Administration of Education

Today was our first attendance meeting of the year and we were looking over the collection of statistics for last year. The attendance policy is that any student, who has more than 18 unexcused absences, gets no credit for the course. Out of our 1500 high school students, 20% had 18 or more unexcused absences. That equates to 300 students. I want to emphasize that these are unexcused absences, the actual absenses are much higher. How many actually didn't get credit? The answer was "a handful".

What happened was that the schools decided that if the student passed the course, then they got credit regardless of how many absences they had. What we have is a Progress Based Curriculum, rather than a Standards Based Curriculum. So, we had students who missed more than 18 classes, who actually passed a class. These facts create a good deal of questions and philosophical debate, and perhaps even bring us back to accountability and what we have now: testing, testing, testing...

What is the point of being in class, if they can pass without attending? How challenging can the curriculum be if they can pass without attending? Why are they not attending?

One suggestion was to get a better reward system, so that students will attend class. Another was to have a portion of the overall grade dependent on attendance. Another was to put a positive spin on phone calls made to parents, to encourage more support from parents.

All of these may help in some way, but the bigger question is: What are the things that make children want to come to school? What are the things that make children want to participate in their own education?

The first question can be answered from a strictly human perspective. I mean there are jobs that I actually dreaded going to each morning. Jobs that actually made me physically sick because the stress level was so high. Then I've held positions that, believe it or not, I actually looked forward to going to. Positions that I got to early and stayed til long after my work hours. Positions that I probably would've done with or without pay (many that I did do without pay).

We find that enthusiasm in jobs that have an intrinsic reward with more value than the monetary gains we get. In addition, the work conditions are such that we feel valued, that make us feel good about ourselves, and that challenge and engage us. Our contacts with other humans, in that position, are satisfying as well. The question is: can school be made like that and how?

What human isn't born with a natural curiosity and desire to figure out what they do not understand? What human isn't born with a desire to explore, discover? Schools, of all places, should be places that encourage these things and provide avenues for explorations, challenges, growth.

I'm simply going to give you quotations here, and then web sites where you can go and get the information yourself:

Incidents of child sexual exploitation have risen from 4,573 in 1998 to 112,083 in 2004, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Reports of child exploitation up. USA Today Snapshots, 17 February, 2005.

Demand for pornographic images of babies and toddlers on the Internet are soaring. More babies and toddlers are appearing on the net and the abuse is getting worse. It is more torturous and sadistic than it was before. The typical age of children is between six and 12, but the profile is getting younger. Approximately 20 new children appear on the porn sites every month - many kidnapped or sold into sex.
Prof. Max Taylor, Combating Pedophile Information Networks in Europe, March 2003

http://www.innocenceonline.com/statistics-children.asp

Approximately one in five children received a sexual solicitation or approach in statistics collected in 2000
Online Victimization: A Report on the Nation's Youth,David Finkelhor, Kimberly J. Mitchell, Janis Wolak, June 2000

STUDY: KIDS LACK NET SUPERVISION
The Roper polling organization conducted a study of 500 households with children between the ages of 8 and 18 and found that parental supervision of children's Internet activities is seriously lacking. The survey, conducted for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, finds that 20 percent of parents do not monitor their children's Internet usage, and 52 percent monitor it only moderately. More alarming, the survey also finds that 18 percent of the children surveyed intend to physically meet someone they met on the Internet. Forty-eight percent of parents allow their children to go online every day or as often as they want, and 24 percent of parents do not place restrictions on the length of time their children stay on the Internet. In addition, 71 percent of parents with children age 14 or older no longer supervise their children's Internet use. Ruben Rodriguez of the National Center's exploited child division calls the Internet-equipped home PC the "baby sitter of the 90s." (USA Today Online, 05/27/99)

http://www.marymadden.com/cybersex/mainpages/society/kidprotect.html

We teach our children not to talk to strangers. So, why are they talking to strangers online?

