Preaching to the converted
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on June 9th, 2009
Sometimes, not often, we run into a school district administrator who “gets it” before we even start talking about our product. Yesterday was one of those times. We were giving a presentation and demonstration to Jon Corippo of Chawanakee Unified in California. While we were having the meeting, Jon was tweeting about our product on twitter and getting us a referral to another district in the process. That was definitely a first for us.
But, the point of this post is not to praise Jon, although he is certainly deserving, but to make more people aware of the district’s new digital high school. They have an amazing, cutting edge plan, that as Jon describes it “Throws everything we think is education out the window because it does not work, and starts over”. Check them out at minaretsmustangs.wikispaces.com. One of the nice things about my job is being able to meet with visionary individuals. Jon has a vision and is making it happen everyday.
Oh, and what did Jon think about our product? He wants it.
Observations of a Digital Academy Parent Night
Posted by lou in Internet Education on May 16th, 2009
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a parent information night for a new digital academy being started by the Escondido Charter High School. For those of you who are not familar with the school, they are a very high performing charter school organization which currently runs a high school, a middle school, and several programs under California’s Independent Learner model. They are very successful as an organization, with a beautiful set of buildings and a very long waiting list. Their site is http://www.echs.org.
The Digital Academy marks a new initiative for them where they will be taking kids through what I would call a blended model with most coursework done on the web / on-line with some brick and mortar instruction. As opposed to some efforts such as Pennsylvania’s PA-CYBER (http://www.wpccs.com/) where they look to deliver all instruction online, Escondido presented parents with a blended model.
I was very curious to see how the parents responded to the presentation and what their questions or concerns were. What was truly interesting was that their were very little (if any) questions on the quality of the instructional material. The parents seemed to take it on faith that their children would get as much knowledge from the digital content as they would in a brick and mortar classroom. The only question that was posed that related at all to quality was a question about whether the program was accredited.
Instead, the questions related to the concern parents had about the lack of social interaction. One parent asked if his child would be eligible to play sports at the “regular” high school. A second parent asked if her son would be able to go to the prom. They were reassured that all social and after-school activities would remain open to the students in the Digital Academy.
This led me to think a bit about programs which are not grounded with a brick and mortar program. How would they be able to offer the same social activities? Distance learning programs have had this issue for a while, but in those cases, it is understood that if you live in a rural or remote area, your social opportunities are limited by your locaiton. My conclusion is that this experience reinforced my belief that digital learning will be an augmentation of traditional school programs for some time to come, and that this “blended” model is probably a good (better?) approach.
Step-parents
Posted by lou in Parent's Opinions on March 21st, 2009
Recently, I had the opportunity to interact with a parent user of our web service over a series of emails. The contact was initiatied by the parent using the Feedback link in our product. Her (at least I think it was a her) point in the feedback message was about adding the ability in Connected.info for a step-parent to be treated as a parent in Connected, but not with exactly the same privelages that a parent had. This peaked my curiousity and I sent an email asking a few questions about her concern and a proposal for what we might do about the situation.
This sparked a series of emails which really illuminated the issue for me. Before I describe the issue, I would like to compliment the parent on having a very good attitude about the validity of the involvement of a step-parent in a child’s life. I thought her attitude was refreshing.
That said, here is the situation. The custodial parent (the one who wrote the note) has remarried and the step-parent in the household with the child would like to have access to the features of Connected that allow the viewing of grades and homework assignments for the child. The non-custodial parent also has remarried, and the new spouse of that parent would also like the same visibility.
In Connected.info, we drive a lot of our relationships and group memberships from the data stored in the student management system. We do this to make Connected.info more immediately useful for a user. The idea being that if there is less configuration to do on the part of the user, there is more perceived value in the software. Some student management systems do a better job at identifying parental and legal guardian status than others. In the case of Powerschool, many schools use the “custom field” capability of that student management system to note “special” relationships where they exist. So, it is possible for Connected.info to identify step-parents when the school district notes them.
