SchoolTechTools.com

Last month while at the eTech Technology Conference I was involved in a discussion about eBooks and laptop programs. The topic came up about loading eBooks onto the student laptops, and doing away with the traditional hardback textbooks. So far we have only heard promises from book publishers, and it seems that they really don’t want to make the shift away from those traditional textbooks. In speaking with our students, the laptops are heavy enough, and they really don’t want to add several books to what they are carrying around. The laptop is a great platform to load eBooks onto, but there just aren’t very many of them out there.

The topic came up again on an e-mail listserv that I participate in, and I spoke out again about publishers not willing to shift to eBooks. We have enough talented teachers in the State of Ohio to write the textbooks that could be used statewide and correlated to the Ohio Academic Content Standards. I offered to build and host a site where this content could be housed – for free. I’m working on creating a wiki that can be the home of this content. This content really shouldn’t be limited to Ohio, in fact it really shouldn’t be limited at all. I really like what MIT (and others) is doing with their OpenCourseWare project, and would like to create a similar project for K-12 schools. Please stay tuned for more information about the eBook website.

My last blog post was 3 months ago, and things are finally starting to let up. Actually things are constantly evolving and new opportunities are always presenting themselves. For instance, I was 1 of 3 panelists that conducted a webinar for EdTech Magazine (http://www.edtechmag.com/k12/index.php) entitled “Going One-to-One.” I joined Stewart Crais (Lausanne Institute) and Justin Dover (Harpeth Hall) on a variety of topics for the webinar, as well as fielding questions from the audience. There were 350+ attendees registered for the event. I feel very fortunate to be able to present with these two gentlemen, as they both have far more experience than I do in the 1 to 1 arena. Thanks guys!

I have written an article “Doing More With Less” that is currently hosted on EdTech’s website. You can access it here. http://www.edtechmag.com/k12/events/updates/doing-more-with-less.html . I will have another piece on e-Discovery tools coming out soon. I’ll post the link here when it’s published.

As for school, our master image has been much better than in the past (third time’s a charm). We replaced our web filter due to students being able to get to anonymous proxy servers. We looked at several solutions, and it seems that the 8e6 appliance was the best fit for us.

I have been using Google Analytics to keep track of the traffic on this site, and have found it to be a wealth of knowledge. Last week when reviewing my reports, I noticed that a ton of students have been searching the web trying to get around the Marshal Software WebMarshal product. Since I have previously mentioned that product on here, my site keeps showing up in their search results. I found that quite ironic because I would NEVER post information “how to get around your school web filter”. Kids – if you’re reading this page, you should get back on task and quit trying to get to porn or MySpace.

I’ll try to post more information soon rather than waiting another 3 months.

Merry Christmas!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to the blog, we’ve been very busy getting ready for school to start. On August 22, 2007 we officially began year 3 of our laptop program. We’ve learned a lot since we started the program, and it shows this year.  We decided to distribute the laptops in the labs during our orientation nights. Last year we distributed the laptops during orientation night, but had only one central location. I had the Technology Department setup in our IT lab where the student-run helpdesk will be located. We figured this way the we could get students used to go to the helpdesk rather than the Technology department.

We implemented Software Restriction Policies through AD Group Policy in an effort to control the applications that students are using during school hours. We wanted to lock-down the laptops during school hours, but allow students to play games and communicate with their friends when not in school. We were able to accomplish this by following some recommendations from Lee Tilley (Chamanade School). Lee had suggested creating a second user account in which students could login to their PC with admin rights. Once we got some group policy issues worked out, things started working very nicely.

The problems that we are still battling are as follows:
Can’t get students to leave the laptops in the bags – they take laptop out while at home
Students are putting binders and notebooks between the screen and back of laptop bag
Students are using school e-mail system as an IM tool.

If you have any suggestions for how to solve my 3 problems listed above, please let me know.

Due to the incredible amount of spam, and the lack of usage I am shutting down the forum on SchoolTechTools.com. If you are interested in being on an e-mail list to discuss 1 to 1 laptop program issues, just e-mail me. Thank you to everyone who has participated.

Monday at the eTech conference I got to listen to Will Richardson give his presentation entitled “A Web of Connections: Why the Read/Write Web Changes Everything.” Will was a very engaging and exciting speaker. Unfortunately I was not able to attend any of Will’s other sessions. Due to the weather, I was unable to present on Tuesday and will not be attending Wednesday.

We received about 15″ of snow today, and are going to be closed tomorrow as well.

CDWG has just published the Anytime, Anywhere Computing Reference Guide for Education. This covers most aspects of 1:1 computing initiatives. I wrote the majority of the content for this book, and had help from another author who contributed the Higher Ed portions. CDWG plans on creating an online version of the book that strictly deals with K-12 environments. You can check out the entire book in electronic format here:

http://www.cdwg.com/webcontent/resource_ctr/g_r_guides/default.asp

There is an article that was recently published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette cites the negatives about school laptop programs. It’s important to note that the negatives discussed in the article also happen when the students are using the computer labs at school (if they didn’t have the laptops), and that some of them relate to poor monitor by their teachers. Giving teachers professional development for how to handle classroom management (specifically with the laptops) may be the best money spent. If you are interested in reading the article, here it is:

 http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06243/717868-96.stm

 Please post comments about the article.

It’s kind of funny that this banner ad was on the article page when I viewed it.

I recently had a second article published in EdTech Magazine’s June/July 2006 issue. The article was about the status of school funding and how it affects 1 to 1 laptop programs. Check it out:

http://edtech.texterity.com/article/20060607/5/

I just listened to Michael Furdyk at the AALF 2006 conference. Michael is only 23 years old, but has more experience with the Internet that most people in this room. He has created a website called www.takingitglobal.org that is an online community site for students and teachers. Michael is an amazing speaker, and I would love to hear more from him. He is living proof that people can do anything they can put their mind to.
Michael has an incredible vision for technology usage.

I just finished a session with Joe Hoefmeister and Jeff Spain from Country Day, and it was about their IT infrastructure and how it relates to the educational process. I really wish that we could get away without filtering Internet access, but I just don’t think it will work in our environment. Most of the problems that we have stem from bad classroom management skills. Their suggestion about Instant Messenger was not to block it, rather to ask the teacher how they could embrace it in the classroom. They don’t have any Internet filters in place, but they do have a Packeteer to prioritize traffic. They don’t block any of it, it’s just the lowest priority traffic on the network. That is the way that they can get away without filtering traffic but not getting slowed down by downloads and P2P apps.
I don’t know how it would work to not restrict the student laptops at OHP. If we took the more liberal road and didn’t create lists of applications that they are allowed to run, what would happen? Would we have more problems with games, spyware, and viruses than we did this year? It would be interesting to see what happens. We did that exact same thing with most of our community based satellite programs. Their Internet connection is not filtered, the students have admin rights, and we have not had any problems. I know they are a different “breed” of student, but it would still be interesting to see what would happen if we took a subset of our population and opened up their laptops. Perhaps we could leave the laptops slightly more open, and restrict the laptops by Group Policy once the student has violated the policies we put in place.
I also want to open up the e-mail program to allow student-to-student e-mail again. We will need to patrol it at the beginning, and make some examples of students. I think we can get away with 100 personal e-mails per month. If they go over that number we give them a warning, and it needs to be noted in a file somewhere. If that same student violates the policy a second time, their e-mail would then be shut off for a period of time or for good. We’ll have to see.