Do you REALLY know for sure who your child is talking to online? Do you REALLY know for sure that they are not seeing images that are so graphic they would disturb you?! If you answered "yes" and aren't monitoring your child, then I advise you not to bet your life on it. More importantly, don't bet your child's!

My theme this week seemed to be Cybersecurity/Hacking. Day one was blocking some additional websites using our software program for those purposes: Netsweeper. I had pulled a report of the most accessed sites for the past few days and determined there were a few inappropriate sites that were getting under the filter. Tuesday, in a meeting with a few teachers and administrators, I talked about the ability of students to "hack" teacher passwords, getting access to student data. I was concerned that our teachers and staff were using passwords like their names, or even "password". My point was readily dismissed with a remark: "Yeah, if they cared." The next day a student was caught running a hacking program on one of the teacher's computers. I was called to determine what to do, and so I pulled out the district policies and the AUP that students must sign. The consequences: banned from all school computers indefinitely, contact parents.

Day four was the New York State Cybersecurity Conference. The presenters were supperb and included such experts as: Parick Gray, Director of X-Force National Emergency Response Team; Chris Painter, Deputy Chief of Computer Crime; and Thomas Eldering, Alan Paller, Director of Research for the SANS Institute, and more.

I wished a number of people had been there: all parents, all teens, all teachers, and all school administrators. Their recommendations to parents:

1. place the computer in a central area (not in a child's bedroom)

2. know your child's user name and password (and don't abuse that knowledge)

3. set reasonable time limits for computer use and enforce them

4. put a bios password on your computer

5. install monitoring software (not to checkup on your child, but for the purposes of finding information if something should happen to your child).

Parents would never allow into their homes to speak with their child, some of the people they are allowing their children to converse with on the internet. They would not be that blind! Unless you actually know where your child goes on the internet, unless you know exactly who they are talking to, you DON'T know. Pedophiles can hide behind all sorts of false identities on the internet. Your child may have posted his/her picture and information of themselves on the internet on web sites known as "MyPlaces" web sites, where they supposedly meet and chat with other kids. Sorry, but that's also where these sickos lurk. Protect your child.

Oh, and schools. Get the message out to parents. There is a free curriculum teachers can use to educate their students about the dangers on the internet. They can download it for free. Administrators, encourage your teachers to download and incorporate this curriculum in their own. It is vitally important.

Today was primarily spent in meetings. The primary focus was our Student Information Data Base, getting a program up and running that will print our report cards, getting a gradebook program running, troubleshooting networks in our satellite schools, discovering that all of our loaner laptops are either old or missing, learning that many teachers don't even have decent computers in their rooms and hearing one of the directors tell me they don't have money for computers, etc, etc.

Quite frankly I'm getting slightly discouraged already, and its only been two weeks. It seems that the directors of the various programs are only concerned with the issues above, and that's what they want me to focus on, and training for the teachers on how to use the Student Database, gradebook, etc.

My passions have always been instructional technology. I think individuals become confused thinking that refers to all technology in a school. But I'm primarily concerned with things like why students should learn html, not just Frontpage; how blogs, wikis and other social software can improve classroom performance, how to develop effective powerpoints and how to teach students to create effective powerpoints, why and how to use the web to connect with students outside of school as well as connecting with parents and the community...

I'm grateful that I still work part time as administrator at a university. Tonight I spent the evening editing videos the School of Nursing had taken. I spent some time talking with one of the professors who is currently investigating the use of blogs in preservice teacher training, and I took a look at some of the challenges we've been having with our course management system lately. Ah.... it's so refreshing to actually be talking education and technology.

I hope there will come a point when the administrative stuff is up and running on its own, so I can begin to go into classrooms and work with teachers. I hope I can find the acceptance with teachers that I found with professors. I surely do hope so.