But, what if the school district does not note them? How would such a relationship be identified and an appropriate user status be given to a step-parent in Connected.info? The request that the parent I interacted with had was to allow her to grant “parental” status to another user. There are some advantages to that, but shouldn’t the non-custodial parent have a say in whether this was ok? What if there are court orders preventing the non-custodial parent’s spouse from having access? This turned into a thorny issue.
The second issue we discussed was the issue of how much access to grant, and specifically, what was seen on the “family calendar” by the step-parents. I explained that the “family calendar” was essentially a view of events present on individual family members calendars and any groups those users belonged to. So, then, the question of what constituted the family came up. Is the family the superset of the custodial parent’s household AND the non-custodial parent’s household? Clearly, there are issues with that. Is the “family” then the set of events that only the child is involved in? That is probably not complete enough a set of events.
What seemed to be the best solution was for the “family calendar” of the custodial parent’s household include events from the individual members of the household and the groups they belong to, but not events that only appear on the non-custodial parent’s household members calendars.
One last issue that came up was that of the child’s calendar view. Since the child is both a member of the custodial parent’s household as well as the non-custodial parent’s household, shouldn’t their “family calendar” view show all the events from both households? That is, when they sign in as themself, what evens show on their calendar? The parent I was interacting with via email agreed that a combined view was appropriate for the child. In fact, she felt that there was value in both parents being able to see events scheduled by the other parent that affected the child. However, privacy issues would normally prevent that from being practical.
I found this a fascinating conversation about an area that really does not get enough attention in school oriented software.
Connected.info included in the New Media Consortium’s 2009 Horizon Report
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on March 17th, 2009
The growth of a new company is marked with milestones and we have just had another one with our first piece of PR. We were mentioned in the 2009 Horizon Report, K-12 edition, from the New Media Consortium. The report can be downloaded here.
The Horizon report is a nice resource for technology professionals in school districts. It discusses the trends in technology that are making their ways through the education market. Their reports have been pretty much spot on over the years they have been published.
This year’s version covers the following trends:
- Collaborative environments
- On-line Communication Tools
- Mobiles
- Cloud Computing
- Smart Objects
- The Personal Web
The report talks about the Time to Adoption for each; gives a nice overview of the trend; discusses the relevance for teaching, learning, or creative expression; gives examples of the trend being used in practice; and, gives links to places to continue learning more.
Connected.info is included in the Collaborative environments section, but we could just as easily have been included in several of the others as well. I am very pleased we were included, and I am excited that we achieved this milestone.
March 4th release of Connected.info
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on March 4th, 2009
We are really pleased to announce our latest release of Connected.info. The new features went live on the site this evening. The maturity of the service is starting to be reflected in the nature and type of the changes we made this evening. Sub-groups is not an earth shattering new feature, but it is one that will simplify a lot of things and make the use of the product more efficient for some situations. As a team, we are gratified to have an involved set of early adopters who are helping us continue to build a world class product.
Below is a list of the main changes:
Sub-Groups
- Any group, including class section groups can now have sub-groups.
- Sub-group membership can be administered using a new sub-group membership editor. Users can be added and removed from sub-groups via a quick and easy checkbox
- Sub-groups have all of the same features as groups
Posting
- A group owner has the ability to disable (and re-enable) the following features – blog posting, forum posting, and wiki posting by other group members. Teachers may find this useful for certain course sections.
- School administrators may disable posting for the entire school district if they wish. Teachers can over-ride this for a specific course section.
- Muli-post editing now will only show active course section groups and will display period title and time, as well as room information to help differentiate sections.
Flagged Content
- Teacher postings in class section groups can no longer be flagged as objectionable.
- Flagged content will now display who has flagged the content
Group Content display
- Improved display of group content (blogs, etc.) by limiting the number of items displayed on the main page to the most recent. A link to show all the content has been added which will navigate to a new page.
