Thanks!

I am very humbled and honored that the Texas K-12 CTO Council (the Texas state chapter of CoSN) presented me an award as the Grace Hopper Texas CTO of the Year at their Winter Meeting in February.

Without the incredible support and hard work of my amazing staff, this would not have been at all possible.  My staff is an incredibly hard working talented group of professionals that does amazing things each and every day.

The other group I need to thank are all the amazing CTOs and Technology Directors around the state who are part of the Texas K-12 CTO Council.  This group of individuals exemplifies hard work, collegiality, and is a group that makes each and every member better at being leaders.

More info at Judson ISD: https://www.judsonisd.org/jblog/post.cfm/young-receives-hopper-award-as-cto-of-the-year 

Texas K-12 CTO of the Year

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Where is the app integration and innovation in K-12?

I came back from TCEA, underwhelmed, not by the myriad of great presenters, but by vendor product offerings.  Where were the companies transforming education and interconnecting systems so that educators can leverage multiple platforms as needed to help provide a better more integrated learning experience?  Most of what I saw was just incremental improvements of existing products.  While there were some standouts, I was not wowed.  

I came home to beautiful warm weather over the weekend and decided to

Endomondo

work off too many conference calories by exercising.  I thought about how technology has transformed fitness for me in the past couple of years and it struck me that other industries are embracing interconnected app and data ecosystems much faster than K-12 Education.  I use an app called MyFitnessPal to track weight, calories, exercise and more.  I chose this app mainly because of its very robust third party integration.  It integrates with Endomondo, which I use to track running, walking, and cycling. So I donned my bluetooth headset, which allowed me to play cloud streamed Spotify music, while I biked many miles be tracked by GPS on Endomondo. At the end of the ride my ride data was automagically synced from Endomondo to MyFitnessPal, allowing me a seamless experience that made working out a less taxing more enjoyable experience.  That is what is needed in education. We need products that integrate easily together and provide students and staff enjoyable and powerful educational experiences.  

We are seeing more companies do this. Products such as Google Apps for Education, Schoology, and Edmodo, just to name a few are working on app ecosystems so staff and students can easily integrate apps and data for a seamless and more productive learning experience.  We need a lot less siloed products that are hard to manage and do not share data and functions with other apps or systems.  Am I wishing for too much, or do our students deserve this?

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

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Wearable technology: Coming to a classroom near you

Carl Hooker rightly noted that wearable and connected technologies were the standout of the Consumer Electronics Show. I don't doubt the days of my fridge knowing I'm low on milk and letting my grocery store know to put it on my order are not that far away. I’m perfectly fine with my fridge restocking itself.

EyeTap

The technology of connected everything is here. Proof enough is that it's such a beautiful day here in Texas that I can't be bothered to go inside and find my laptop, so I am writing this on my iPhone on 75 degree Texas January afternoon using Google Drive. We are very connected and classrooms are increasingly more so everyday.

So my question is...is Carl Hooker correct in saying wearable technology is coming to classrooms?  My opinion is that for a while most teachers will be terrified of students wearing items like EyeTap or Google Glass. Is Billy looking up facts, recording me, or being inappropriate?  But then just a few years ago wasn't the idea of cell phones in classrooms thought to be crazy by most?  Wearable and connected technologies will certainly cause an uproar at times. Students will get in trouble. Innovators and us nerds will find great educational uses. And undoubtedly we will have to craft new policies, many of which will probably be too draconian and reactionary at the outset. What do you think the future holds for education and wearable technologies?

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From zero to working server in ten minutes – Trying out managed hosting

In an earlier blog I mentioned my requirements for a great help desk for our organization.   After a lengthy search, trial, and selection process, a winner was picked.  As it turned out, while the help desk used standard software that we support, it used a database version that we did not yet have running in our organization.  We were not able to upgrade our current databases, because other vendors’ systems required older database versions.

We talked about options such as starting another database server, and our help desk vendor mentioned that they had a lot of customers starting to run their software in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.  Like many districts, while we have had many cloud based software applications, we had never tried managed hosting, which has gained a huge amount of traction in recent years, with a huge number of players , now increasingly dominated by heavyweights such as Rackspace, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Verizon, and IBM. 

Managed hosting is akin to renting a server, rather than buying it.  The customer gets to choose the operating system and the software stack that goes on top.  The customer typically will pay based on the software chosen, the size of the hardware needed and more.  Other charges may include additional charges for bandwidth, storage, monitoring, support, and security services.  Much like a rental of anything else, the customer has control over how long they want it, from minutes to years.  It is truly a pay as you consume commodity.  The servers are housed in the managed hosting provider’s data center, so the customer never has to worry about the plethora of mundane non-mission critical tasks that have been traditionally associated with the acquisition, installation, maintenance, and decommissioning of servers.

