Monthly Archives: September 2005

Scott McLeod: Legal and Ethical Issues

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Here’s Part II of my recent conversation with Professor Scott McLeod from the University of Minnesota. I had quite a bit of feedback on Part I of our conversation on data-drive decision making so I hope you will enjoy this talk about legal and ethical issues facing educational technology leaders. I won’t repeat all of the background information about Scott in this post, but it’s important to emphasize that he is a lawyer in addition to a professor of educational policy. So while you shouldn’t take anything you hear as official legal advice, you can be sure that Scott knows what he’s talking about.

Of all the interesting things that Scott shares, the most useful for me is the notion that we don’t need to put ourselves in the endless cycle of inventing new policies, rules, and regulations to deal with every new piece of technology that our students bring to school. If fact, it’s just the opposite. I think schools are in a much stronger position when they apply the old, tried and true policies. Kids already know that they shouldn’t bully, disrupt class, interfere with their colleagues’ learning, etc. Camera phones, MP3 players, Web sites, and all of the other technologies that can cause trouble occasionally are just the latest verse to a really old tune.

The more we set technology apart from the rest of school life by making all sorts of special rules about it, the more marginalized technology becomes with respect to the curriculum and the more likely it is that students will view the rules as yet another reason that school is irrelevant. Does your high school ban iPods or other MP3 players from the hallways during passing time? I know of some that do. Have you walked down the sidewalk of a major metropolitan area lately? Those aren’t cotton balls in everyone’s ears.

Download: STP-ScottMcLeod-2 (20.5 MB, 44:48)

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Review: Brenthaven Pro15/17 backpack

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I carry my 15-inch Apple PowerBook pretty much everywhere I go. Until recently I used a standard leather shoulder bag to lug my gear. But when the seams started to give way, the zipper broke, and my neck finally couldn’t take it anymore I decided to trade up to a Brenthaven Pro15/17 backpack.

Brenthaven Pro15/17 backpack

I found out about Brenthaven bags because they make padded sleeves custom fitted for the Apple iBooks that we use in our 1-to-1 program. Those sleeves have performed flawlessly and Brenthaven’s customer support has been top-notch. So after taking a look at one of the backpacks up close and personal I placed my order.

The backpack is perfect for the way I work. I ride a motorcycle pretty regularly when the weather’s nice, so a backpack is ideal. With all of the pouches inside (and there’s even one made to fit your iPod perfectly) my cables, adaptors, and other portable electronics each have their own cozy compartment which has eliminated the tangled mess that used to inhabit my old shoulder bag. I also love the low-profile shape of the backpack. I don’t worry that I’m going to knock someone over if I turn around too quickly.

You’re not going to find a Brenthaven bag at your local Wal-Mart; at $179 it’s far from the cheapest bag around. But with a lifetime guarantee, enough padding to protect your laptop from all but the worst drops, and excellent design, I’d say it’s money well spent.

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Picking your battles

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Miguel Guhlin responds to Tami’s comment on my post about online testing in Minnesota and concludes that teachers must be the ones to transform teaching and learning. He says:

I’m tired of technology fads—and blogs, podcasts, wikis as tools to revolutionize teaching and learning are included in that—that claim they will change everything. In truth, I see that systematic change will be accomplished by sharing, not pushing, disruptive technology at the classroom level with one teacher and doing so over an extended period of time.

I’m starting my third year as a “technology integrator” and I, too, am more convinced than ever that I will be more effective as a one-on-one “coach” rather than a “trainer” who conducts large-group sessions. I’ve done too many training sessions and workshops with almost no discernible impact over the past two years. Casting a wide net just doesn’t work.

So I’m going to stop wondering how I can get every teacher in the district blogging. I’m not going to worry if everyone doesn’t understand the implications of the read/write Web for our students’ futures. I’m going to work one teacher at a time; one project, one classroom, one blog, one wiki, one disruptive technology at a time. Miguel’s right; it takes courage for a teacher to “swim against the stream.” I’m going to focus on the ones who are willing to jump in and fight the current.

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Ed Tech Coast to Coast #3: Access to technology

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Tim Lauer couldn’t make it, but that didn’t stop Steve, Will, and me from recording another episode of Ed Tech Coast to Coast Tuesday night.