Wikis:
- Connected.info will now display the names of the individuals who made an edit to a wiki and the date the change was made in the wiki history rather than just the dates of the changes.
Assignment Workflow
- Assignments created in the SIS gradebook will now “auto-post” into Connected without having to be specifically linked to a Connected assignment.
- Connected.info will honor the “post on” date specified in the gradebook (PowerTeacher) and not post the assignment to the students / parents until the date specified.
- If there is a date collected supplied in the gradebook, Connected will use that date to show that an assignment has been submitted by a student.
Period order now honored
- Class sections will now be sorted in period order in all displays
Teaching Digital Literacy in a Web 2.0 age
Posted by lou in Internet Education on March 2nd, 2009
Recently, I re-read a study sponsored by the MacArthur foundation on Digital Learning. The study can be found at http://digitallearning.macfound.org. I may have mentioned this study before in another blog post. But, as a part of some training materials we developed for our product, I have put some thoughts together on the need to update teaching digital literacy in K-12 in light of all the new Web 2.0 tools. Time in a computer lab learning Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, and Excel is simply not enough anymore.
The study makes a point (among others) that young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society while interacting with one another on-line. My observation is that this is true to a point, but that there is a gap in learning when it comes to some areas of digital literacy. I’ve read that to be a digital citizen means knowing about:
- Internet access methods
- Communication methods
- Literacy
- Security and Safety
- Etiquette
- Rights and Responsibilities
- Law
- Health and Wellness
- and, Commerce
I can believe that some of these can be “picked up on the streets” in ways which formal learning in a classroom or via computer can not. For example, digital etiquette might be better learned by adapting to the norms of the on-line community one is interacting with vs. trying to use rules learned elsewhere.
But, there are some rules of digital etiquette which make basic communication more productive and less prone to misinterpretation. An example area is how to deal with commentary on a blog post. Or, how to comment in a productive manner vs. an unproductive manner. Being exposed to some simple rules can help avoid problems which may prevent the blog author from having a positive experience.
Digital safety gets a lot of play in the media, and it is a topic that worries many parents. The idea of a stalker obtaining information from one’s child and worse yet, making contact in the real world as a result of a virtual connection is chilling. Just like teaching the important message of “Don’t talk to strangers”, we need to be teaching the basics of dealing with the prospect of Internet crime, cyber-bullying, and identity theft. K-12 educators reinforce the “Don’t talk to strangers” message in early grades, but rare is the lesson plan that includes a discussion of how to deal with cyber-bullying.
Some educators are pushing for mainstream education to include the idea of a digital update on the Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. (See: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom’s+Digital+Taxonomy) It is fascinating to see things like twittering, instant messaging, and text messaging being included in a list of educational objectives.
However, this is very progressive thinking. Most schools still view many of these tools as distractions and do what they can to block access to the basic tools that students will use the moment they leave school. Some people worry that this is making school seem increasingly less relevant to our youth. But, to adopt the widespread use of web 2.0 tools during the school day will require a new model of teaching, and many schools are just not in a position to make the commitment to change. Why is that? I believe that society has laid too much of a burden on schools and teachers. It used to be that the goal of public education was to insure that our youth became ready to take their place as an informed electorate. Essentially, the very future of our country depended on it – a lofty goal to say the least.
But, as Christensen states in his book “Distrupting Class”, schools are now saddled with so much more from an expectation point of view that it is difficult to conceive how they can be successful, let alone adapt to continuous change. For example, Federal law requires that students be protected from inappropriate content while at school. This is part of the digital safety concept and I agree that students need to be protected. It would be great to have some of this burden be borne by ISPs and internet content providers as well so that kids can be protected outside of school too. I do not agree that cutting students off from the tools they need to be successful is a good plan, but I can empathize with educators who choose to do so. I would put forth the proposal that schools consider teaching a course or a series of courses on Digital Literacy where the point of the class is to make the students proficient in the tools. While driver’s education has been cut from many high schools due to budget issues, it is pretty clear that federal programs like e-Rate are there to insure schools can teach digital literacy.
