The School Principal Blog

“Integrating technology throughout a school system is, in itself, significant systemic reform. We have a wealth of evidence attesting to the importance of leadership in implementing and sustaining systemic reform in schools. It is critical, therefore, that we attend seriously to leadership for technology in schools.” - Don Knezek, Director of the Technology Standards for School Administrators (TSSA) Collaborative

While technology can often be a positive source for increased efficiency and productivity in schools, today’s administrators are faced with a barrage of options to choose from. Making the wrong choice when it comes to technology can not only be expensive but result in many hours of work invested for little gain – or worse.

Below is a list of fundamental questions each school administrator should consider before investing precious human and financial resources in implementing a technology solution:

What benefits – in time, money, efficiency — are we seeking to gain from implementing this solution?

All too often, organizations will invest in a solution because of a misplaced notion that “they have to” or “everyone else is.” If a solution ultimately doesn’t save you time, reduce expenses or increase efficiency - is it really worth it?

How much will it cost to implement? What is our return on investment?

In today’s economy, schools are more concerned than ever with managing their finances. When evaluating cost, school administrators should look not only at how much it costs to purchase a technology solution but the related implementation and on-going costs of training, support, upgrades, etc.

How well does this solution integrate with our current system and our school’s culture?

A school district invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in a state of the art PC-based computer lab only to find that a majority of students and faculty own Macs. Doing a thorough analysis and survey of what technology and systems are currently used can help schools avoid implementing solutions that ultimately end up collecting dust in a corner. After all, a solution is only as good as how well and how often it is used. In addition to evaluating the effectiveness and usage of technology systems, infrastructures and standards that are currently in place on campus, administrators should also consider what technologies and standards are being used by teachers, students, parents and other stakeholders outside of school.

Is this solution scalable and can it meet future needs?

Implementing a new technology solution takes time, money and resources - so it is important to make sure that you invest in a solution that not only meets current requirements but can easily be scaled or adapted to meet future needs. Costs for additional licensing, ease of customization, additional modules, etc. are all elements that should be considered when evaluating a solution’s scalability.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/ / CC BY 2.0

Google Wave is a new service from the internet giant that has the potential to greatly enhance the way students communicate with each other when creating group projects for class. Wave combines many of the best features and benefits of other real time editing tools into a near total solution for group work and project development.

When Google Wave is launched a student or educator will immediately be presented with a window where waves are separated into viewing fields in the center and right hand side of the screen. A handy organizer (much like an e-mail folder lit) and contact’s list are present on the left side.

A button aptly labeled “New Wave” will start a new project, and this is where a teacher or student can really begin to utilize the features of this service. If a social studies class project requires four partners to work together to create a presentation, then each of the four students can be quickly added to a new Wave specific to their assignment.

Each participant can log in and out of the Google service from home, school, or a public library while conducting independent research. Videos, pictures, and other attachments can be uploaded directly into the Wave viewing field for quick and easy access to all source materials; this also provides an easy way to back-up all versions of a project!

Wave provides many handy features and keyboard shortcuts that make it an ideal choice for schools where students are encouraged to utilize laptops for note taking and homework assignments. Students can add materials, chat about the progress of a class project, and more after mastering a few quick commands provided in an introductory video to Wave compiled by Google (this video will show up in a sample wave the first time the service is accessed).

Teachers concerned about unevenly balanced workloads within a group project can easily view a Wave with the built-in playback feature and see the development of the Wave (and research) to ensure that all students are properly credited for work done. Teachers can also use this feature to ensure that all participants are behaving according to school rules when communicating with each other in the course of a classroom assignment and to make sure that no instances of cyber-bullying occur. Parents and teachers can also rest assured their students are safe, as Waves can only be viewed by contacts who have been cleared to contribute to the project.

Google Wave provides a tremendous amount of benefits to the teacher or student wishing to maintain a hub for real time project collaboration in a controlled environment. Classroom and school utilization of Google Wave will help students learn the collaborative skills needed to succeed in a business world that centers around social media integration and introduce them to practical applications of technology.

Google Wave demo video:

The ebook has the potential to transform the way students use books as a learning tool. While cost is prohibitive right now, in the future each student could have a virtual library in their hands with access to almost any book. One of the most popular formats right now is the Kindle.

Open Education describes the features of the latest Kindle, the Kindle 2.