“Synching Up With The iKid” by Josh McHugh is the cover article in the October issue of Edutopia, and what I would term a MUST READ for educators. McHugh shares that “A recent survey by CDW Corporation shows that teachers are more likely to use technology to ease the administrative requirements of K-12 education than to utilize it in instructional applications.” (Isn’t that exactly what I said in this blog only a few posts ago!) Later in the article he writes: “federal testing requirements consistently get priority over technology initiatives. Consequently, teachers spend most of the day in drill-and-practice mode…” which is probably why so much of the technology we see in classrooms are games, and or PowerPoint lectures.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to help develop and teach the curriculum for a technology camp based in a typical in-the-woods camp. The business man who funded the camp, stressed the importance of having a curriculum that encouraged students to be producers of media, rather than simply consumers. John Holt, in his book How Children Learn stated: “It is a serious mistake to say that, in order to learn, children must first be able to ‘delay gratification,’ i.e., must be willing to learn useless and meaningless things on the faint chance that later they may be able to make use of some of them. It is their desire and determination to do real things, not in the future but right now, that gives children the curiosity, energy, determination, and patience to learn all they learn.” and I would definitely agree with that. Humans are naturally curious about their world, asking questions, seeking answers. With technology our students have the ability, at any given moment in time, to look for answers to our questions, or to at least find theories about the answers, and to share their own thoughts and theories with others.

Effectively using technology in classrooms means using technology in innovative ways to make classrooms dynamic environments of learning; Wiki’s, Blogs and Course Management Systems like Moodle are some of the ways educators cited in the Edutopia article are making their classrooms and their teaching more dynamic. It talks about how the use of technology can begin to change the classroom into a place where children begin to construct their own learning. “When they open their classes up to the world; Power tends to move from the center outward…For educators accustomed to making and enforcing absolute rules, letting the inmates take part in running the asylum is going to take some getting used to. But in the end, the best way for students to learn about the world they live in is to have a hand in creating it.”

Today, sitting around the dinner table with a couple of college students, we got into a discussion about technology in the classroom. “What’s a SmartBoard?” was the question posed to me, as I had casually mentioned one in the discussion. I stood up, imagining there was one on the back wall, and began to demonstrate, with imaginary imagery, what a SmartBoard and its software can do. “...One of the most valuable and effective technologies a classroom can have...” was a statement I made and one I frequently make. It can make teaching dynamic and learning interactive. Then, I added, that the only other technology I thought that had that dynamic of an impact were Student Response Systems.

I know how hard my daughter has struggled with Calculus. I know how she’s left a classroom, thinking she had understood what the instructor had said, only to find she understood nothing… “You see” I said, “The instructor can give the lesson (using a SmartBoard, of course), and then ask the students a question that would let the instructor know if they’ve understood it. The students click in their answers and he can begin to get a picture of what they’ve understood and how they understood it. A graphical representation appears on the wall, that shows the responses as they are entered into the ‘clickers’. The instructor can address the problems right then and there: ‘Ok, so what did you hear my say? Where have I confused you?’” The students participate in their own learning.

The discussion became animated and lively, as the two of them began to talk about what it would be like to sit in a classroom in which the instructor used such technology. I heard a lot of “I wish…” My daughter talked about how this is the first year one of her professors has ever used the CMS to teach a web-enhanced course, and how much she likes it and how much she uses the CMS. “I wish all my instructors did that. She puts links up on the site, for further investigation. She says ‘If you’re interested in learning more about what we talked about today, I’ve posted a few web sites with information on this topic.’”

The two college students lamented that too many professors were still the “Sage on the Stage”. What I've discovered, however, is that it was easier to get professors to use technology than it is to reach teachers. Coming from being an adminstrator of Higher Ed, where technology was really making it into the classrooms in a dynamic way (even a small private college with financial struggles) to working in the K-12 environment that still uses relatively little interactive technology, I realized I had a HUGE hill to climb. There are many more hurdles in K-12 than I ever understood. But, here we go…

The MIT Media Lab is working on a project called "One Laptop per Child (OLPC)" with the goal of mass producing laptops specifically designed for kids (rubber exteriors are one specification) at the price of $100 each. These will not be available on the commercial market, but distributed to schools working through large government initiatives. The primary target population is in developing countries.