What are your thoughts?
The 2009 Economic Recovery Act & Education
Posted by lou in US Education on February 26th, 2009
Over the last few weeks we have learned more about the portions of the economic stimulus package passed by Congress and how it will effect education in the United States. As near as I can tell, there is $53 Billion dollars allocated in the recovery act to address Education and Training. Of that amount, state departments of education expect somewhere near $5B dollars to be allocated to them in this coming year, perhaps as late as October of 2009. There is a second, separate pot of money in the amount of $650 million, that has been allocated to an existing program called Ed-Tech. That funding amount is available in 2009, but is less than the amount previously available to schools under that program in years past. However, it is worth noting that this money is designed to be allocated to school technology programs and not to address more general school budget concerns.
Many states seem to be looking at their share of the $5B to address shortfalls in tax revenue, that is, to maintain the status quo in their state. No doubt this is welcome news to many states, California included. Some states are in less dire economic circumstances than California and their department of ed leaders are looking at how best to spend this new money. For us at Connected, it will be very interesting to see how those states choose to spend the money. Will it be applied to existing programs, or, will it be spent to move schools a bit closer to the rest of society’s use of the Internet.
Slightly off topic, but it is worth saying that in the last couple of months, feedback from parents we have spoken to about our product has illuminated an opinion shared by most that school hours represent time that their children are walled off from the world for the most part. Cell phones are to be turned off or silenced; many Internet sites are blocked, etc. Many parents are concerned that schools are making it harder for children to be prepared to deal with the real world. This will be the topic of another post to come.
Back to the Recovery act…
One of the things I like about the new administration in Washington is its commitment to transparency. To that end, the site Recovery.org is worth visiting. The content is sparse at the time of this posting, but it is definitely worth paying attention to.
Let me get back to the Ed-Tech program and the $650 million dollars. Of that $650 million, $308 million will be passed down to LEA (Local Education Agencies, or school districts) for them to decide what to do with it. Another $308 million will be administered by the state for use by the LEAs. That is, districts will apply to their state department of education for grants to use that money. An additional $37.5 million will be available to the state departments of ed for state-wide programs. We hope that school districts will look at our solution – Connected.info and consider it as something they could apply for grant money to deploy in their district.
At a high level, the infusion of money into the educational system in the United States is a good thing. I only hope that the system chooses to apply that money in ways that create better learning opportunities for our students.
New release of Connected.info
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on January 30th, 2009
On 1/26 we made an important new release available to our pilot users. We continue to be pleased by the progress the product has made and how much use the product is getting from the pilot users. We are gathering valuable input from the users as they leverage the features of the product and many of the new features are a direct result of that feedback.
We are especially excited to release our SMS (text messaging) interface to the product. This feature was designed and specified by seven students at CART in a Joint Application Design (JAD) session. We are pleased that we were able to turn this around and that our relationship with CART allowed us to have this experience.
The highlights of this release are:
Calendar
- Repeating Events: Any event can now be set up to repeat in a number of practical ways
- Navigation Acceleration: Requested by several teachers at CART, when in any group calendar, there is now a pull down to quickly move to any other group calendar.
- Public events: Events on your calendar that you want to share with users who do not have Connected.info can be made public events. These events have a web address (URL) which you can share with people so they can view the event and its associated details.
Posting
- Multi-post: Within Blogs and Wikis, the calendar, and other parts of Connected.info, the system now recognizes that you may wish to have the same information appear in multiple places. For example, as a student, you may want a blog post to appear in your class group as well as a personal group. The system now facilitates this.
Forums
- Forums are a way to organize discussion topics so that the flow of conversation is easier to follow. Contrasted with a blog, where the author receives responses on a posting they have created, in Forums, any group member can post a topic.
Connections
- With Connected.info it is now possible to invite other members of your family and friends who are not affiliated with CART to join Connected.info. While they will not get the benefits of being able to interact with other students and teachers, you will be able to include them in your personal groups and share events with them.
