No such thing as a small technology problem

As readers may know, I love spending time in my district's 14 K-12 buildings. I carry a little notebook and watch classes and ask my standard question "How's your technology working today?" to teachers who are not engaged in direction instruction.

And I usually come back to my office with a page or so of notes, listing tech problems that teachers may be having - especially at the beginning of the year as we recover from room cleanings, moving, new equipment set-up, and software and OS updates. Funny thing is that nobody's problem in the big scheme of things is huge. Common problems:

• The printers aren't set up on my new computer.
• No one has yet intalled _______________ software.
• My student computers in the back of the room aren't hooked back up.
• Can you show me how to get this app on my iPad?
• My IWB needs alignment. Can you remind me how to do this?
• I moved my desk and need a longer cable.

You get the idea. The issues are not like "we don't have enough money for ___________," or "the network bandwidth is insufficient for ______________," or "the kids need more skills in using _____________. 

Given the time, nearly every problem I encounter can be solved. But that does not mean they are not important problems, just because they may be small in the grand scheme of technology integration. If they keep an individual teacher from getting her work done, trying a new teaching method, or developing a negative attitude toward technology, they are very, very important.

We big-picture types need to remember this.

On a related note, this post is worth a few minutes time: Norbury, "What Faculty Want From IT" Campus Technology, 9/18/13

1. Better Communication 
2. Tech Reliability
3. Simplicity
4. Standardization
5. Constancy
6. Flexibility
7. Rapid Response
8. Relevance
9. Pedagogical Support 
10. Ubiquitous Wireless

I would add Respect to this list, but over all, looks like Norbury and I work with the same kinds of teachers.

BFTP: Joy in the classroom

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past.  Original post, September 22, 2008.

Steven Wolk begins his article, "Joy in School" (Educational Leadership,Sept 08) with a great quote:

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win the ability to read and write, if in the process the individual lose his own soul? - John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

and goes on to ask

If the experience of "doing school" destroys children's spirit to learn, their sense of wonder, their curiosity about the world, and their willingness to care about the human condition, have we succeeded as educators, no matter how well our students do on standardized tests?

Mr. Wolk is my kinda educator. He writes that the following essentials can bring joy to students' school experience.

1. Find the Pleasure in Learning
2. Give Students Choice
3. Let Students Create Things
4. Show Off Student Work
5. Take Time to Tinker
6. Make School Spaces Inviting
7. Get Outside
8. Read Good Books
9. Offer More Gym and Arts Classes
10. Transform Assessment

Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote Designing Research Projects Students and Teachers Love. I am still as proud of that article as of anything I've written before or since, and it echos many of Wolk's points. 

Education that is not enjoyable is a dead end street - learning on a subject will stop as soon as a child is out of range of the educational institution.

How do you bring joy to learning in your classroom, library or computer lab? 

Does your school worry about increasing joy as much as it does increasing test scores? (And might there be a relation between the two???)

Ways the librarian of the future will keep busy?

After participating in a morning-long work session this week on identifying librarian training needs for the upcoming year, I was a little stunned by the implications of this headline:

8 Ways The Librarian Of The Future Will Keep Themselves Busy

The headline makes it sound like librarians are going to need to invent ways to keep themselves occupied so they don't bump their heads on their desks when they doze off out of boredom. Not in my universe.

The infographic in the link above was created based on data by Pew Internet by LibraryScienceList.com (a group with whom I am not familiar). As far as it goes, it describes some roles that school librarians have long identified as being "The Information Expert" and I call "The Virtual Librarian":

What this table fails to recognize is teaching role of all librarians - school, public, academic and special. Increasingly our role is less about doing information stuff like that above for patrons, but teaching them to learn to do it form themselves. (And no, we are not working our way out of a job since there is always a new crop of individuals to be taught!)

If we can describe the future as this coming school year, these are ways our school librarians will "keep themselves busy"...

1. Teaching, assessing and reporting ELA media literacy standards and playing a major role in teaching our Digital Citizenship curriculum.
2. Faciliating our 1:1 iPad initiative by doing staff development, managing devices, and selecting apps.
3. Providing in-building staff development on standard technology uses including interactive white board use and GoogleApps for Education. Doing as-needed tech support on days the techs are not in the building.
4. Locating quality, relevant support materials, both commercial and open source, for use with classes that are now using our CMS Moodle instead of a textbook. (This is going to be huge and require a great deal more sophistication than "pulling a cart of books off the shelves to support the climate unit in third grade.)
5. Continuing to promote Voluntary Free Reading by both traditional methods of book talks, author visits, reading events and displays, but also digitally by online book clubs, social networking (Follett Quest), and links to digital resources about book (TeachingBooks).
6. Finding ways to promote digital resources with both students and staff, especially helping classroom teachers learn about e-books that can be used by multiple readers at one time, creating virtual classroom sets.
7. Oh, and doing all that traditional stuff like collection development, material selection, weeding, circulation, team-teaching in classrooms, and supervising paraprofessional and technical staff. Communicating with staff and parents. Developing budgets and plans. Working with leadership teams to support broad building goals.

OK, I can only think of seven rather than eight things our district librarians will be doing "in the future" to keep busy, but I don't think we'll be hearing the sounds of heads hitting desks from boredom.