The traditional procurement and setup of servers in schools districts and other institutions can traditionally takes weeks, if not months.  All of the following are tasks that can be eliminated with managed hosting, so time to server spin up can be slashed:

1.       Quoting of hardware.

2.       High up front capital costs.

3.       Data center space.

4.       Air-conditioning.

5.       Power.

6.       UPS and generators.

7.       Racks.

8.       Purchase orders.

9.       Receiving and inventory of equipment.

10.   Physical setup of equipment.

11.   Operating system and software installation.

12.   Switch ports.

13.   SAN space.

I am sure there are many things I left of the list, but the point is we saved a large amount of upfront costs and saved time for our already overburdened staff.

In our case our help desk vendor had an image for us to spin up our server off of in the AWS cloud. We literally went from no server to running application server in about ten minutes.  It was incredible and makes me inclined to think that we will be running many more servers this way in the coming years.  The huge capital costs and efforts required to maintain data centers may not be sustainable when our money could be better spent on projects that benefit student learning.  While our need for servers is not likely to lessen, the cheaper and faster bandwidth becomes, the motivation for districts to move to managed hosting will increase.

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

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Do you have a new year's resolution to stay organized? Try my favorite productivity tool, Evernote

Sometimes, I feel like am very organized, then other days I feel as if I am anything but organized.  But generally I feel I do a good job utilizing task lists, to do lists, documenting ideas, mileage, meeting notes, instructions, web pages, tips, etc.  Over the years I have used many techniques to record this info, from paper, 3M sticky notes, to notes in Outlook.  But hands down, the best tool I have ever used for this is Evernote -  http://evernote.com/evernote/ .  As busy leaders, a tool like Evernote can prove indispensable to maintaining organized information in a hectic work world of information overload.

Evernote is a free productivity tool that I feel basically acts as my second brain many days, allowing me to easily find chunks of information that I probably would have otherwise forgotten or lost.  Evernote is available on the following platforms: 

• iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch
• Android
• Windows Phone
• Blackberry
• WebOS (via App Catalog)
• Mac OS X
• Windows Desktop
• Windows 8 (Touch)

And even without a software or app install, Evernote is always available just through a web browser.  So as long as you carry a smart device, you will have Evernote at your side, ready to record info you do not want to forget.  

There are a million ways to user Evernote, or maybe more, judging from all the blogs post and list of uses you will find from a quick perusal of Google search results, from a query such as this: https://www.google.com/search?q=way+to+use+evernote .

I keep all sorts of information in Evernote, which allows you to store related information in notebooks, which are pretty much what they sound like.  You could have one giant notebook, or organize notes into a notebook for every subject.  I am not a big filer – I use about five main notebooks for a majority of what I file.  Much like my email filing technique, where I stopped being an email filer several years back and now I rely on search queries to find information, saving me the countless hours of filing emails, or in this case notes.  I keep the following notebooks in Evernote: Systems, Work, Personal, Recipes to Try, and Best Recipes.  A way I find useful that allows you to further make notes searchable, and findable, is by adding tags to notes in Evernote. As many tags can be added to a note as you want, allowing you to quickly find the note at a later time, but if you don’t tag notes, Evernote still has a robust search system built in to help you find your notes.

And this is where Evernote really shines and ends up being what I call my second brain.  I have Evernote on at least three computers, three tablets, and my phone.  What is great is that all of these devices keep their notes in sync, such that I can save a note on my phone during the busy work day, then fire up my tablet in the evening, to find the note waiting for me.  So I may clip a web page in my web browser, using the Evernote Web Clipper Extension - http://evernote.com/webclipper/ , which I can then later access on any of my devices when I need it. The web page is fully indexed, so I can search for a word or subject that was on the page, without having to remember what web site I had found the info on.

I also file lots of emails into Evernote.  If I receive an email that has information I need to keep, then I forward it to an email address that Evernote has attached to my account.  I think this is one of Evernote’s most powerful and often overlooked features.  To find out the email address to send notes to for your account, in the software, go to the Tools menu and choose Account Info.  On a mobile device or tablet, click on your name to see Account Info.  You will see an address to email notes to, which will then be automatically placed into your notebook.  This is fabulous and makes retaining a few really important emails all the easier.  I often send receipts, software licenses, and other things I need to keep to my Evernote email address so I can find them easily later.

If you have not joined the Evernote revolution, and you are looking to start the New Year out better organized, then I highly recommend you try out Evernote and see how it works for you.  Do you have an Evernote super tip?  Then feel free to leave a comment and share it with the world at http://ctotechnotes.blogspot.com/

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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