The School Technology Podcast - Episode 002

Here is my most recent podcast, this one is about my opinions on Internet or Cyber Safety.

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School Technology Future - Looking Back

On Wednesday I attended the graduation of the kindergarten students in my school. The kids were all dressed up and we watched a slideshow of their past year in school and most parents cried.

Meanwhile, there I was thinking about their future.

These students will graduate in the year 2022 and we have no idea what their future will look like, which is why 21st Century Skills are so important. I don't know what school technology will look like in 12 years, let alone what jobs and careers there will be for these young students.

Then I started to think back 12 years ago -- about thing we use everyday today that were not even invented when today's high school graduates were in kindergarten (1998). Things like...

DVDs - we were still using VHS tapes.
Broadband Internet - all we had was dial-up.
GPS Navigation - we used an Atlas that was usually lost in the trunk of our car.
iPod / iPhone - cell phones didn't even have cameras on them yet.
Google - although it was being worked on, most people used Yahoo and Netscape.
WiFi - again, all we had was dial-up.

Get the point?

This was just off the top of my head. Wow! How the world has changed.

Which is why I do not chase technology in my tech class, instead, I focus on skills. Skills like creativity and innovation are timeless and do not expire. Teaching a child to be creative and innovative will get them employed no matter what the latest technology is.  Which is why you will hear me say over and over again in my workshops that we need to teach skills and not technology.

The Problem with PODs

Yesterday I talked about using student's Personally Owned Devices (PODs) in schools and how great it is to have students use their own technology instead of schools having to buy it for them. Today I want to talk about the down side of this idea.

When I spoke about this idea in Florida this past January there were a few hecklers in the crowd (most of them from IT). Most of their questions revolved around getting sued.

Here were their concerns and my answers.

Damage: "What happens if a student breaks one of these PODs at school, or it gets stolen?"
My 14 year-old son takes a $200 graphing calculator to school everyday and no one expects the school to buy him a new one if it gets broken or stolen. I don't think we should expect anything different from a $300 iPod Touch or an iPad.

Bad Things: "What if the student has something bad on their POD, like naughty pictures that they downloaded at home and now are showing them at school?"
What would we do if a student had a pencil and drew a naughty picture? Or, what would we do if a student brought a printed picture of something inappropriate to school? We would send them to the office and they would get into trouble. Same thing with PODs. What I think the root of this concern is that by law students need to use "filtered" Internet at school, but their Internet might not be filtered at home so schools worry they could get into trouble. We are only responsible for the Internet AT SCHOOL. Let's compare this to books; at school we make sure students have appropriate books to read but we have no control over what they might have access to once they leave our building.

Viruses: "A student could very easily and accidentally bring in a virus that could take out the entire school's network."
The answer to this one is easy. Don't let them onto the school's network. The only thing that PODs should be able to get on to is the Internet. Have them store everything in the cloud and not on your school servers.

Games: "If we allow PODs they will just play games on them every chance they get." 
Again, back to the pencil and paper -- we don't allow student to play tic-tac-to every chance they get, the same would go for PODs. NO GAMES DURING WORK TIME. Instead use games as a motivator, once the student's work is done and approved, then they can have a little free time. You would be surprised at how much more work will get done in our schools.

The bottom line is that PODs are coming wether we like it or not they are the new school technology that could save our budgets. So at least we should prepare ourselves by being ready with policies and practices for when they do come.

The Future of School Technology is PODs

I believe the future of school technology will be in Personally Owned Devices or PODs. This has actually been brewing for decades, but now is finally the time when it is ready.

Let me start with a quick history lesson: back when the idea of public education for children came about, school always had more "stuff" than individual homes. Stuff like books and things, a home would only have a few books, where as a school could have thousands.

Remember when computers got started? They were the size of rooms and were housed at some of the country's greatest schools and universities. Students would sign up to take computer science classes and share these big mammoth machines that cost millions to own.

Everyone was happy

But something quietly started to happen in the eighties...

Back in the mid eighties was the start of the personal computer revolution, suddenly students went home to "stuff" better than their school had. Students would use a computer at school that could barely do simple math but go home and play on their Commodore 64, my friend even had a Texas Instrument computer that could talk!

The problem was that we couldn't exactly take our computers to school. So schools were safe and sound with their antiquated computers and we just accepted it. Until the iPod Touch...

The iPod Touch changed everything. Now students had the Internet and over 100,000 apps in their pocket and a revolution is now waiting in the wings. Now that students can take their computers to school in their pocket what are we going to do about it?

Smart school districts have started to embrace this knowing that it helps their bottom line. Think about it: why buy students computers when they already own them (PODs) and are willing to bring them to school. Just give them some filtered WiFi, have them sign a contract and Shazam! they're happy.

Tomorrow I will talk about some obstacles to this ideas of PODs.

Look into my crystal ball of school technology.

Often when I work with school districts someone will inevitably ask me to predict the future of school technology. "What's going to be the next big thing?" They ask like I have a crystal ball that I can just look into and figure out where districts should spend their technology money. The truth is I don't, but I do live and breath school technology so I guess it is a fair question.

So here is my list what a standard 21st Century Classroom should have:

Hardware:
1) Interactive whiteboards paired with LCD projectors. The projectors should be permanently mounted to avoid damage and the annoyance of always having to align the interactive whiteboard. More and more teachers are getting these every year and lessons are slowly getting converted over to embrace this technology.

2) Document cameras go right along with number 1 since you should already have a LCD projector. Teachers hate giving up their old overhead projectors at first but then after a few months they love, yes love, their document cameras -- because you can put practically everything underneath it: calculators, books, dissected frogs, you name it.

3) Classroom sound systems, hopefully the days of little back-row-Sally not being able to hear her teacher are coming to an end. Since so much of what happens in a classroom is auditory, like the teacher talking, watching a video, listening to music, etc. we need to make sure every student has a fair chance of hearing what is going on.

Software:
1) Go Web 2.0 whenever possible, if there is a choice between a math CD or a math website -- go with the website every time.

2) Online professional development, pay for a good quality company like AtomicLearning.com and reap the benefits of not having to sit down and train each and every teacher individually, let the online PD do it for you. Let's say your teachers are struggling with how to create their first podcast, all you do is assign a few online lessons and check back in a few weeks to see how their podcasting went. You can't expect teachers to use new technology unless you plan on training them how to use it.

That's all for today -- tomorrow I will tell you about some cool future technologies that I see coming over the horizon.