Bacon Wrapped Cheese and Shrimp Stuffed Jalapenos

Memorial Day food timeout - I made these yesterday and they were delicious.

Get some large jalapenos, cut lengthwise, core, and fill with a mixture of cream cheese and white sharp cheddar (with some garlic and seasoning in it). 

Place in a peeled raw shrimp and put on the other jalapeno half, then wrap in some thick bacon and close with a couple of toothpicks. 

Then grill slow and low - they will need your constant attention - and you will need to spray to keep down the fire.

Enjoy the baconny spicy goodness.

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What should we measure in our technology departments?

It is very easy to assume things are working well and that our IT departments are functioning excellently.  But if we really want to confirm that, what metrics should we measure?

There may not be a one size fits all answer on this, as there are so many variables in the equation, but ultimately there are a few key things that most of us should be tracking, to help us gauge workloads, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

At the core of many IT departments, sits a help or service desk. If we don’t have a handle on these numbers, then that is the place to start.  The service desk is a window into our IT operations that can shed a lot of light on our operations.  

There are lots of things to measure – time to resolution, technician workload, technician efficiency, recurring problems, and more.  Most of us strive to turn around trouble tickets as fast as we can, while at the same time making sure the customer is satisfied and received excellent service.    So I would start with measuring these numbers.   If you do not have a way to measure customer satisfaction with work performed, then it may be time to shop for a new help desk.

Going over these numbers regularly with your managers and staff helps promote an efficient service oriented operation.   If staff is thinking about how their work is perceived by customers, then they are likely to provide better service.  Bad service ratings and customer satisfaction may be meaningful indicators of a serious IT problem that is not resolved, or they may indicate an overworked staff or even possibly show an employee issue that needs to be addressed.

At the end of the day, tracking many of these service desk related metrics should help us better understand the work our staff is performing and hopefully allow us to improve our operations and our customer service.

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Where are my backups?

Just one month ago, the small town and school district of West, Texas suffered a horrendous tragedy, with the massive explosion that devastated much of the small town and the West Independent School District. My understanding is that the explosion devastated much of this district’s technology infrastructure, servers, and backups.  And just now it is being reported that a lot of schools (and most likely their data) reside close to fertilizer storage across the country.  And unfortunately this week in Oklahoma City, five schools were ravaged by a horrendous tornado.

Data is unfortunately super easy to lose – if not to a major natural or other disaster, then just as easily to a failed hard drive, a broken water main, or a building fire.  Whether you are a technology director, superintendent, or a classroom teacher, this is the perfect time to ask several questions, where are my files and systems backed up?   Are the backups stored in different physical locations?  Are the backups in a secured location?   Can the backups be restored to a different place if needed? 

 

All of us need to be backing up our important digital assets (and our students’ assets.)   Very few of our schools sit somewhere immune to natural disasters.   San Antonio is thought to be a very good location in Texas much more immune to tornadoes and hurricanes than many parts of the state, such that we have many very large data centers here.  Yet the picture to the right is my son’s elementary school two years ago, with a major wildfire burning right behind it.  I am sure the staff of the school never thought a fire would threaten them, yet it came so very close. 

So before travelling down to San Antonio to ISTE, please take a few minutes and backup your laptop, iPad, servers, etc. to another site or perhaps to the cloud, lest some unfortunate disaster strikes you or your school.  Safe travels.

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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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