For generations, one of the questions teachers must contemplate and answer for themselves is “What do I want my students to be able to do with the lessons I teach them?” As I have answered that question, I have come to view my answers along a continuum. My continuum of goals I have for students Read More
Category: Schools
On Problems in Education
In education, problems are not so easy to isolate and fix. Students and teachers are vastly more complicated than IT and their lives are affected by far more variables than even the most sophisticated IT systems. When looking carefully at problems in education, we discover they cannot be isolated; and solutions may resolve symptoms but Read More
IT for Education Leaders: Networks
Because Google Workspaces and cloud-based data systems are used for all aspects of teaching and learning as well as school operations; secure, robust, and reliable network infrastructure is vital to schools. For many decisions about what to install and how to configure it, school IT professionals must engage educators and others who are affected by Read More
On User Devices in Schools
Cell phones have been arriving in schools in the packets of students for the entirety of the 21st century. For most of this century, the cell phones they have been bringing into schools are smartphones which can distract students with a myriad of channels for communications and apps. Those channels for communication and apps can Read More
tl;dr Closing a Physical Library is Always Bad for Learners
When I was a child, I looked forward to our class visits to the library. As a teen, I spent more time than most in the library, but not as much as others. As an undergraduate student who lived off campus, I was very familiar with the library. I spent many days there studying to Read More
On Standardized Curriculum
Curriculum (what teachers are supposed to teach) is an interesting part of school design. Ostensibly, there are things that each seventh-grade student (for example) should know, but it is very difficult to define “what students should know” outside of the context of school. The statement, “the book is written at and eight grade reading level” Read More
On Frameworks in Course Design
When preparing courses, whether they are planning or designing, instructors make decisions about what to teach, how to teach it, and how to evaluate students’ learning. When teaching for deeper learning, faculty attend to many more aspects of learning than what to tell students and what answers they should recall. The many decisions and the Read More
On Collaboration in IT Planning
Humans have a long history with technology. It is reasonable to conclude that humans and their technologies cannot be separated. Without our tools, our species would not have become the Earth-altering species we have become. When reviewing the history of our technology, we see that information technologies are a relatively recent invention, but for several Read More
Why Testing is Meaningless in Schools
It is widely known inside education (but much less so outside of education), that we really don’t know what to teach or how to measure learning. Educational researchers will dispute this, as they spend their entire careers defining learning and measuring it. In science that is allowed, and we accept the conclusions of studies, but Read More
On Open Resources in Schools
A wide range of expenses consumes educational technology budgets. Very obvious expenses marked the cyclic spending that characterized the first decades of educational computing; computers arrived in boxed, as did software on disks to be inserted into the computers. As networks were installed, expenses became more hidden from users. Servers, routers, and switches (each with Read More