Education, Equity and the Digital World

Powerset Party Hangover Grunt

2007-02-17T20:48:00.000-08:00

Last week I attended a private party for Powerset sponsored by the CEO Barney Pell.
Powerset is an innovative natural language search company with a clear vision, to grunt their way into the future. Powerset and natural language search, Pell explains is the language that people use today to interact with search engines. It is not a natural language of the kind people use, which has rich and flexible structure for specifying relationships, constraints, and meaning of the words and their combinations. Instead, it is like the languages invented by people who speak different human languages but need a way to talk to each other. They use a limited number of shared words, with no order or structure, and supplement this with gestures and grunts. These languages are called "pidgin" languages. So "keywordese" is like a grunting pidgin language...Very cool stuff

Preparation for Program-Wide Implementation

2007-02-17T20:06:00.000-08:00

If your intention is to implement a tech program school-wide, or district-wide, here are some recommendations for implementing this change:
Create an action plan for implementing electronic portfolios that involves the following elements:
Vision - provide a clear vision for the role of electronic portfolios in the overall program = reduced confusion
Skills - provide adequate professional development for all stakeholders = reduced anxiety
Incentives - provide appropriate incentives to motivate all stakeholders = faster adoption
Resources - provide adequate resources for full implementation = reduced frustration
Work with your innovators and early adopters during the early exploratory stages, when processes are still fluid. Understand that a lack of structure or defined process may be frustrating for some novices, at either portfolios or technology implementation.
Find the natural leaders in your college/school/district, and engage them in the planning and initial implementation. They will be great allies in the transition process.

Take the team through a change simulation (The Change Game) to test their assumptions about how to implement a comprehensive change. Assess the competencies of all of your staff who will be doing the full implementation, to determine the targeted staff development needed.
Organize training activities based on the needs and readiness of the individuals.
Model electronic portfolios across the institution: administrators and teachers create electronic portfolios along with students.

Create an institutional e-portfolio that incorporates elements of individual e-portfolios.

2007-02-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

Here is a resource, An Integrated Technology Adoption and Diffusion Model, that can help with the adoption of technology across the curriculum. This article provides some excellent suggestions for effective professional development strategies at each developmental stage of the adoption process.

What is The Infrastructure Optimization Model

2007-02-17T19:55:00.000-08:00

According to analysts, more than 70 percent of a typical school districts IT budget is spent on infrastructure, such as servers, operating systems, storage and networking. Add to this the need to refresh and manage desktop and mobile devices and you have a unique set of challenges for IT infrastructure to face.

The Infrastructure Optimization Model can help schools and districts understand and subsequently improve the state of their IT infrastructure and describes what that means in terms of cost, security risk, and operational agility.

The Infrastructure Optimization Model helps districts understand and subsequently improve the state of their IT infrastructure and describes what that means in terms of cost, security risk, and operational agility.

Districts can benefit substantially by moving from this type of Basic infrastructure to a Standardized infrastructure, helping them to dramatically reduce costs through:

•Developing standards, policies, and controls with an enforcement strategy.
•Mitigating security risks by developing a "defense in depth"
•Posture: a layered approach to security at the perimeter, server, desktop, and application levels.
•Automating many manual and time-consuming tasks.
•Adopting best practices, such as those of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL); the SysAdmin,
Audit, Network, and Security Institute (SANS); and so on.
•Aspiring to make IT a strategic asset rather than a burden.

Facing California’s School Technology Woes Within The School Finance System

2007-02-15T16:26:00.000-08:00

I recently completed work on a bi-Partisan request to research and help guide K-12 public school reform policy in California. "Getting Down to Facts" is a research project of more than 20 studies designed to provide California's policy-makers and other education stakeholders with the comprehensive information they need to raise student achievement and reposition California as an education leader. The purpose of the research project is to carve out common ground for a serious and substantive conversation that will lead to meaningful reform by providing ground-level information about California's school finance and governance systems necessary to assess the effectiveness of any proposed reform. "Getting Down to Facts" was specifically requested by Governor Schwarzenegger's Committee on Education Excellence, Democratic leaders in the State Legislature and Jack O'Connell, Superintendent of Public Instruction.
The project addresses three broad questions:

What do California school finance and governance systems look like today?
How can we use the resources that we have more effectively to improve student outcomes?
To what extent are additional resources needed so that California's students can meet the goals that we have for them?

Our paper Effective Approaches for District Data Use Co-authored by Dr. Ida Oberman, asks
Are California school districts making the most of data systems to inform and guide education
reforms? Our study examines how data collection and analysis at the district level can be
improved so data systems can become more effective tools for decisions about spending,
resource allocation and improving instruction.