Our conversation centered mostly on the topic of access to technology and how full-time access changes the teaching and learning environment. Will’s school just launched a tablet PC project for teachers, and we’re in the second year of a 1-to-1 project with 600 elementary students and their teachers. We’ve both found that if teachers let it happen, 1-to-1 environments can change the day to day work of teaching and learning dramatically.

Are we approaching a day when not providing a computing device to each and every student constitutes educational malpractice? A laptop changes nothing by itself, of course, without a well-trained teacher to create and facilitate learning activities that exploit the technology. At least if you send the technology home with the students they can explore things on their own regardless of what goes on at school.

Download: ETC2C-20050922 (19.5 MB, 42:32)

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Opera browser now free

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Opera announced today that their browser is now free (but not open source). This would be just another browser option if Opera weren’t so good. It’s always been the fastest browser out there and their support of a “presentation mode” makes it an outstanding choice for presentations. With Opera Show and Eric Meyer’s S5 system, there are two excellent PowerPoint alternatives for people who want to create accessible, standards-compliant, Web-based presentations.

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Simple podcast publishing

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Someone asked me several months ago about the easiest way to podcast the daily announcements from a school. Podcasting tools have proliferated since then and there are a huge menu of tools to choose from now. But the problem back then wasn’t so much recording and producing the podcasts. After all, recording a 1-minute series of announcements doesn’t exactly require a fancy recording studio. The problem was publishing the podcast feed itself in the simplest possible way.

One of the best options at the time was to using one of the several blogging platforms that supported RSS enclosures. That’s probably overkill for doing a simple little podcast. RapidWeaver is a really cool piece of software for OS X that makes publishing Web pages, blogs, and podcasts really easy, but even then it may be to much complexity for that daily announcement podcast. (I should say that using a tool like WordPress or RapidWeaver would have other benefits like making a searchable text archive of the announcement available and providing for listener/reader comments and feedback.)

I just discovered the simplest solution yet. DirCaster is a free PHP script that you drop into a folder on your Web server. Once in place it generates a podcast feed on the fly for whatever content gets put in the folder. There are settings you can configure to control how many podcasts are included in the feed and to set values for various elements of the RSS (e.g., copyright, email address of author, etc). It does not support Apple’s iTunes-specific RSS tags, but you can always use FeedBurner to add those automatically if you’d like to get the podcast added to the iTunes Music Store. Updating your podcast, then, becomes a simple matter of uploading a new audio file. DirCaster takes care of everything else. I’m not sure generating a podcast feed can get much easier.

I’d also like to point out that Dan Bricklin’s ListGarden product has been updated to support podcasting. ListGarden is a tool that makes it pretty easy to manually create RSS feeds. It works on Linux, OS X, and Windows or can be installed on a Web server and accessed as a CGI program. It has a slightly more complicated install, but once in place on a Web server it might be an excellent solution for a group of teachers who all want to publish their own RSS feeds without the extra overhead of installing a full-blown blogging tool.

So many tools, so little time.

Scott McLeod: Data-driven Decision Making

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The No Child Left Behind Act has forced school districts across the U.S. to take a hard look at data about their students’ achievement. Lots of data. But some districts have gone beyond the requirements of NCLB and have embraced data and used the information to identify best practices and improve student achievement.

Dr. Scott McLeod is a professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration at the University of Minnesota and a proponent of data-driven decision making. As director of the University’s Center for Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), Scott works with educators around the country, helping them understand how being data-driven doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds. We sat down for a chat earlier this week about some of the ways district’s are using data, how to overcome barriers to utilizing data, and some examples of using data that go beyond student achievement. And we even take a question from a “caller.”

Scott has agreed to monitor the comments on this post to dialog with any listeners who would like to follow up on something they hear. So don’t hesitate to post another question or ask for clarification on something from our conversation.

Download: STP-ScottMcLeod-1 (15.9 MB, 34:43)

Is this the first Web 2.0 browser?

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I saw it in Wired today in an article titled “Killer Buzz Flocks to New Browser.” Could Flock be the first of a new generation of Web 2.0 browsers? According to the Wired article:

Flock advertises itself as a “social browser,” meaning that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It’s a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user.

If you’ve read Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web then you know that his original vision of the Web was much more “Web 2.0″ than what actually emerged in the early days. He thought that every browser would also be a tool for seamless content creation. Flock appears to be the first major rethinking of the browser experience since the emergence of the read/write Web. I can’t wait to take it for a test drive. Anybody got an invite to share?

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