It has been almost eight years since I stopped working for the overly-large school district. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what’s happening inside the complex bureaucracy I left behind.
Tag: IT (Page 1 of 2)
The New York Times recently published a long front-page story about how Google “took over” the classroom. The writer’s primary focus is on concerns about the amount of student data the company is collecting in exchange for their free tools, and what they plan to do with it, although she doesn’t get many answers from them.
However, the part I found most interesting was about how those Google’s tools arrived in many classrooms in the first place. IT directors from Chicago, Oregon, and Fairfax County (aka our overly-large school district) complain that representatives of the company went straight to teachers with products like Google Classroom instead going through channels.
He said that Google had directly contacted certain Fairfax teachers who had volunteered to beta-test Classroom, giving them early access to the app. In so doing, he said, the company ignored the Google settings he had selected that were supposed to give his district control over which new Google services to switch on in its schools.
And why do so many teachers ignore IT’s rules and go 
through the formal process of getting those services approved?
Lots of reasons, but in our district it’s mostly because they know that the wheels of our bureaucracy grind very slowly. The formal evaluation system for new tech products can take years, especially for anything that hasn’t been blessed by Microsoft.
IT grudgingly went along with the use of Google Drive in the classroom after hundreds of teachers started using it on their own. Some of our innovative people very quickly recognized the value in online collaborative tools and jumped at the opportunity soon after it was released (only five years ago). One school even had the audacity to register their own domain to make things easier for their staff and students.
This would be a good time to point out that there’s no such thing as “free”, especially when it comes to Google. Even if the latest tool looks like a gift from the gods, teachers still have a responsibility to be cautious about allowing their students to pour data into these systems (see also the recent news about Edmodo).
On the other side of things, district administrators also need to understand that some of the best resources for evaluating new technologies are the connected, innovative educators working in their schools. Ignoring their expertise and judgement is going to result in them ignoring you.
[Apologies in advance to Doug for this post. :-)]
In a story about Microsoft’s education event this week, Wired made one good point about instructional technology. That had absolutely nothing to do with instruction.
The article’s focus was on the new, simpler version of Windows, called 10 S, that the writer says is aimed at competing with Google’s Chrome OS.
Chromebooks have been so successful because they’re hard to hack and easy for IT people to deal with; Windows 10 S appears to at least try doing the same.
And that sentence offers one primary reason why technology in the classroom is so screwed up: many, if not most, schools and districts make purchasing decisions based on what will make IT happy.
IT wants devices that make their jobs easier, something that is easy to clone, lock down, and control. From a central, remote location, please. The needs and wants of teachers are secondary. And students? Well, we rarely ask them about anything to do with what goes into their education anyway, so their opinion doesn’t count.
Certainly there is a place in schools for Chromebooks and whatever Windows 10 S turns out to be.1 But I strongly disagree that this computing-lite approach is “great news for students”.
Windows 10 S and Chromebooks simply represent one more way to standardize and maintain control over the learning process, while appearing to be forward looking.
A few months ago I ranted about how our IT department is adamant about not wanting Chromebooks to be used in our schools. If a technology is not blessed by Microsoft, they really don’t want to talk about it.
Now, however, things may be changing – a little – whether IT likes it or not.
A small group of principals here in the overly-large school district decided to bypass the usual bureaucratic channels, along with all the IT denials, and took their case for Chromebooks to directly our Deputy Superintendent (with a great deal of support and encouragement from our little cheering section).
To our surprise, he approved their proposal to purchase a limited number of the Google-based devices to test in their schools. The initiative only involves a few classrooms in five six schools so we certainly aren’t talking about any major shifts in thinking. But potentially it does represents a big crack in the IT barriers.
Of course, nothing is ever simple in our world. As you might imagine, our CIO2 is not happy.
The “Nonstandard Computer Exception Request” she signed (required by regulations) includes this pissy little declaration: “No requests for hardware or software support associated with these devices will be made to IT personnel.” It also forbids the schools from using the standard Google administrative dashboard to manage the Chromebooks, conveying the message: this is our sandbox, keep your crappy toys out.
So, IT is essentially treating these as BYOD devices2 and clearly trying to set up this project for failure. We on the instructional side, are doing our subversive best to make this initiative a success, with a big assist from our Google Education rep. More to come as we see how things play out.
One more thing about Chromebooks.
I’m not going to tell you that they are the ideal instructional device or that they will magically transform learning in our schools. They have plenty of flaws as a classroom tool3. Same with the iPad, another popular choice by schools over the past couple of years and also hobbled for effective use by the barriers erected by IT.
No computing device by itself is going to change public education. The technology must be accompanied by a whole new approach to pedagogy and curriculum, along with huge shifts in thinking from teachers, administrators, parents, and kids.
And, at least in our district, a major alteration in IT attitude – from obstruction to support.
We are having a little dispute here in the overly large school district, between a growing chorus of principals, teachers and tech trainers who want to use Chromebooks in their classrooms, and the IT department who says no way.
I understand the reasoning of the school-based people. The devices are cheap, reliable, and perform most of the functions a student would need during the day. They are a step backward from the all-purpose laptop we’ve become used to, but it would enable classrooms to have far more access to network applications for the same money.
However, I also understand IT’s position: regulations. District rules state in no uncertain terms that though shalt not purchase anything that doesn’t run Windows. Just ignore those thousands of iPads we approved in a moment of weakness. :-)
Of course, there’s much more behind their opposition than just following the rules (which they wrote in the first place). Devices like Chromebooks represent the loss of both control and jobs. Our IT people love to customize and configure everything, and they employ more people to do it than the department for instruction.
In the approaching age of easy-to-use, disposable computing devices (the $100 laptop we’ve been promised for so long), organizations like ours will need far fewer people to manage and repair them.
Certainly “real” computers will not disappear from schools anytime soon,4 but in the next few years, their numbers will likely see a steep decline. Accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the numbers of computer repair and “desktop management” people.