To get a sense of the basics, we turn back to the latest version of the Kindle. The device features the ability to display a wealth of different document styles and formats. As one would expect, the Kindle 2 provides access to and readily displays books, newspapers, and magazines. However, the latest version also displays a vast array of other document formats: Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, TXT, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PRC and MOBI files. Therefore the Kindle now has the potential to be a document repository and full-fledged library.

Perhaps an even more exciting option, albeit still in its infancy as a polished product, is that the Kindle 2 can turn a traditional book into an audiobook. There is still much work to be done before the device can be considered a perfect swap for the audio created by a soothing and polished human voice, but the device offers an amazing step forward in the overall reading process.

As proponents tout, one can use the Kindle as an ebook reader on a train or airplane just as you could pull out a book to read. But then later, the earbuds can be connected and you can continue to read (as in listen to the audio production) as you walk through the station or airport.

Of course, the new ereader means that no book has to be printed and therefore there is no such thing as a truly finished product. The ereader concept certainly makes nonfiction works more practical as updates can be easily uploaded to ensure that the book available for purchase always represents the latest edition.

A less expensive ebook reader alternative is the free Kindle application on the iPod Touch. The iPod Touch costs about $199 and can access the Amazon library of ebooks if a WiFi connection is available. While most books cost $9.99, there are also many free ebooks available through the free Stanza application. Many classic titles such as Alice in Wonderland or Romeo and Juliet are not copyrighted and available for free through Stanza and on free ebook sites like Project Gutenberg, which has 28,000 free ebooks.

You can see the full article, The Future of Books and Authors in the Digital Age at Open Education.

Photo by Richard Masoner

A new charter school in New York may answer the question- what would happen if you paid teachers really well? Would you attract top talent and would that improve school performance?

From The New York Times-

The school, called the Equity Project, is premised on the theory that excellent teachers — and not revolutionary technology, talented principals or small class size — are the critical ingredient for success. Experts hope it could offer a window into some of the most pressing and elusive questions in education: Is a collection of superb teachers enough to make a great school? Are six-figure salaries the way to get them? And just what makes a teacher great?

The talent question may have already been answered. The school had their pick of 600 applicants including a former personal trainer of Kobe Bryant and graduates from top US colleges. The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, interviewed 100 applicants to build a teaching dream team for the school that is set to open in New York’s Washington Heights area.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

See the full New York Times article.

A web based school calendar that allows collaboration of school administrators can make it much easier to schedule events for a school or district. Often the school administrator gets bombarded with requests by email or other methods and has a huge challenge of organizing everybody’s calendars into the master calendar. Often this can lead to double bookings for an athletic facility or school facility, which can lead to a major inconvenience for everyone involved.

How Tandem for Schools solves this problem is by streamlining and simplifying the process.

1. School staff log on to the calendar and make requests for facilities.
2. Tandem automatically checks for any scheduling conflicts and sends a notification by email to the “master queue manager”
3. The “master queue manager” approves or rejects the request.
4. If the request is approved the event is posted to the calendar for all students, parents, and staff to see.

By allowing staff to collaborate to schedule the schools events in a simple and efficient way, Tandem can save a significant amount of time for everyone involved. School administrators and coaches don’t have to play phone tag to change an event on the calendar. The calendar also communicates with students and parents, who can receive real time notifications of any changes such as baseball rain outs or reschedulings. Students and parents can sync the school calendar with their other calendars such as Outlook, iCal, Google Calendars, or Cozi so that when a change is made, a notification is automatically sent to their calendar.

A survey by Vanderbilt University found that 50 percent of teachers “are not prepared to teach students how to write well and rarely assign complex writing tasks.” The research by Vanderbilt professor Steve Graham was published this spring in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

According to the article at Vanderbilt’s News Network:

The lack of writing and writing instruction was more pronounced in social studies and science, but even language arts teachers provided little writing instruction for their students,” Graham said. “Another disturbing finding was the sizable number of teachers who made few or no adaptations in their teaching efforts to assist weaker writers.

According to the results, teachers rarely ask high school students to complete assignments that involve writing more than a single paragraph, and most common writing assignments involve little to no analysis or interpretation. Some teachers reported using a variety of effective writing practices, but indicated that the use was infrequent, removing their effectiveness.

