T.H.E. Journal — Features
Teachers & Technology: English with an Edge
Andie Brown believes in sedition--well, a form of it, anyway. She purposely gives her students the assignment to challenge the status quo, and they use technology as a means toward that end. The result is truly meaningful education; students learn that what they do may have a powerful impact.
(5/15/2008)
Osage County: Security in a Small School District
The Osage County R-II School District in Osage County, Missouri, is tiny--600 to 650 students, according to Richard Becker, technology coordinator. Yet it faces the same computer security challenges of larger districts with far fewer resources—a scarcity of resources that includes staffing. Becker himself makes up half of the entire technical team.
(5/13/2008)
Spotlight: Free Social Media Tools for Educators
While most districts are still tackling Web-based collaboration tools from pedagogical and security perspectives, a large number of teachers are already out there using these tools to supplement instruction, engage learners, and encourage their students to become producers of information, as well as consumers of it. In other words, they're experimenting. And here are some of the free tools they're using to do it.
(4/16/2008)
Taxing the System
Eager to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which addresses concerns over access to "offensive" Internet content on school and library computers, the Poway Unified School District made a move this year to ensure that its 33,000 students are kept as far away as possible from such content. By beefing up its Internet content-filtering, the San Diego, CA district also put itself in the position to qualify for federal grants not accessible to schools that don't comply with CIPA.
(4/8/2008)
Blackboard Vows To Press On
Despite last week's apparent setback in the Patent Office, Blackboard is vowing not to go down without a fight even as Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Center--the two groups that sought to have the patent revoked--celebrate victory. We have the first interview with Blackboard's chief legal officer, Matthew Small, since the action. He discussed Blackboard's plans moving forward and why he sees that patent as still being valid and strong.
(4/2/2008)
Spotlight: Free Science Resources Online
Looking for ways to encourage student interest in science? These authoritative sites arm teachers not only with free multimedia, projects, and other deep resources, but also lesson plans and standards-aligned, curriculum-focused materials that will help you make the most of these educational and entertaining tools.
(3/31/2008)
Electronic Transcripts at the Tipping Point
In an age of electronic information, it seems obvious--exchange student transcripts electronically, thereby cutting costs, speeding the process, and making fraud more difficult. But in a process that has taken many years, student transcripts are just now being pushed and pulled into the 21st century. Often on a state-by-state basis, high schools and colleges are gradually adopting technologies to allow them to exchange transcripts electronically.
(3/28/2008)
Creating a Collaborative Syllabus Using Moodle
A "collaborative syllabus" is one in which the students have the ability to help determine the specifics of a course--a novel concept in K-12 but one that is being applied in higher education. Those specifics can be any element that a professor is willing to be flexible with (such items as the objectives, grading, attendance policies, types of assignments, and so on). The logic behind this tool is that by actively participating in the creation of the syllabus, students are able to signal what they want to learn and how they want to learn it and then (potentially) set the standard by which they will be accountable.
(3/24/2008)
Technology Immersion Turns Around Texas Middle School
Take a Title I urban school with fewer than 50 computers for some 850 students and a staff that wasn't strong in technology. Add an ambitious plan to roll out a new technology program that gave a laptop to every teacher and student. Sound like a recipe for problems? Actually, it wasn't.
(3/20/2008)
Podcasting Basics: Simple Steps for Introducing Podcasting into Your K-8 Class, Part 2
In the first segment in this two-part series, teacher and consultant Brad Pearl explained what kinds of hardware and software you'll need to introduce podcasting into your classroom. He also shared advice for selecting a first project and getting students involved in the work of recording podcast segments.
(3/18/2008)
Desire2Learn CEO Makes Case Against Blackboard Patent, Court Ruling
Desire2Learn recently became the first education technology provider to fall victim to litigation stemming from Blackboard's patent covering learning management systems. In February, the company lost a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by Blackboard and in March was enjoined by the court from selling any versions of its learning management system containing the "infringing" code. In this exclusive interview, John Baker, Desire2Learn's president and CEO, discusses the case with us, its impact on the company and its customers, and the implications for education technology as a whole.
(3/17/2008)
K-12 Online Teaching Endorsements: Ohio Department of Education Perspectives
In "K-12 Online Teaching Endorsements: Are They Needed?" (Deubel, 2008), I noted that four states, including Georgia, have endorsement programs for teaching online and suspected that it is only a matter of time for more to follow. A reader responded with concerns. Endorsements might deter current licensed teachers from pursuing teaching online, require some colleges and universities to create new courses for their teacher preparation programs, add thousands of dollars to the expenses for teachers-to-be to take additional coursework, and ultimately impact state departments of education, which might need to create new administrative offices. Of course, this is just one opinion, but the reader raised legitimate issues. There is the flip side to an endorsement movement.
(3/13/2008)
A White Hat Talks about Modern Malware
When Julie Amero was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor in Connecticut last year, it was a wake-up call for many schools to make sure their anti-virus and anti-spyware software was kept up to date. Amero was the substitute teacher who had chased students off of the regular teacher's computer and taken charge of the computer, on which pornographic images then allegedly started appearing. (Since then her conviction has been vacated, and she awaits a new trial.)
