If we hope to make technology an easy-to-use and useful educational technology that is also secure and reliable, school and technology leaders must gather data to understand the information and instructional technology (I&IT) in schools: Users’ perspectives—There is a rich body of research that supports the conclusion that perceived ease of use and usefulness is Read More
Category: Leadership
#edtech for #edleaders: Network Planning and Installation
In many ways, an information technology network is much like other technologies in that the expertise needed to design and build it is much more specialized and expensive than the work of managing and operating a network. Network engineers are the professionals with the greatest understanding of how to design and build robust and secure Read More
A Closer Look at Educational Data
Educational data has been a recurring theme on this blog. In this post, I continue considering the nature of data in education and the nature of data in science… comparing and contrasting the two. Constructs and Instruments Scientists are always specific about what they are measuring, and there are accepted methods for measuring these quantities. Read More
The Nature of Science: A Lens to Understand the Data Movement
A colleague and I recently had a conversation about “data” and its role in education. I maintained that advocated for using data have a fundamental misunderstanding of science and evidence. I further maintained that misapplication of the principles of science and inquiry makes the decisions made by “data-driven leaders” in schools dubious at best. This Read More
Leaderspeak Interpreted
I recently rediscovered a glossary that a colleague and I started a few years ago… we had been collecting terms we heard educational leaders using for years, and we reflected on what they meant when they used them. These still seem very appropriate today, so they will be appearing in this blog until the collection Read More
When Goals Are the Goal
I found this quote in the data for a chapter I am preparing for publication: We spent so much time trying to decide if the goals were specific, measurable, and all of the other adjectives for the acronym, we had no time to think about what we were going to do. Even when we decided Read More
Understanding #edtech
In order to assess the degree to which educational technology is influencing teaching and learning in any school data must be gathered from three different perspectives. It is reasoned that together these provide the most complete assessment of all five dimensions of the instructional and information (I & IT) systems installed in the school. Users’ Read More
Dimensions of #edtech
Sufficient Devices Are there sufficient computing devices available in the school? Sufficiency exists when there exists: Enough devices so teachers’ decisions are not limited; Enough capacity that students can create products teachers deem appropriate; Methods to easily share limited resources. Robust, Reliable, and Secure Network Is the school’s information technology network reliable, robust, and secure? Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: Internet-only Operating Systems
The newest type of device to enter the educational market is the Internet-only notebook. When these devices were first marketed, they had no functionality without the Internet, but later generations have added some offline functionality. Still, however, these devices are most useful in schools when they are connected to the Internet. The dominant device used Read More
#edtech for #edleaders: Mobile Operating Systems
The two dominant mobile operating systems are Apple’s iOS (which is installed on iPads and iPhones) and Google’s Android operating system (which is installed on a range of tablets and phones). Microsoft makes a version of Windows available for mobile devices and the open source community also makes version of Linux available, but these are Read More