My own thoughts on the subject are many. The initiative will be closing the international digital divide, and raising the bar on integrating education and technology worldwide. An article in the September issue of Scientific American speaks about the growing wealth worldwide. In The Climax of Humanity, George Musser states "extreme poverty is receding both as a percentage of the population and in absolute numbers." He goes on to discuss how the economies of countries like China and India are evolving into those that will rank with those of the more highly developed countries. We are indeed becoming a global economy, and our children really will compete with children around the world for employment. Getting laptops into the hands of children, and into their homes as well, will dramatically change their access to knowledge and education. Will our own schools commit to infusing their teaching with technology.

In the district I am responsible for, there are some classrooms and schools that use technology well, and others who use it as a babysitter. The teachers, far too often, are familiar only with "adult technology" that is, with the technology they use for grading, attendance, etc. Instructional technology is weak. I find it most strongly in the career and technical schools--no surprise there! The auto classes use technology. The engineering classes and the graphic design classes use technology, but the students in other classes do not. Part of the problem is that adults like adult technology. They tend to stick with their comfort levels. But another part of the problem is the money and how it is allocated. Our district is very inefficient! There are two SmartBoards and neither is in a classroom. Instead they are sitting in the halls of the admin building. Administrators use them in their presentations. WHAT A WASTE!

I was hired to change that, but I'm overwhelmed with the way the administration is currently set up. To use the course management system, I have to pay another department for the services, and they are not cheap. The cost is not just for the CMS, but the staff that works for that department, and the overhead. If I want to provide training for the teachers, I have to pay another department to provide them, and again, it is not cheap. I know I have a great many changes to make in the way things are currently run. I'm not sure I can. They been doing things this way for a long time, and people are territorial.

My other thoughts on MITs initiative is that this is the way things should be. MIT is in the forefront of Open Source--with SAKAI and its Open Courseware. Making the world your team, seems to be the way to make the world a better place--no competition, just cooperation.

MITs goal is to have the computers ready for the first rollout a year from now. The lessons they are learning in the development of these will help everyone. They are paring down the computers, making them more efficient and more durable. It will pave the way for more access to technology for everyone. Thank you MIT.

I went to visit several of our component schools today, those classrooms termed "Special Education" classrooms. We provide special education classrooms for those smaller districts that do not have enough students for the district to support. We have provide special education teachers, assistive technologists, occupational and physical therapists. Schools can send their students to a school where we have classrooms, and they pay us for that service.

Anyway, I went to visit the classrooms to see how they were using technology and to see what sort of equipment needs they had. What I found was that the classroom technology was sorely lacking in many cases. Old computers, no internet connection, and operating systems that could no longer run some of the programs the assistive technologists would like to run for the students. What I also found was that, for the most part, the computers were being used for Word Processing or "Games". What disturbed me was that most of the games were just exercises jazzed up. I questioned WHY that disturbed me and came to the conclusion that, in many cases, the technology was either being used as a baby sitter/reward type of thing, and/or it was being used in a way that the teacher was familiar with using technology (as one of the Director's put it: adult technology) rather than with a direct and clear purpose in mind. Often programs are used that way so that educators can say they are integrating their curriculum with technology.

A few recent studies have shown that games have the potential to actual program, or reprogram, the brain. A study by Bavelier and Green: showed that individuals who play action games regularly are better able to process certain visual information.The same study showed that playing the game Tetris did not have the same effect. Micheal Posner and colleagues at Cornell conducted a study with a group of 4-6 year olds playing "special computer games". The games were shown to have "improved healthy youngsters' ability to pay attention".

This is where we truly need to be putting our money and attention. Yesterday, when I met with one of the directors, he stressed that their purpose in hiring me was so that I could begin guiding them to use technology in a way that would "raise test scores". Sadly, this is the result of NCLB, and should not be the focus of education. When an IEP meeting is convened, the task is to identify specific skill weaknesses of the child, and then to develop a plan to address and shore up these weak areas. This is exactly what technology has the potential to do, and I do not mean through drill and practice, which does very little to raise the conceptual knowledge of the child. If we are "teaching to the test" then we are focusing on drill and practice, because conceptual knowledge is developmental.