Writing is an important tool for educational, occupational and social success,” Graham said. “Writing instruction needs to be reformed to improve high school student work as well as strengthening the ability for success in college and beyond.

This is an alarming study because the ability to write effectively is an important skill in the workplace and you could argue it is becoming more important as professionals are more likely to write for a work related blog whether they are in business, journalism, or other fields. The growth of the cell phone and social media culture can develop bad habits such as poor grammar and punctuation that should be addressed in the classroom. Teens with cellphones avg 2,272 text messages a month, compared with 203 calls according to a Nielsen study.

One simple way that could help students to become more effective writers is to encourage student blogs. Blogs require students to write long form compositions that require analysis and critical thinking. Since it is publicly viewable, students will want to proofread for correct spelling, punctuation and grammar. It is also a fun way to express yourself and can even encourage a passion for writing.

Obama’s new chief of education, Arne Duncan, favors extending the number of days of school in a school year and the school day. This is one of his ideas to improve education in the US to make students more competitive with those from places like China and India.”We have a significantly shorter school year 20-30 days versus India versus China, other places, our students are at a competitive disadvantage”, Duncan says in the interview video below.

Currently the number of students that don’t graduate high school is alarming. According to CNN “Thirty percent of high school students drop out before graduation, and another 50 percent won’t finish college, according to Education Sector, a nonprofit think tank. For Latino and African-American students, the numbers are more dramatic. About half of them will graduate from high school, the Washington-based group said.”

Duncan is not the only one one who favors reducing the long summer break for students. Malcom Gladwell argues in his new book, Outliers, that the summer break is one of the main reasons poorer students fall behind. Since students are no longer in class, it is up to the parents to keep their brains stimulated and often parents in lower income brackets don’t have the money or ability to do that.

Obama has set the goal for the US to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

by Bora Zivkovic of Blog Around the Clock

You are quite an evangelist for the use of online tools in the classroom. You used to teach with a blackboard and chalk - how and when did you get to embrace the modern tools in education?

My main subject was History. It’s what I had studied in college. But I always taught about History from the perspective of technology, focusing in on the invention of the bow & arrow, agriculture, paper, the steam engine and explore how these technologies affected and changed our cultures. The first time I saw a Radio Shack Model I computer operate, I knew, at that moment, that this was one of those technologies that was going to change everything. Here was a machine that you operated by communicating with it. I was thunder-struck. I was seduced.

However, it was sometime later that I started to learn, and am continued to learn that it isn’t the fact that we have a machine that we can communicate that makes computers so important. It’s that they give us new ways of communicating with each other. This, I’ve learned as an educator — not as a technologist.

One of the important concepts you write about is the Flat Classroom. Can you, please, explain it to my readers?

It’s simple. According to a recent PEW Internet & American Life study, 64% of American teenagers have produced original digital content and published it to a global audience. How many of their teachers are published authors, artists, musicians, composers, or film makers? From the perspective of our children’s information experience, they are more literate than many of their teachers. Our classrooms are flat.

The central question that we should be asking today is, “How do we drive learning if we can no longer rely on gravity?” Where do we get the energy. It’s a sobering and threatening idea for most educators. However, I think that once we can get to the other side of this problem, we, teachers and learners, will be much happier. Here are just a few ideas:

* We need to redefine literacy to reflect today’s information landscape and not just teach it as skills, but to instill it as habit.
* We, as teachers, need to model learning, not just inflict it. We need to practice new literacy in front of our students.
* What students learn has become less important. The answers are all changing. It as important today to be able to invent answers to brand new questions. What’s become more important is how students are learning.
* We need to understand our students information experience and learn to harness the energy that comes from it, to replace the vanishing energy of gravity.

“Please turn off your cell-phones, i-Pods and other electronic devices, kids” - why is this sentence, spoken at the beginning of a class period, wrong? What should a teacher say instead?

This is wrong on so many levels. But principally, we have to recognize, accept, and respect our students out-side-the classroom information experiences. For the first time in history, we are preparing our children for a future we can not clearly describe. So much is changing and so fast. I think that there are clues in our students information experience that we can use to better prepare them for that future.

I recently read about six schools in New York City (where they’ve banned cell phones) that are giving cell phones to all of their students (2,500 of them), preloaded with 130 minutes of talk time. More minutes are added based on test scores, good behavior, and other activities. The teachers are starting to use text messaging to share homework assignments, remind them of upcoming tests, and other activities. What I’d love to see is text-messaging become a platform for doing homework assignment in collaboration.

