Common Sense Comes to Chicago

A lot of the online safety materials out there for schools to use in talking with parents operate at a pretty low level of critical thinking. Fear plays a prominent role — fear of online predation, fear of inappropriate content on social networking sites being examined by prospective employers or college admissions committees, fear of online bullying. 

These concerns are real and clearly need to be addressed in any cogent approach to helping kids and parents make sense of life online. Yet programs that focus solely on challenges and problems shortchange kids, parents, and teachers in some important ways when they ignore opportunities for using online tools thoughtfully, proactively, and positively.

During an area meeting this week, it was a pleasure to learn more about Common Sense Media and their approach to educating schools and families. Vice President for Outreach Rebecca Randall walked a small group of us through the organization’s vision, history, products currently available, and those in development. 

They offer a thoughtful mix of media literacy and online safety materials. Their efforts are driven by available research and their increasing experience with kids and families. Something like 2500 schools are using these materials already and the numbers are rising quickly. The majority of their staff members work on rating and reviewing various kinds of media (video games, movies, web site, TV, books, music) to help parents and kids make informed choices about what they consume. 

Best of all, these services and materials are free. Check out their site, see what you think. I’d be curious to hear your reactions.

Posted on April 25th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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A Little Busy…

I am usually pretty good about managing meeting schedules and try to bunch them on certain days so I can leave bigger chunks of time open on other days. I can tell there are too many, though, when I start losing track of them, as I did this morning. Today I had three meetings: Computer Science Department (this is the one I missed), the Lab + architects team, and then a meeting to allocate summer classroom space. Tomorrow, there is a biweekly staff meeting, two conference calls with Lab + futurists, and a meeting to review all 12 futurist interviews with a group of faculty members and the architects team. Wednesday is the rescheduled CS meeting I missed and an All Schools Council meeting after school. Thursday I’m up to Parker for a breakfast meeting with the Common Sense Media folks, and Thursday night and Friday I’m out to Schaumburg for the TechCom conference, where I’m hosting a roundtable discussion on IT leadership in K-12 schools. No wonder things feel so busy. There is a whole lot of work that needs doing that doesn’t involve going to meetings…

Posted on April 20th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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LMAIS Tech Directors Forecast: Cloud-y and Raining on the Tech Parade

The good folks at Lake Forest Academy were kind enough to host yesterday’s semiannual meeting of the Lake Michigan area Tech Directors. This stunning campus has a fascinating history and could not be a more delightful place for such a meeting.
The economy was a hot topic of conversation. Pretty much everyone will be doing more with less next year. Cutting printing costs was high on everyone’s agenda, whether by educating users, piggybacking on Green initiatives, using only duplex printers, restricting printing to various degrees, or moving toward paperless operations by using file servers of web apps instead of hard copies.
A few schools have had to cut technology staffers as well, but haven’t cut service levels, so morale is taking a beating as the pressure ratchets up on senior staffers to deliver the same output with fewer resources.
Cloud computing was also discussed at length. About half the schools have or soon will have moved student e-mail to Google; there is more reluctance to move faculty and staff email to the “cloud” because some of the legal and risk management issues are stickier to navigate.
Folks are also looking to cut costs on web filtering services as vendors hike renewal price tags. Lab was one of two schools present who don’t do web filtering, so we listened in enough to learn that some of the web filtering tools out there are pretty powerful and have come a long way from the clumsier, ham-handed programs out there in the beginning.
This group has been meeting twice a year since way back in 1990. Even as people come and go from the group, there is a sense of community to it that makes it engaging enough to keep coming back, whether the Milwaukee or Chicago contingent is hosting. It’s become an important part of my personal learning network and I’m thankful that I have the opportunity to attend, contribute, and learn.

Posted on April 17th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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A Visit to Orland Park

The gracious folks at one of Orland Park’s excellent elementary schools were kind enough to host about 18 guests for a morning of observation and discussion on their use of Promethean interactive whiteboards for teaching and learning. The event was sponsored by Promethean resellers Graphtech Systems.

After introductions and a brief review of their process of adopting the “P-boards,” as they called them, we observed Kindergarten, 4th grade Music, and 4th grade Math classes for 30 minutes each. Then we returned to the conference room for a review of some new research about the effectiveness of Promethean boards in boosting student achievement and a general Q&A session while we ate lunch.

The demonstrations reminded me of the universal truth that technology tools don’t automatically make a lesson better. The teacher is always the key to good integration.