What we should be looking at is not how to integrated education with technology, but looking at the problems that currently exist and ask how technology can be used to solve the problem. In other words, focusin on how to integrate education with technology is the least creative and beneficial way to do so, focusing on how to creatively solve educational problems and realising that technology can help us to do so, is the best way to see the future.

I hope I help them to raise their test scores, but much more I hope to inspire a sense of excitement and energy and creativity.



Schools are investing money in technology at ever increasing rates, not just in hardware, infrastructures and software, but in teacher training, administration, and in disposing of the technical trash. And, there is money to be made in selling technology to schools. Sometimes it seems like the schools are bleeding money, and getting little back for it.

This morning, at breakfast, my college freshman daughter turned to me and said "Mom, make sure you tell all the high school teachers to use Blackboard." Her reasoning was that if all professors and teachers used Blackboard for, at the very minimum, posting assignments, students who couln't read what they jotted down during class, or who missed the assignment altogether, could find out what the assignments were and complete them. She suggested that what would make life even better, would be if instructors went completely paperless allowing students to submit assignments online as well. "No more worrying about a printer that won't work".

She said that, in high schools, students can easily access a computer in the library, if they don't have the internet at home. Or they can access it from the public library. She said, quite interestingly "It would make school so much more serious."

Hmmm, this gives me something to wonder about. Making assignments available online, can seem to make students less responsible (they don't need to worry about copying the assignment down in class), but it is actually removing an excuse for not having homework done. It makes accessing this information easier, while at the same time, making students, ironically, more responsible for their assignments. And, to make things even better, parents who have often heard "I don't have any homework tonight" can check and make sure that's the case. :-)

If a school does not have a course management system in place (like Blackboard, Angel, etc) they can download and use Moodle (which is free and very, very easy to run and use). A teacher can use any number of free web sites created just for this purpose, if the school does not have a course management system available. Here are a couple to get started:
http://teacherweb.com/
http://www.think.com/en_us/


I would encourage all teachers to have a web presence and use it to extend their reach.

Yesterday I officially finished my full-time position as Director of Technology Integration at a small univerisity, though I will continue part-time in the evenings until they find a replacement. Monday, I will begin a new position as Coordinator of Technology for a K-12 Education cooperative of five counties. I am already aware that the software applications I will primarily use will be completely different. In Higher Ed I was Blackboard Administrator (a course management system), and created learning objects using software applications like Dreamweaver, Impatica, and Camtasia. I was heavily involved in digital video editing. It was fun and creative. In K-12 they tell me I will primarily be responsible for a software program called SASE.

In Higher Education I used my Education Theory and Practice every day, and felt a connection with the School of Education on our pirmary campus. In K-12, I'm not sure what my connections will be like. I wonder if I will feel disconnected from eduction? I wonder if I will be as able to share my expertise, as I did in higher ed. I wonder if I will be as respected.

Outside of higher education, I've found that I have to prove myself twice as capable as any man. At the University, I was the first person any individual on campus turned to , when they had a technology related question. I was highly regarded as an expert in my field. I wonder why it is so often a different story outside of that.

My abilities in technology come naturally, and it runs in the family so that is not unusual. Nevertheless, because I always feel the need to prove myself, because I feel that, as a woman, I can not simply say I don't know something and have that be okay, I worked twice as hard at learning everything I possibly can. But, I love technology and I love the creativity it has afforded me, and I am confidant in my knowledge and my own capabilities.

I will be noting, as I begin this job, the differences in my experiences. As a new administrator in K - 12, I'm sure I will see K - 12 differently than those who are moving up the ranks within K - 12. I've been on the outside looking in. :-) Now, I'll be on the inside looking out.