

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

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Education has yet to experience digital transformation

Gartner Symposium 2013

This past week thousands of IT leaders descended on Orlando for Gartner Symposium.  This was not a conference about the nuts and bolts of IT, as much as it was about trends, strategies, and the new reality of the impact of everything and everyone becoming digitally connected. While the conference was not focused on education, it was abundantly clear that K-12 education is lagging behind many industries in transformational uses of technology.  Gartner Senior Vice President Peter Sondergaard's keynote termed what is happening globally as "digitalization", saying "Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Every business leader is becoming a digital leader..."  The message was that all industries are being dramatically altered and technology is the common thread behind massive transformation. Sondergaard insisted that industries and leaders need to understand and harness the innovative power that technology.   

While technology in education has been a key ingredient in innovative classrooms as demonstrated in numerous classrooms, schools, districts, and the Project Red study, there are many examples poorly implemented technology in schools.  For schools to be truly transformed by digitalization, they will need to leverage technology to educate every student with customized learning content and feedback supplemented and supported by well-trained educators.  The learning model itself at some point probably needs to change, lest many schools will continue to be only marginally impacted by technology.  What are your thoughts?  Have we truly transformed education through technology, or do we have a long way to go?  What are you doing to start your transformation?   Your comments are welcome at http://ctotechnotes.blogspot.com/

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

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E-Rate: The Sequel?

E-Rate: The Sequel?

While many educators have been enjoying the relative relaxation of summer vacation, there has been a flurry of activity in DC around the federal program known as E-Rate. 

E-Rate has served as a catalyst for school technology growth to power research, communication and online learning, since its inception in 1997.  E-Rate has provided schools with funding for powerful networks, which have become pervasive, and crucial to the functioning of the education process.  School networks are now a crucial utility to schools, much like electricity.  But networks need to change; much like the electrical wiring at schools has needed to be increased from the days where all that was plugged in was a filmstrip projector.  The uses of networks in education are expanding daily and the numbers of devices and users on them is climbing rapidly, with the advent of 1 to 1 and BYOD programs, bolstered by a host of online learning initiatives.

Several groups, such as CoSN (the Consortium for School Networking), have been advocating on schools’ and educators’ behalf and have been pushing the FCC to revisit E-Rate funding, which has been largely static, despite a massive increase in needs.  Just over a month ago, there appeared to be progress, with President Obama’s announcement of the ConnectED initiative.   And just this past week, the FCC voted to overhaul the E-Rate program. 

A true technology leader, Sheryl Abshire, Chief Technology Officer at Calcasieu Parish Public Schools, testified before the FCC saying, “E-Rate needs to move beyond assessing whether a classroom or library has an Internet connection to determining whether that connection’s speed meets the needs of users who seek to access and use the most up-to-date digital content, courses, resources, services and tools.”   We could not have asked for a better advocate on our behalf and it appears the FCC listened.

So now the rest of us need to help out; The next step for all of us is to provide comments on the new proposals as the FCC provides details on the proposed programs, so be sure to keep an eye on the FCC’s site.  

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