Using a P-board and handheld clickers to ask kids questions they already know the answers to is just an empty an exercise with the technology as without it. Projecting a textbook page on to a screen so a student can walk up to the front and write an answer on the same answer blank that’s in the book doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

Juxtaposing video clips of old and new dance steps, though, and inviting students to identify and annotate ways in which they compare and contrast, and saving those annotations for sharing online is a much more engaging use of this technology. So is drawing lines of symmetry in large sized polygons and figuring out together why there are more lines of symmetry in an equilateral triangle than an isosceles triangle.

I was also reminded that good technology integration is incremental. It’s natural in a new implementation like this one, now in its first year, for people to start by taking what they’ve been doing in the analog world and moving it into digital space without changing it much. The really good stuff comes later on when the comfort level and confidence improves and teachers have time to share what they’re doing with each other. As they do that, they’ll escalate their practice and become better together than they could be on their own. That’s when it’s the most fun to be a professional educator, in my humble opinion.

Our hosts are off to a great start, mostly because they have their priorities right. The teachers drove this initiative from the beginning and put student learning first. Their Principal and School Board are highly supportive and have made time and money available for ongoing professional development. They picked a product they like and are excited about, and the vendor has kept all promises and worked well with the school.

Many thanks to our hosts for the morning…and best wishes for ongoing success!

Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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Signs of Rampant Disruption

An NBA player got in trouble with his coach for twittering during halftime.

Jurors are doing web research on handheld devices during trials.

Bloggers like me can call in audio blog posts to the mobile blogging platform Tumblr.

In schools, we are only beginning to understand how disruptive these technologies already are and how much more so they will become. If we are not inclined to see past challenges to the opportunities these disruptions present, we will rob our students of the wisdom and guidance we can contribute to their growth from students to true scholars.

One of the better formulations of the teacher’s role in the Information Age is in this You Tube video about Connectivism, the process by which students construct learning networks.

Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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At NAIS

Yesterday’s presentation went well. The three hour workshop is a good format. There is enough time to say what needs saying and get some real discussion going. About 18 people were there. My co-presenters and I tried to help attendees come away with concrete suggestions for improving their ed tech practice in areas of leadership (my segment of the presentation), IT Management (Denise Musselwhite), Student Learning (Antonio Viva and Howard Levin) and Professional Development (Jill Brown).  It’s a terrific group of co-presenters. We enjoy working with each other so much that we’re pondering some sort of regular webcast to really zoom in on specific topics.

The NAIS Technology Task Force met for two hours yesterday morning. We spent a lot of time discussing NAIS’ efforts to reach out more to teachers than they traditionally have and what strategies might be most effective when it comes to sharing information member schools need. We also celebrated the “Stories of Excellence” booklet’s completion, knowing full well that freezing technology stories in time by putting them in a hard copy format makes them obsolete pretty quickly…but at least they’re in a form that some folks are more inclined to read than by going online.

In about an hour, I’ll be doing presentation #2 on the role of the independent school CIO along with Keith Gillette from Lake Forest Country Day and Jason Ramsden from Ravenscroft Academy.

Posted on February 26th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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Hills and Valleys

I actually had something of a lull, if such a thing exists in ed tech, toward the end of last quarter. I had time to think, plan, and act in a pleasant sort of way that I wish were possible all the time. Things have ramped up quite a bit since then, though. Working with the architects’ team, beginning the process of launching a school web portal solution, and preparing three separate presentations for NAIS at the end of this month has made for a very busy time. Mostly it’s been a good busy–thinking through possibilities in new and renovated space plans offers a unique chance to support some kinds of technologies over others and define more broadly how space, time, people and programs may be considered technology resources. And finally getting after the web portal project and having the resources to do it properly is exciting, too.

For you ed techies out there, what projects are occupying your time these days?

Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Curt Lieneck
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Milestones II, and Happy Holidays

So much for returning to less urgent tasks. What a quarter it has been! The Presidential election and its “up close and personal” impact on Lab, collective bargaining, the ISACS site visit, architect selection for the Master Plan, budget cuts…wow. I’ve been here a long time, and it’s never dull, but this quarter has set a new benchmark for furious activity.

I’d like to finish up the Milestones theme as this calendar year concludes. I’ve already mentioned replacement cycles and moving network management to the University’s control. With a robust wireless network in place, we could create the next milestone: pairing teacher laptops with permanent audiovisual systems, which we began five or so years ago. It’s rare to see technology change teacher behavior overnight, but as we’ve equipped virtually every teacher with a laptop and over 80 instructional, common, and meeting spaces with audiovisual systems, we’ve seen big changes in how teachers run their classes.  Even some of the most technophobic and change-resistant teachers here quickly realized how using these tools could benefit students and leverage class time better. I can’t point to a better example of a good return on a technology investment.