(3/11/2008)
Open Source Computer Donation Program Aims To Go Nationwide
Ensuring that schools in low-income communities have access to the same technologies as wealthier schools isn't enough for James Burgett, executive director of the Alameda County Computer Resource Center in Northern California. He wants them to have better technology, and he wants them to have it for free. Burgett--along with several partners, contributors, volunteers, and staff--has been for years refurbishing computers, loading them up with open-source software, and deploying them in classrooms (and giving them to individuals) in the San Francisco Bay area. He's recently expanded that effort and is now looking to take it national.
(3/6/2008)
'Augmented' IT Supports Massive Infrastructure for Virginia District
Coordinator Tom VanDenburg's network and systems organization at Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia manages about 3,900 Cisco switches, 240 routers, 7,500 wireless access points, and a multitude of servers running Windows 2003, Red Hat Linux, HP UX, and Sun Solaris for roughly 240 sites across the county. Each school in the district is wireless; operations run 24x7; and every day the network hosts around 12,000 concurrent users.
(3/3/2008)
Case Study: Bloomfield SD's Migration to Broadband and VoIP
As the IT director for Bloomfield School District in New Mexico, I faced a major challenge with our infrastructure when it came time to upgrade our network and voice systems to meet our educational and technological objectives. The district, with 10 administrative and school sites, is located in a rural area of northwestern portion of the state, which limited the alternatives available to us. Its network was based on T1 connections, and the bandwidth would not support the education initiatives of the district. It was also very expensive, costing us about $5,900 each month.
(3/3/2008)
STEM Education: High School Students Network with the Community
A senior center in Leetsdale, PA now has both wired and wireless computer connections, along with the computers themselves, thanks to students from nearby Quaker Valley High School. The students found funding for the project themselves, including computers, since the senior center had no computers previously. As part of the project, they also wired the building and offered classes to seniors on how to use the new systems.
(2/28/2008)
Improving Instruction with Interactive Whiteboards (on the Cheap)
The Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District in South Yarmouth, MA faces obstacles not uncommon to many school districts: poor state testing scores, declining enrollment, and a diminishing budget for classroom resources. But that hasn't stopped Lory Stewart, director of instructional technology, from doing everything she can to squeeze out the money necessary for bringing interactive whiteboards into as many classrooms as possible.
(2/21/2008)
Podcasting Basics: Simple Steps for Introducing Podcasting into Your K-8 Class, Part 1
Getting started with podcasting in your class doesn't have to be a complex undertaking. The software you need is free. The special hardware you need--if any--can be purchased for under $20. And you don't need to know a line of HTML. Yet the payoff--in student engagement, creativity and dedication--can amaze you.
(2/20/2008)
Set It and Forget It: Bedford County's In House Disc Duplication
Victor Gosnell remembers what it used to be like whenever a compact disc duplication project would come up. In the early days--when Bedford County Public Schools in Virginia began buying computers that included CD burners--a teacher or media specialist would purchase a stack of discs at an office store and duplicate them one at a time. Or Gosnell, the director of technology & media for the district, would handle the job himself. They'd produce perhaps a couple hundred discs a year for special projects.
(2/14/2008)
The 2 Mistakes Schools Make in Deploying Wireless Networks
When the School District of Philadelphia announced last fall that it was deploying wireless Internet access at every school in the district--some 268 campuses--it was hyped as one of the world's largest enterprise wireless local area networks. Aside from the scale of the project (which involves the equivalent of 14,000 access points), the news barely raised an eyebrow among K-12 administrators. After all, announcements of new school deployments of WiFi have practically become a monthly occurrence on THEJournal.com.
(2/12/2008)
Karl Fisch: Creating Lifelong Learners
Many technology pioneers come from, well, technology backgrounds. Not Karl Fisch, a former math teacher whose role over time evolved into the director of technology at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, CO. Starting with three years of teaching middle school math in the early 1990s, Fisch noticed technology "inching its way" into the school administration and classrooms after years of seeing all recordkeeping handled at each institution's central office.
(2/7/2008)
Designing Students' Futures on the Web
With a classroom of eager-but-apprehensive students sitting in front of her, Debby Martin threw out some ideas that the advanced Web page design students could tackle as a team. Soon the class discussion turned to the fact that teenagers often get a bad rap from their communities, which don't always "get" what they're doing or why they're doing it. "Some of them even mess up and negatively affect the entire community," said Martin, a business teacher at Hampton City Schools in Hampton, VA, which encompasses four high schools.
(1/31/2008)
Web Technology Boosts Writing Performance at Alhambra USD
Can a computer really grade a composition? Ask the initially skeptical teachers at Alhambra Unified School District just east of Los Angeles. Coordinator of Instructional Technology Linda Benafel introduced Vantage Learning's online writing program MY Access! in the 2005/2006 school year. Seventh-grade test scores on the California Standards Test writing assessment immediately zoomed nearly 50 percentage points, from 22 percent of students scoring proficient or above in 2005/2006 to 70 percent in 2006/2007.
(1/17/2008)
Podcasting from the Seashore in Cape Cod
Every year fifth graders in the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District in South Yarmouth, MA spend five days at the seashore. For some, according to Lory Stewart, director of instructional technology, it's their first trip to the beach, in spite of the fact that they live on Cape Cod. Likewise, many have never been away from home, let alone for four nights.
(1/16/2008)