I know that this may seem weird to some, but no less (NO LESS) weird than many of the applications we use every day would have seemed 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.

What is your basic advice to teachers who are not themselves Internet-savvy, yet want to take a plunge and get their students to produce online content, be it blogs, podcasts or videos? How do you explain the pros and cons and the usual traps some teachers fall into?

Be a good teacher, and pay attention to your students information experiences. Your students can teach you a lot about these new tools, and what better way to model yourself as a lifelong learner.

Become 21st century literate. Once you’ve accomplished that, then you can teach yourself what ever you need to know. Most of the teachers who are doing extraordinary things in their classrooms didn’t learn it in a workshop. They learned it by engaging on online conversations with other innovative educators.

Original article at Blog Around the Clock and is licenced under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.

Photo credit

This is an inspiring video urging support for improving education under the Obama administration. It is part of the Will We Really? campaign launched by The Forum for Education & Democracy which promotes “a public education system worthy of a democracy, one characterized by strong public schools, equity of educational resources, and an informed, involved citizenry.”

This article is from GothamSchools

by Philissa Cramer

GothamSchools asked principals how they’re handling this year’s sizable mid-year cuts and how they plan to cope with the even larger cuts that loom in the near future. Here are their responses so far:

Bronx middle school:

Here’s what we’ve cut so far to reach our budget reductions for this year:
1 Assistant Principal
1 Teacher
2 paraprofessionals
2 school aides
Supplies budget by 50%
Per Session (giving people pay for meeting together to plan collaboratively) by about 50% (we’ve tried to maintain at 100% our per session pay that was set aside for tutoring students)

Other than not replacing two teachers who are leaving at the end of June (one is retiring and one is out on a medical leave), I have no idea how I’m going to meet the cuts for next year!

Manhattan elementary school:

We had an $80,000 cut this year and we are estimating a $200,000 cut for next year. The school has the essentials but we were hoping to buy SMARTboards for each grade and air conditioning for the auditorium, both of which will not occur now. We receive a lot of federal money from Title I, because we are a high poverty area. The Title I funds have eased some of the pain other schools are feeling.

Brooklyn elementary school:

We are very scared as we will have to eliminate all after school programs and raise class sizes as we will have to eliminate about 5 positions… this flies in the face of the success we have had by lowering class size and having after school programs…. Sad times…

Large Queens school:

So far this year my budget was cut $266,000.00. I have heard that our proposed cut for next year is 668,000.00. As of now we have been able to absorb the initial cut without any major changes to instructional programs; we may have to cut some after-school and/Saturday tutoring programs as we get closer to the end of the year. All of our dollars are allocated when our October 31st register is set.

When the city cuts the budget they are actually taken monies that were spoken for. Some of our funds are allocated for areas that we do not control, e.g. teacher absence and coverage pay. If teachers are absent more then we planned for from past years we need more dollars in the budget; and likewise if they are absent less than in the past then we have money left over. So as you can see budget dollars change.

I will say that if they take 668,000.00 next year that that will have a direct impact on instruction. That translates into 10 teacher lines; if it happens I would probably be forced to excess 5 teachers and make major cuts in peripheral programs. This will cause all classes to be full and possibly over sized and a reduction in instructional services to our struggling learners.

In addition, if they make an additional cut, which we heard might happen, this year, then we will have to excess teachers mid-year. If that happens all schools will have great difficulty.

Large Queens middle school:

This year, we’re probably going to cancel Saturday programs and cut back on sports. And we won’t be able to buy new Spanish books, which are very old. Next year, we will have to fire a dean and have fewer assistant principals. And we’ll have to cut a guidance counselor and a lab specialist. … The bottom line is we will get rid of the things we don’t absolutely need.

A report from IS 296 in Brooklyn:

Principal Maria De Los Barreto closed one entire academy. Her school is broken down into small learning communities. In addition, this year her school leadership team were planning to expand the technology programs with classroom smart boards and they are unable to reach this goal. … She did not open any new vacancies and she could not replace teachers that transferred out. This increased her classroom enrollment and made her class much larger this year.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons. GothamSchools / CC BY 3.0

Photo by amfdesigner