Feb 26 2010
A few weeks ago, Frontline premiered a documentary called “Digital Nation”. In one segment, the vice-principle of Intermediate School 339, Bronx, NY, Dan Ackerman, demonstrates how he “remotely monitors” the students' laptops for “inappropriate use”. (his demonstration begins at 4:36)
via School administrator boasts to PBS about his laptop spying Boing Boing.
Jan 26 2010
“The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education.”
via 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology.
Aug 04 2009
So you think you’ve finished all the planning for your new intranet and you’re ready to get to the building part. Not so fast there…there’s still more thinking to come.
Concentrating on the problem solving
You have identified the specific needs you have to meet for your intranet to be successful, but now you have to figure how to accomplish those objectives with the tools at hand. Personally this is one of the reasons why I love these types of browser based tools. They force you to think creatively rather than running the code to just make it do whatever you want.
Let’s start reviewing some of the functionality you are likely to address in building out your site:
There are a lot more that we’ll address later but this is a good list of things to get us going.
Document management
Generating documents is part of the lifeblood of most organizations and I’m sure yours is no different. The challenge comes with keeping everyone on the same page when working with documents as part of the team. There’s two main parts to this: editing documents and accessing documents. Editing documents collaboratively online is the strength of Google Apps for documents and spreadsheets. I’ll leave the focus on how to do that work there. The strength of Google Sites when it comes to documents is the File Cabinet feature and embedding documents.
File Cabinets in Google Apps give you a place to upload documents to and organize them within folders. Unfortunately there is little security there beyond the site level security. In one of my later articles you’ll see that security in Google Apps is dependent on creating lots of small, targeted sites and weaving them together.
When planning your File Cabinets, think topically. You can only create one level of folders in each cabinet, so plan around a cabinet holding one topic area of information. It will make it easier for your users to recognize what is in the cabinet right away. For example a cabinet labeled “Forms” should hold only that, various forms broken down into folders. It’s fine to have a number of filing cabinets in your site, or even have sites that are nothing more than filing cabinets. Another example is if you wanted to have HR forms all in one place setting them up as their own site with read only access for most users is an effective solution rather than trying to manage them as part of a larger site.
Lists of information
There are a couple of ways to handle lists of information in Google Apps. One is to use the List page in Google Apps to create a basic structure of sortable fields. If you need a quick and dirty list of things such as to-do items or a phone directory this is a good way to go. If you need something more robust I suggest you create your list in Google Apps spreadsheet and embed the spreadsheet into your site. It is much more powerful and versatile than the built in list function.
Reference Materials
This is one of the times I recommend using the internal functions of the site over an outside application. Google Apps do not have a wiki function, but the Pages can be tied together in a way to make them very user friendly. Procedural documentation, policies, guidelines, anything that may need to be updated easily are good candidates to be a Page in a Google Apps intranet. One of the larger advantages is the ability to attach files and comments to the pages, making them truly living documents.
Discussions
Email is a critical part of our operations and instant messaging services such as Google Talk and Twiter are becoming just as valuable. Discussions in Google Apps take this to another level by making the conversation public to all the site members. Unfortunately, unlike other systems there aren’t any “discussion lists” within Google Apps. What’s a site administrator to do? Use the Announcements option instead, of course.
By using the Announcements option each new announcement becomes the beginning of a message thread and the comments are the responses. It’s a great way to leverage a feature in Google Apps for something different than it was designed for while still meeting a significant need. An example of this is using an Announcements list for a Q&A section in your site where users post their questions as announcements and your answers are the comments. You can subscribe to the list and always be in the loop on what your users need to know.
Links
By using the List page template you can create indexes of links for your users that act as supplementary navigation, reference lists, tables of contents, and more. If you are going to have a number of links in a list (20 or more) I suggest adding a category field that you can sort by so people can find the links they are looking for quickly and easily.
We’ve covered some of the basic components your intranet may need. Next is one of the more complicated aspects of Google Apps sites…navigation within a site and across multiple sites.
Jul 21 2009
Far too many of us have bought into the new chestnut of “digital natives vs. digital immigrants” as educators and administrators. It does follow well with our habit of searching out a label for each face in a classroom; making them something we can count, measure, graph, and put on a PowerPoint slide. Unfortunately this sets up some drastic misunderstandings of the individuals within these groups. I challenge you as educators and administrators to look deeper, gazing into the infinite variety that exists between 0 and 1 on this person-based number line.
To assume the members of a particular generation group posses an innate level of understanding because they are part of that group is stereotyping. We would be shocked and incensed to hear the statement, “Oh, they don’t get technology because they’re old.” How is this any different than, “This should be easy for them, they’re kids after all and you know kids and computers.” It’s a fallacy that must be corrected or at a minimum recognized.
Students come from all backgrounds and levels of understanding. We recognize this when it comes to core curriculum, classroom composition, even school lunch programs so why do we seem to have a blind spot to this when it comes to technology. Is it fair to assume a student will pick up Spanish easily because they can speak English? Of course it isn’t. So why is it fair to assume a student will pick up blogging, video, online collaboration, and multimedia just because they use Facebook?
The only thing separating this generation from generations past is they lack the fear of unfamiliarity for the most part. Their aptitudes are the same, they have similar strengths and weaknesses, and experience the same joys and frustrations as we and our parents did. We must recognize this when working with them as teachers and planning for them as administrators.
There are no digital natives. There are no digital immigrants. There are students in all their infinite, wonderful variety. Peel off the labels and discover what lies within. Recognize they will all learn at their own pace, in their own way, the things that are important to them. No zeroes, no ones, only students.
Jul 17 2009
Four Pillars of Technology Integration | nashworld – Annotated
Support your teachers every step of the way as they slowly transform the classroom environments they create toward new and better approaches to learning…
…and then hold them to it. Hold staff accountable for bringing their skills up to the present realities of the 21st Century. We’ve been living passively in this century for almost ten years now. It is time for all of us to sit up and take a direct and active role in the changes happening within the learning profession.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
