The Internet Classroom Assistant
I’m working as a mentor in several ISTE Institute sessions this year and one of the participant’s comments took me back several years to my first experience using online discussion forums with students. She was describing an idea for a student activity and my first thought was that it would be great to have the students interact in a forum setting about the work they were doing. My second thought was that there is no way for this individual teacher to set up her own server running Moodle to create an online course. Blackboard? Forget about it.
It’s easy to forget that even open source software like Moodle has costs associated with it. Not every teacher has a spare server or knowledge of configuring server software, much less a supportive tech department that encourages creativity and innovation. (Don’t get me started on that one.) What if there was a free service on the Internet that let teachers create online courses that could be used to post links, share documents, and host discussions?
That rather long intro brings me to the Internet Classroom Assistant. If you’d like to experiment with adding online components to your face-to-face classes, the ICA might be just what you’ve been looking for. The site has been around since 1998 and I think I used it with my high school physics class around 2000. It’s not fancy, but it’s free, simple, fast, and has no ads. Read about their philosophy and some of the ICA features. Does it do everything Moodle does? Not even close. Does that matter? Not for someone who wants to dip their toes into the online learning world and see how they like it.
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I work as a computer specialist for a K-12 school district on the west coast, so naturally your comment regarding a supportive tech department caught my attention. Please don’t regard what follows as trolling, but I’d like to present another side of the story.
Our school district has one technician for every 500 computers, a number that’s about to increase to 1:600 by next fall. I’ve worked in school districts in other regions of the US with similar ratios. As a comparison, my private sector experiences have been much closer to 1:50. (The pay was also significantly higher, but I enjoy the school environment).
When I check my email in the morning, there are a minimum of 50 new troubleshooting requests, spanning 11 schools. We have a lot of technology: student and staff servers, wireless base stations, teacher laptops, roaming laptop carts, etc, so this is to be expected. But these are the day to day issues every tech has to deal with: my situation is not unique.
While I do my best to be supportive of the individual needs of teachers, it is difficult enough to tread water with standard support issues. Supporting a variety of individual projects – the ones that require creativity and innovation – puts us that much more behind.
Take Moodle as an example. I am a huge fan of Moodle and this spring I introduced it to my district. But while it is easy for a teacher to utilize, there are a myriad of technical issues to consider during setup. How do we integrate it into our current network structure? Do we locate it centrally or in each school? How do we best optimize the database and Apache and deal with the security and scalability issues? In our case LDAP authentication was a huge concern. These are all questions that have to be addressed, and they all take time (or skills) we may not have. Because Moodle is a hobby of mine I was able to do much of the setup in my off-hours. But that’s the exception, not the rule.
If you were in charge of a school’s IT department, how would you address this? More staff is an obvious answer, but that’s not always feasible. Each creative and individual project requires a technician (or multiple technicians) to learn the details of the environment it runs in. Multiply that across an entire district. If a technician leaves, those teachers may not be able to proceed until the new tech learns the ropes. Most schools don’t offer the compensation to compete with the private sector, and lose many excellent techs to beter jobs. And that’s assuming a quality staff is in place already.
Many of us work very hard to meet the needs of the teachers. Sometimes we are greatly appreciated, other times ridiculed. But it’s important to point out that unless the teacher has the technical abilities to be absolutely self-sufficient (and we may be talking certified-level skills here), allowing individual projects can be a very slippery slope for IT support.
Tremond,
Thanks for your reply. I should be more careful about making off-hand comments without taking the time to give more background. I know how hard the vast majority of tech support specialists work to support the teaching and learning that goes on in their schools. It is too often a thankless job that goes unappreciated.
Unfortunately, I’ve heard many accounts from teachers around the country who are shackled by an overly restrictive tech support environment. I think this response almost always comes from the top in the form of security policies or other official positions because I rarely hear about individual tech support staff who don’t go all out to do their best. The fact that you went to the trouble of installing Moodle and introducing it to the teachers in your district shows that you’re not one of the people I’m concerned about!
I’m all for tight security and consistent standards, but there is an inevitable tension between control and innovation. It’s all about striking the appropriate balance, and that balance may be different from district to district. A free-for-all with teachers installing their own software would be a disaster. That’s obvious. Somewhere between that and the one size fits all approach is a sweetspot.
I should get more specific and take a shot at answering your excellent question. Standardization is important. We have moved all of our users to the Microsoft Office suite over the last couple years. There were a number of teachers who went kicking and screaming, but the tech group back then recognized that it was too difficult to support Office and Appleworks both. It was the right decision. Similarly, we’ve standardized on other educational apps and have set a minimum hardware standard that we support. At the same time we have experimented over the last couple years with a variety of Web-based applications (Moodle, wikis, etc.) that are easy to manage centrally. We are now nearly the end of a big centralization campaign to bring nearly every server into the server room in the district office. We have a gigabit fiber backbone on our network that allows us to centrally manage almost everying which frees up our building-level techs to support users and workstations. I guess I would summarize it by recommending the following: centralize computing services as much as possible, standardize on software and hardware whenever possible, and find teachers who are willing and interesting in new technology to test new technologies before rolling things out for an entire district.
Thanks for the comment. I hope you’ll keep reading and challenging me when I get sloppy.