A case study on technology implementation
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 07:26PM I am a regular reader and fan of Chris Dawson's ZDNet blog, Education IT. He is opinionated, seems well-informed and is a real, live school technology director, not just a pundit. But he doesn't often write about his day-to-day challenges. On Monday he did - and it really made me think. (I know, it's dangerous.)
In My LMS debacle, Chris laments that his district (he, specifically) has not yet created a "learning management system," that includes a portal to the student information system that allows parents and students access to grades, homework, attendance, etc.
A number of things Chris wrote about concern me and I thought Chris's blog post might make an interesting "case study" for discussion. As with all situations, I am fully aware that I know but a small piece of the realities of Chris's district and it is always easy to Monday morning quarterback any situation. Given than caveat, here goes...
This [implementing the Learning Management System] also happens to be one of the most fervently requested items in our recent meetings with community members to review progress on our strategic plan. So it has come from upon high (i.e., the superintendent, aka, my boss) that this shall be done. Quite frankly, it’s about time that it percolated to the top of my priority list anyway since so many school districts already offer everything from Moodle to parent access to their SIS.
OK, who died and left the superintendent Chris's boss. Oh, right, most tech directors do have supervisors who help them set priorities. And Chris's super is channeling the public's wishes. Where had Chris been getting his priorities prior to this? Where should all us be getting our direction? From our supervisor? From our advisory committees? From teachers? From watching what neighboring districts are doing? From reading the latest professional journals or blog entries? Yes. But the key, I believe to a successful technology (and library) program is that its focus is on helping others meet their goals - and not having some separate agenda.
Right now, many teachers use blogs, Google Sites, Quia, and wikis to publish course information, assignments, documents, etc. We’ve been fairly laissez-faire about the whole thing and teachers have adopted web-based tools as they felt the need. Plenty still haven’t.
I've felt guilty about not pushing Web2.0 tools more fervently in our district, but with Chris's comments I feel a small breeze of redemption. While never trying to squash our early adaptors' innovative urges (and keeping all Web.0 tools unblocked), I have been reluctant to encourage teachers to use even the free tools until we could adopt a standardized version of the tool. So far our teachers have access, training and support in our website (a content management system) that allows the creation of pages, galleries, drop boxes, discussions, etc. Wiki and blog capacity are coming soon. We've just now adopted GoogleApps for education. But we aren't exactly pushing the envelope here.
The logic of my approach is that my departmen has the resources to train and support our staff on only so many tools. And the more teachers using the same tool, the more peer-to-peer support. It's dull, perhaps, but the slow, deliberate, planned rollout of such tools has a more comprehensive and lasting impact than simply boosting the early adopters.
...we haven’t rolled out this so-called “parent/student portal” because it requires fairly spotless family management or, in a basic implementations, a login for every student in a family.
Fairly spotless family management? Is the daily attendance this system tracks "fairly spotless?" I hope so if Chris's state like ours wants accurate attendance data on which to base school aid payments. Again, as dull as it may be, data integrity and completeness are hugely important qualities that good tech departments have to deal with. Sorry.
About half of our teachers use the full functionality of the gradebook (required to communicate useful information about assignments to parents) while the other half only submit their term and final grades through the system, preferring to maintain their individual assignment records elsewhere. More and more are adopting the SIS as their gradebooks, but it’s a slow process.
Why have no common expectations for gradebook/SIS use been set for Chris's teachers? Do soldiers get their choice of weapons? Do bank tellers get to choose whether to use the bank's computer system? Do physicians get to choose not to use the CAT scan if so inclined? If the parents in Chris's district have indicated that better access to their children's progress metrics are important to them, why have the administrators in Chris's district simply not said "Using the SIS gradebook is a basic job expectation, just like taking roll or giving grades or having PT conferences. Do it." We've done it here.
My sense is that Chris comes from the "visionary/leadership" school of training technology directors. I've said it before and I'll say it again - having a vision ain't worth squat if you don't have those plodding old management and administrative skills needed to put that vision in place.
Good luck with the LMS, Chris. You are more than welcome to set me straight on everthing I am clueless about here.
Reader Comments (5)
I think I can clarify the "Fairly spotless family management" part. The problem isn't so much "family management" as poorly written software and a poorly designed database filled with poor-quality data.
1) Poorly-written software. Many of the online tools for parents that I've seen are built under the false assumption that each child needs one parent login associated with it. In the most basic problem scenario, the parents are divorced and have problems with sharing the account, changing the password without telling each other, etc.
2) Poorly designed databases. Sometimes, the school or district's super-official database is simply built wrong. It doesn't have fields that need to be tracked, or the fields are set to the wrong datatype, or it's not designed for each cell to have a single nuclear piece of information. This is a cross between not designing the database to meet needs and just lack of basic database properties like normalization.
3) Poor data. Of course, everyone wants to have access to the student database, and noone ever gets any real training in database editing. Then you have the problems from part 2, where the database isn't designed to store a type of data that the office staff really need to store. So they office staff start using deprecated fields to store comments, or store a second parent's email address in the parent name field, etc etc. You end up with a mess.
So, when you get ready to add a new tool that pulls data from the database, it doesn't "just work" you're forced to face up to the fact that you really haven't been strict with the quality of your database and existing tools.
Upon re-reading your post, it looks like we agree about the importance of data integrity. Oh well, maybe my comment will be useful to one of your readers. :)
I have one critique of your considerations: I have no problem with requiring teachers to post a certain number of grades/grades at certain times to a system-wide program, but why does it matter how they calculate those grades? I found your analogies unhelpful--soldiers and bank tellers are generally expected to follow direct orders instead of planning their own objectives. Doctors DO get to choose whether or not to use the CAT scan--part of the healthcare debate concerns whether doctors are choosing expensive diagnostic tools too often!
Doug, I agree with your analogy about soldiers and bank tellers. This year I have talked with several principals in the schools I work with and told them that they need to set the expectation that teachers will use the tools they have been given. I am so tired of the "If we give it to them they will use it" mentality. No, many of them will walk by everyday as "it" gathers dust while other teachers seeth because they would use it if they had it. Of course the support and training needs to be in place but if your immediate boss doesn't tell you what he/she expects, most people (not just teachers) will just keep doing things the same way they are comfortable with.
Hi Dave,
Our current SIS, InfiniteCampus, organizes individuals by their relationship to "households." Initially this was a big confusing and required a bigger amount of data cleanup than we had anticipated, but it works well now and certainly makes sense.
All the best,
Doug
Hi Libby,
I appreciate your comment and spun today's blog post out of it. <http://doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/2010/1/29/what-tech-use-should-not-be-optional-for-teachers.html>
A key question here is who should be planning a teacher's objectives - the teacher or the institution or the community or the state???
All the best,
Doug
Hi Dottie,
I agree whole-heartedly and have seen this myself.
Doug