Especially late in my career working in k-12 schools, I often drew the ire of guidance counselors and school leaders by recommending students consider community college for their first stop in higher education. For context, late in my career, I worked as a licensed teacher, but my role as an educational technology specialist found me Read More
Teachers teach. What exactly they should teach, what they actually do teach, and the degree of consensus about what they teach and the degree to which they are doing it are very contentious issues today. Most would agree some of the curriculum belongs in the Most educational practitioners are content if students demonstrate new learning Read More
Educators know there is no possibility that education can be politically neutral. Sure, we generally avoid taking an explicit side in any election—in one’s role as a public school educator, they cannot even advocate for passing the local school budget. All knowledge is, however, useful in either supporting or rejecting a conclusion; all decisions can Read More
Several factors make it impossible for commercial software developers to update operating systems and applications indefinitely. Even open-source operating systems and applications that are developed by communities of programmers rather than businesses are usually retired. When software is retired, the publishers no longer release security updates. At that point, responsible IT professionals will upgrade the Read More
Hackers are individuals or groups who try to gain access to others’ computers. Phishers are individuals and groups who try to trick users into giving them access to a computer system. Both hackers and phishers are generally after either computing capacity or data. In some cases, they want to use our computers for nefarious purposes, Read More
When you subscribe to your local internet service provider, you will receive a device that you can easily carry under your arm that is called a gateway. While a technician may arrive to install it, a reasonably tech-savvy individual can install and configure it using the directions they provide and the automated scripts programmed into Read More
In education (as in other fields) we hear leaders who proclaim they are “data-driven” and they “use evidence.” Despite this, there tends to be agreement within the education research community and within the practitioner community that research is not a factor that affects decisions I the manner we would all hope. (In New England the Read More
To minimize the threats of incomplete or inaccurate understanding of the work done by others, effective IT decision-making in schools requires the collaboration of individuals who approach them from very different perspectives, and it is unusual to find single individuals who have expertise in more than one of these perspectives. When designing and redesigning IT Read More
Stephanie Moore and Heather Tillberg-Webb’s Ethics and Educational Technology: Reflection, Interrogation, and Design as a Framework for Practice by Stephanie L. Moore and Heather K. Tillberg-Webb (9780415895088) continues to deliver on the promise summarized on the cover. Ethics, we have seen, should be approached from a design perspective. As designers, we are encouraged to be Read More
Compared to IT users in business, school populations are different. They bring different skills to the IT they use, they need more flexibility more often than business users, and their needs change over time (only to return to the original need). These characteristics arise from the facts that students have emerging literacies; it is not Read More