Tinkerings

This morning as I was getting ready to head over to the ISTE conference here in Philadelphia, PA, I got a text message from my friend, MaryAnn Sansonetti-Wood asking if I would join her and another of my friends, Jessica Donaldson, at a Starbucks for breakfast.  Jessica gets a kick out of me checking into FourSquare from the Starbucks at home every morning, and wanted the fun of checking into the same one with me.  I chuckled.  Then I gladly agreed.

On the way there, walking down busy Philadelphia streets, sweating profusely from the weight of my backpack and the unfortunate choice of a long-sleeve shirt, I started to think about how impossible this would have been just a few short years ago.  Social technology keeps us connected in ways we don’t always know or even understand.

As I pondered those thoughts about how cool it is for three people from Tennessee and South Carolina to want to share their connectedness at a coffee shop with hundreds, if not thousands, of other people to whom we are all connected, I also thought about how all this became possible.  Not the technology.  The connections.

I owe all of that to a phone call from Discovery Education’s Gerard Newsome some six years ago.  They were inviting two people from each state to something new in Silver Spring.  He didn’t know really how to tell me what it was or what the agenda was.  And I had to pay for my own transportation to get there.  But they would provide a hotel and some food, and we would all figure this thing out as we went along.  I was both intrigued and committed.

It was a phenomenal time.  I met some great people.  In fact, I met a lot of great people.

Later, when I needed some help putting together a conference at our middle school, I called Gerard.  He hooked me up with Lance Rougeux as a keynote speaker (Don’t Look at the Duck), and then got on the phone to some others who were part of this new group called the Discovery Educator Network.  They all congregated in Cleveland, TN.  They came at their own expense.  They came from TN and GA. They trained people for free.

And bonds of friendship were formed that will never be broken.

I can’t take the time here to try to mention them all.  I would fail miserably.  But they know who they are.  And hopefully, after reading this (I’m assuming they will, of course), they will feel the love.

Thanks, DEN!

This afternoon I went to one of my best sessions so far at FETC (and most of them have been pretty good).  Steve Dembo was presenting on the topic “iThink iNeed an iPhone, iPod, or iPad.”  Steve is always fun, high energy, and extremely knowledgeable.  He is one of the true Rock STARs of the DEN.

His goal was to demonstrate the iPad’s usefulness for classroom use.  But he was having a little trouble with his connections.  He would transition to anew slide in his presentation and then wait for several seconds for the changes to appear on the big screen.  At first he kind of kidded around that he knew why he was having problems, but he wasn’t going to tell us.  Then, toward the end, he changed his mind.

The iPad is great for a lot of things, but it isn’t quite there yet for using to present at conferences or even in the classroom.  There is a new adapter that allows you to connect the iPad to a VGA cable and show some apps on your monitor or projector screen.  But many apps just won’t show up.

As a result, Steve told us he was using an app called Good Reader to display his screen through to the VGA cable.  The only problem was that the convention center wifi had blocked the port used by the app to display over the VGA.  So, Steve connected his iPad to his iPhone and that to his Mac, created his own wifi network on his iPhone and was moving back and forth from iPad to Mac through the phone to the VGA cable and onto our the projector screens.

Say Wha…?

I know.  It was almost too geek-speak for me, too.  But it just goes to show you that there is always a way to make technology work.  At conferences.  In workshops. And in the classroom.

Steve Dembo gets an Attaboy for his out-of-the-box efforts to make sure the audience could fully grasp the utility of the iPad.  Even if some of those utilities become its own flaws.

Last month I was asked to give a brief 10-minute talk to my fellow learners at our system’s Aspiring Administrators Academy on the topic of Administrators as Technology Leaders.  Due to some time constraints (OK, everybody ahead of me took twice as long as their allotted time), a few of us were bumped, and the talk never happened.  So, I thought I would post my thoughts here and let you add those things I may have missed.

Below is the Prezi I created to go with my talk.  The first few slides are simply screenshots from the “Did You Know?” video posted everywhere across the Internet.  There are two short video clips I added just to play in the background while I talked.  The first are images of the various kinds of technologies our students use every day.  The second is an abbreviated list of the software our district has provided teachers to help with instruction.  The main points of the Prezi are expanded below.

Know What’s Possible. Teachers do not expect their principals to be able to walk into a classroom and expertly demonstrate every piece of technology purchased for a school.  But administrators need to demonstrate life long learning as a daily practice, and learning about technology is part of the drill.  Read articles.  Read blogs.  Attend workshops.  Watch a webinar.  Find out what is possible with technology if you expect to lead in technology.

Demonstrate Technology in Your Own Practice. Create a PowerPoint presentation for faculty meetings.  Email a report as an attachment instead of stuffing mailboxes with paper.  Update your profile page on the school website regularly.  My rule of thumb is this: If you want to see how engaged a principal is with technology in his or her school, look at their personal profile on the school website.  Some are missing.  Others are still dated September when it is actually April.  And a few, a blessed few, update their page once a month like clockwork.  It doesn’t matter if YOU updated it, your secretary updates it, or one of your student aides updates it. The fact that you care enough to know it is updated speaks volumes to your teachers.

Give Teachers Time. Teachers will learn to use new technology the same way kids learn it.  They need time to goof off with it.  If you purchase a new software and expect your teachers to embrace it, cut back on planning time meetings.  Trim back after school faculty meetings.  Instead, tell every teacher to find time to just “play around” with the software.  It takes a huge amount of pressure off of them to “perform.”

Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train…and Then Train Some More. I cannot even begin to express the frustration teachers feel when they new technology is “shoved down their throats” (a quote from a teacher friend), but no one gets trained on how to use it.  My suggestion is that administrators use the “I do, we do, you do” approach.  Go to the training yourself.  Show up in a teachers room and ask to help.  Then let them do it on their own.  Let me tell you how powerful and easy this is.  Our district has just purchased Interactive White Boards for nearly every classroom in the system.  Some are Promethean.  Some are SMART.  If the principal would just walk in one day and move some stuff around the screen with a pen or a finger or a koosh ball, not only will the students be impressed but the respect of the teachers will go up five fold.  Lack of training is the number one complaint of teachers regarding new technologies.  And if you offer training (or you have a tech coach that does training) make sure your teachers show up.

Know Your Limitations.  Most of the administrators I know are not technology experts.  Some still think that turning their monitor off is the same as turning off the PC.  So when you get ready to purchase new hardware or new software, understand that you are not the expert.  Get advice.  My former principal did this, and I really respected his final decision even though it wasn’t my recommendation.  We were deciding whether to go with SMART or Promethean.  Three teachers went to Promethean training and to SMART training.  Two of us came back with a recommendation for SMART boards.  One for Promethean.  However, the Promethean purchase was going to be about $10,000 cheaper.  That’s not chump change.  The principal got on the phone and called principals from other districts who had both boards.  He had the SMART and Promethean reps back in his office for several meetings to discuss all the options.  He truly struggled with this decision.  In the end, he went against my recommendation for SMART boards, but today I think he made the right decision for the school.

Always Consult the IT Department Before Making Any Decisions. Envision that statement with about twenty exclamation points at the end of it.  I would love to put Apple products in our classrooms, but our IT department doesn’t support them and they cannot connect to our server given its present setup.  What a waste of money if I decided to do that without consulting them first.  Or iPads.  I can envision a day when every student gets an iPad in kindergarten.  But will the infrastructure handle giving out enough IP addresses to let everyone get online at the same time?  Will it be better if maintenance or the IT department installs the new hardware?  Where should it sit in the room?  Do teachers need a desktop or laptop and docking station?  Your IT department is your friend.  Use them.

Always Choose The Technology To Fit The Lesson. Never Create the Lesson To Use The Technology. This lesson was brought home to me at the Discovery Leadership Institute last summer in a small group discussion about cell phones in the classroom.  Lisa Parisi, a fellow DEN member, made this statement to the group.  It is so easy to jump on the latest technology bandwagon and feel like you MUST use it in every lesson.  Just because you have a PC and a projector doesn’t mean every lesson has to be put into PowerPoint.  You don’t have to build every lesson in a SMART Notebook or Promethean Flipchart file.  When the technology is appropriate for the pedagogy, use it.  When it isn’t, shut it down.

It is at this point that I would be taking questions.  Instead, I’m going to ask one.  What did I miss?  What advice would YOU give new administrators about being a technology leader on his or her campus?

Monday was spent pretty much in the exhibit hall.  Being registered as an exhibitor (with the DEN) didn’t allow me to get a printed schedule of workshops with times and locations, so I wasn’t really sure when everything started.  Luckily, with the time change involved between Tennessee and Colorado I was up early enough to be ready long before anything opened.

Once I realized that the exhibit hall “officially” opened at 9:30, and I was already standing in the conference center at 8, I decided I would look again at the offerings of workshops and see if I could redeem some time.  That’s how I wound up in Hall Davidson’s session on Epson’s Bright Link project and IWB combination.

After that, I spent most of my time in the exhibit hall just wandering around to see what was there.  I put together a little montage of what I saw in the video below.

While Traci Blazosky was presenting on DE Streaming and Glogster in the Discovery Education booth, I struck up a conversation with the founder of Glogster who had stopped by to see her work.  Well, actually, I was noticing him looking at the presentation while standing in the aisle and, being a former sales/marketing guy, thought I should help engage him more in what was going on.  It went something like this:

Me: Are you familiar with Glogster?

Him: Kind of.  I’m Mr. Glogster.

Once I thought the various shades of reds and orange had disappeared from my face, I began telling him how we used Glogster in our classes at Lake Forest this last year.  I mentioned to him that ENA had unblocked the education version of Glogster, but not the regular Glogster.com site.  As a result, we were unable to successfully add DE Streaming videos to our student Glogs.  He verified that the videos for both sites are pulled through the same pipeline and gave me some information to pass along to ENA to help solve that problem for next year.  Sweet.

The afternoon was less eventful.  Well, at least less embarrassing.  I got to meet the founder of BrainPop and pick up a cool Moby ball cap.  I will wear it proudly.

MaryAnn Sansonetti and I went to a social gathering sponsored by Compass Learning at The Tavern.  Since neither of us are customers of theirs, the gathering was a little boring (sorry Compass Learning).  As a result, even the prospect of possibly winning a new iPad in the evening’s raffle couldn’t keep us there much more than about 30 minutes.

In a conference as overwhelmingly big as ISTE, it is the small things that really matter.  Seeing Epson’s new technology.  A chance meeting with a website founder who might help an entire state free up his product.  Lunch with friends from Pennsylvania.  Coffee with a friend from South Carolina.  Late night dessert with both.  These are the successes of ISTE.