Assignment Workflow
- This feature is a way for students to submit their completed assignments to their teachers electronically while allowing the teachers an easy way to view / review and assess the assignments. Teachers can see which students have submitted an assignment and students can see when a teacher has reviewed and assessed their submissions.
Messaging
- Interacting with Connected.info by way of SMS: A special feature designed by the students at CART. This allows a user to interact with Connected.info by text messages. For example, sending the text m@connected.info HW to the text message interface will return today’s homework assignments to the registered user of the cell phone.
With this release we are now able to invite anyone to experience the product features. If you are interested in receiving an invitation, please contact us at connect@connectedinfosys.com
Iowa pilots set to begin in February
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on December 30th, 2008
We received word this week that we are approved for two more pilots. The districts are in Iowa and include a high school and a junior high. These will be full school implementations for us and we are very excited. There will be teacher training and a set of guidelines for how to use some of the more advanced (for schools) features of our product offering. Both the pilots and the training course content represent major milestones for our young company.
I found the discussion with school administrators before the pilot agreement to be interesting in that there was a lot more concern over the impact on teacher time that what they called peer-to-peer communications among students would have. They felt that in the past, tools where students could post about other students cause a lot of work. The district personnel asked questions about how our product dealt with these issues. I feel we have a good overall set of features for dealing with abuse in this area. The conversation did get me thinking about how we might be able to address cyber-bullying in a more straight-forward manner so I am into writing more functional specs now.
Also, I was reminded of what I have read that within social networks there is the ability, like in real life, to just leave a clique or group and either join another or form another. Thus, bullying, while distasteful, is somewhat more easily addressed by an individual in an on-line environment. However, there is the potential for greater abuse as well. We did a review of our terms of service after the discussion with our Iowa partners because the issue of the mother being convicted of violating MySpace’s terms of service for creating a false persona on line. Of course, our product has taken steps to reduce that possibility, but we have to make certain our terms of service our up to date in this area. Thankfully, they are up to date.
I have often wondered whether the concern over all of this is warranted or not. According to the Iowa schools, they saw a lot of incidents of teasing and threatening messages in the past when they allowed what they call peer to peer messaging. I did not get the details of whether these messages caused any expulsions or not.
In our pilot in California, we have not had the issue so far and only saw incidents of profanity where the students attempted to “beat” our controls for profanity. But, there are many possible explanations for why this could be different. One possible explanation is that simply the times have changed. The use of social networks is much more prevalent and the newness of being able to use an electronic form for “threats” has worn off. But, I think the saying “kids will be kids” still applies and we have to have a product that has the capabilities to deal with reality.
The launch of Connected.info
Posted by lou in connected.info updates on October 13th, 2008
On Wednesday, October 1st, we went live with www.connected.info and began the process of registering the users at our first pilot site. Our partner is the Center for Advanced Research and Technology (www.cart.org). CART is great high school located in Clovis, CA. They are a joint venture of the Clovis and Fresno Unified school districts. We had seven teachers and 615 students to register, along with their parents.
We opted to be on-site and present the goals of the pilot to the teachers and the students in the hope that this would encourage them to be more interactive on the site. The interesting thing for us is that the teachers are planning to use the capabilities of the site to post assignments and give the kids information on their assignments. In addition, the kids can create their own project teams.
So, the students rushed to register themselves. And, we ran into our first glitch. It seems the Google and Yahoo, which by far have the largest number of students using their email services, treated our registration confirmation email as coming from a mail relay and rejected the mail. Actually, now more than a week later, we are still struggling with this issue.
However, as of today, we are starting to see really good usage of the site and the capabilities of the product even though we have not started the phase of the product pilot where we ask users to do anything. Some things are very encouraging. We are seeing an average of 19 page views / visit and the average visit time is 10 minutes. The visit time has actually gone up over the past week, which is a really nice sign.
So, I would think Phase 1, the setup and registration phase should be considered a success so far.