There are lots of other important landmarks as well — redesigning the web site and hiring a superb webmaster to care for it, running four years’ worth of summer tech workshops, hiring a tech team full of people who care about kids, teachers, and doing good work, resolving a challenging library situation by embedding a tech support worker there full time, implementing a web based student information system, moving tech support offices to the main building complex, envisioning and creating a state of the art Language Lab, bringing administrative data managers together to recast how we manage school data–but the three big ones stand out in my mind as the most significant to the most number of people.

As this calendar year draws to a close, let me express my fondest wishes to you and yours for a new year filled with abundant joy, the best of health, and the fellowship of family and friends.

Let me also encourage you to remember our troops during the holidays–those in harm’s way especially, but all our soldiers who will not be home with their families and friends while they serve our country. Thanks for reading.

Posted on December 19th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Ten Years on the Job: Milestones

Now that school is off and running, I can return to some of the less urgent tasks—like updating my blog—that tend to go missing during crunch times. I’d like to add a few further reflections on ten years in the IT trenches, focusing today on those developments that were milestones in our school’s tech progress to date.

The first real milestone on my watch was establishing a replacement cycle for computers. Moving older computers out of the school was the only way to achieve enough standardization to support a single version of the operating system, create practical training opportunities, and ensure that Information Systems communications were relevant to all computer users.

It also gives some structure to the school’s technology budget when replacements are planned. Replacing upon failure can be expensive since you don’t end up buying in volume; you also incur significant support costs nursing old computers along until they can no longer be repaired.

Another milestone came about four years ago when we worked with the University to shift data networking responsibilities from us to them. There was a classic tipping point as the number of network nodes grew rapidly, wireless networking was needed, and aging switching equipment and wiring plants neared replacement points. The early fears we had about not being in control of our network were unfounded, as we experienced improvement in uptime numbers and enjoyed solid cooperation from University networking staff.  It also freed up IS staff members to move on to other tasks with a more direct bearing on the Schools’ educational mission. The network today continues to be extremely reliable, fast, and well-maintained—and not by us, and in a way that is extremely cost effective.

More milestones next time. I’d be curious to hear from Lab people about what they feel are milestones in our tech progress or from educators in other schools about key events in their school’s tech evolution as well. Read more…

Posted on October 9th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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Ten Years on the Job: Gratitude and the DIT

Today, I complete ten years as the school’s IT Director. What a wild ride it has been! To start this new school year, I thought I’d share a few reflections on this decade of change in this and upcoming blog posts. First things first: let me start by thanking those who’ve blessed me with their support and encouragement over the years. I could not have survived the growing pains we’ve seen without it. I’m grateful to you all.  Thanks to:

  • Peter and Shandor, both now at the Latin School, for encouraging me to apply for the job and advocating for my hire 
  • Lucinda, our former Director, for having the courage to hire a teacher untested in the IT world
  • Tony, our Facilities chief, Scott, his #2, and the firemen for always going the extra mile to help my team and I get what we need out of our aging buildings and infrastructure
  • The administrative team, for supporting new initiatives, being patient with the bumps in the road, and challenging me to do better when we need it
  • The faculty and staff, for their cooperation and patience—and especially those with a vision for how technology can create new learning opportunities and the willingness to step outside their comfort zone to try them
  • Our Business Office staff, for their generous, cheerful help with the increasing amount of paperwork a growing IT operation generates
  • Sandy and Brent in the Registrar’s Office, for their hard work, expertise, and willingness to share it when it comes to managing the increasingly complex task of managing school data
  • Our parents, for their ongoing support of our technology programs 
  • The University’s Networking Services Group, for  helping me make Lab a visible, active member of the University technology community 
  • Jack, our account exec from Apple, for being a stand-up guy 
  • My Information Systems team, for putting up with everything I don’t know and helping me climb the ever-steeper learning curve each day (I would match this team with ANY school IT team in the country–I’ve seen a lot of them in my travels, and I hope our school community appreciates what a collection of all-stars we have right now) 
  • Dr. Magill, our current Director, for recognizing publicly and privately the value of technology to our school community and stepping up with the resources to walk the talk
  •  And, most of all, Dave, my boss, who has been a tireless mentor and advocate, both personally and professionally, showing  boundless understanding, kindness, and active, purposeful support in moving our tech operation from a small collection of old hardware and a hand wired network to the robust, enterprise level computing operation we are today 

I don’t know if I’ll do this another ten years or not. The learning curve gets steeper ever year, and every success sets the bar higher still–that’s just the nature of the game. But for however long I stick with it, I’ll keep thinking about all the fine people around me here at Lab and what a privilege it is to work in such august company.  Have a great start to this new school year!

Posted on August 29th, 2008 by Curt Lieneck
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