Website woes

The Mankato Schools put up its district website in 1996 - among the first districts in Minnesota, if not the nation, to do so. I used the Internet Archive to retrieve what I think was our homepage "way back" then. (See graphic.) How times have changed.

About two years ago, I requested that the District Administration magazine review our district website. I enjoyed reading the other school website reviews and thought we could learn a thing or two from an outside set of eyes. Our review was published last month. I'm meeting with the superintendent about it this afternoon. I predict he isn't a real happy camper. Though definitely accurate, the tone was pretty harsh. I guess I asked for it.

While the district site has proven invaluable for public relations, for disseminating information to parents and the community, for providing ready links for students and educators to valuable resources and for displaying student work, it's a holy nightmare to maintain. And at the same time, its importance continues to grow.

We've written webpage content guidelines. We've established a webpage updating guidelines that assign responsibility to individuals. We created easy-to-use forms for teachers to use to create their own webpages. And about a year ago, we even conducted a web usability study. Still stuff  slips through the cracks.

Having an older site might be one of the problems. If www.isd77.k12.mn.us were a house, we would have started with a cottage. As the years have passed, we've tacked on a addition here, a bedroom there, a new garage out back.  I personally seem to be able to find everything having lived with this rambling structure for so long, so it is hard for me to be empathetic with the occasional user to whom the organization is not so transparent.

Standards for websites have also increased tremendously. Our pages not only need to be current, accurate and informative, but aesthetically pleasing, consistent, and easy to navigate. And include lots o' multimedia according to DA. Prettying up few pages isn't too tough - but changing thousands of pages takes some serious time.

Our district is just now figuring out that if we want people to take the job of building webmaster seriously, they actually ought to be paid for taking it on. Keeping the building webpages organized and current is no longer an amusing hobby for the techo-teacher. Oh, the building webmaster also needs to assume responsibility for teaching individuals how to keep up their own pages as well - and seeing that they do so. Quite a job.

Last year we migrated our secondary school websites to a company that specializes in hosting school websites. The switch has gone well enough that we plan to move the elementary schools and district pages there this summer. This won't be a panacea, but it will move us in the right direction.

Like so much of educational technology, websites have moved from novelty to helpful to crucial. They've become serious business and our level of commitment to them needs to be serious as well.

Had I know this job would be this hard, I'm not sure I'd have taken it! 

In praise of pragmatists

Easy to do is easy to say.

Earlier this week I gave the talk  "If You Think You Can Do a Thing."  The presentation's focus is on assessing and changing teacher attitudes toward technology, arguing that attitude plays a major part in any change effort.  (I know, 'Well, duh!")

One of the points I try to make comes from Geoffrey Moore in his book, Inside the Tornado. He neatly divides people  implementing new technologies into visionaries and the pragmatists, and suggests we need to work with each group differently. He writes:

Visionaries are intuitive

Pragmatists are analytic

Visionaries support revolution

 Pragmatists support evolution

Visionaries are contrarians

Pragmatists are conformists

Visionaries break away from pack

Pragmatists stay with herd

Visionaries follow their own dictates

Pragmatists consult with colleagues

Visionaries take risks

Pragmatists manage risks

Visionaries are motivated  by opportunities

Pragmatists are motivated by problems

Visionaries seek the possible

Pragmatists pursue the probable

After years of living in denial, I am coming out of the closet here. Yes, friends and family, I must come clean. I am a PRAGMATIST.  Perhaps I was once a visionary, but having worked with real people, contended with real technologies, and been employed by real schools for the past 30 years, I am now a full-fledged pragmatist.

And instead of being ashamed, I am proud! We pragmatists should hold our heads high. Sure, it's exciting to hear those exciting pointy-heads pontificate about how things "really ought to be," but putting vision into practice is where we pragmatists shine - where the vision is practical, of course.  And when it actually makes sense and if others are doing it. Of course the chance of success must be pretty good. Oh, the change must be demonstrated in other schools to have actually improved kids or teachers lives.

I would argue that making something work in th real world on a broad scale takes as much or greater genius than thinking it up in the first place.

In a recent School Library Journal article, Will Richardson uses an innovative teacher as an example of how using tags within del.icio.us can facilitate the collaborative problem solving process. Visionary! Very cool! But when I demonstrated del.icio.us to a group of teachers this week, one excitedly raised her hand and asked, "Do you mean students could store their research paper bookmarks there so they keep them even after the tech director re-images the lab?" Pragmatic! Very cool! Bless her big practical heart.

Let's hold our heads high, fellow pragmatists. We're doing good things. It just takes us a little longer.

The technology glass

Some people think of the glass as half full. Some people think of the glass as half empty. I think of the glass as too big. ~ George Carlin

If you haven't read Tim (Assorted Stuff) Stahmer's and Graham (Teaching Generation Z) Wegner's comments on yesterday's post about interactive white boards, please do.  If you read Assorted Stuff, you know Tim is skeptical of the IWBs and has experience with a large implementation of them in his own district.  (I'd sort of been expecting his comments.) Graham's been writing about using IWBs from personal experience for as long, it seems, as I have been reading his blog. At the risk of over simplifying, here are some their concerns/observations about IWBs and their implementation:

• they reinforce "traditional" teaching methods
• their motivational aspect wears off
• the cost/value ratio of these devices is not good enough
  
•  the effective use of an IWB is dependent on the teaching skills and philosophy of the instructor

I agree with each of these sentiments (although unlike Graham and Tim, I don't have a skeptical bone in my entire body.) Their comments gave rise to some questions:

1. How are concerns about IWBs unlike any other technology application we have placed in schools? Aren't Tim and Graham's concerns about IWB true for 1:1 computing, computer labs, student use of blogs - whatever?  Thank god - or there would be no need for tech directors or blogging pundits. Well, maybe there still isn't a need for the second.
   
2. Is the "gee whiz" factor positive or negative in technology implementations?  I distinctly remember the giant "oooooh" that always came just after I showed a class of teachers learning to use a word processor how to "Select All" and then change the font. Just because these folks got overly excited at first doesn't mean they aren't using the technology well or badly now - as far as I can tell.
   
3. How do we know when any technology's cost is justified? Of the approximately $3200 per classroom we spent on this project, the SmartBoard device itself was $840 - about 25% of the cost. My logic was this - mounted LCD projectors were mostly likely going into classrooms anyway. Why not spend a modest amount of money and try to increase the likelihood of the technology being used interactively? Of course there is still a part of me that says we should take the entire tech budget and spend it all on quality books and lots of human tutors.
   
4. Are we asking too much of devices? Which comes first the technology or the methodology to use it well? And who defines "use it well?" For good or ill, technology has always been touted as a catalyst for change. Install it and they will come along, if you will. Most of us know that is bogus. Most technology implementations have resulted in a "patina" of change, which may be more harmful to schools in the long run than the perception of no change at all. Teachers who are constructivist in nature will use technology to remain constructivist; the stage sages will add pictures to their lectures (which not be a bad thing either). As one who makes his beer money giving lectures, I am not as down on the method as others might be.
   

I have absolutely no stock in or relatives working for any IWB companies. I don't think my job is dependent on the successful use of these devices. I tend to own up to failures.- the professional ones anyway.

But you know, I am still glad we are doing this project. I believe in what my classroom teachers are telling me - this equipment helps them do their jobs better. (I hear comments like those that Jennifer and Jay left a lot.) The number of teachers applying for SmartClassrooms is high this year. Principals are jockeying for more than their share of installations in their buildings. The buzz from the kids is that they like'm.

Are we seeing the technology glass as half full, half empty or too big?