Chapter 5
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Case Studies
Reflections of a Chief Technology Officer in Kansas
New uses for technology continue to have significant impacts on the world we live in. It has changed and enhanced how we communicate with others, purchase goods and services, become entertained, and it has opened up a world of knowledge to be available at our fingertips. The rate of technology integration into our lives continues to accelerate at an ever increasing rate.
We have experienced a number of innovative uses of technology in the classroom over the years, from the use of interactive systems and collaboration technologies to enabling anywhere learning through the use of mobile technologies. The majority of these education technology innovations are augments and substitutes for the traditional instruction that occurs in our classrooms. Based [on] the definitions that Dr. Ruben Puentedura developed, we are working towards the next stage of innovation for our schools by redefining instruction and enhancing our ability to personalize learning and make effective educational decisions through the use of information and data.
There are three core ideas our district views with utmost importance in regard to the use of technology and our resources, and are the essence of our technology plans:
- the inspiration to provide personalized student learning, also the heart and soul of the district's strategic plan, to help every student attain and put into daily practice the skills necessary to move beyond the basics of digital-age learning;
- the imagination to accurately envision a future that includes new and unique uses for current technology, or the use of technology unknown to us at this moment;
- the innovation to understand that we cannot possibly teach our students how to use all technology that may exist in the future, and they will be better served if we provide them with foundational skills that build self-confidence, thus enabling them to explore and discover new ways to learn using technology.
These core ideas will help us answer the call of our strategic plan, to make sure our students are college or career ready and that they have a firm grasp of technology to be effective in the 21st century.
It will be the three core principles embedded in our strategic technology planning and strong partnerships throughout the district that will allow us all to collectively move forward with a deeper level of technology integration in our district. All levels of staff from district administration, building administration, and teachers are needed to buy into the core principles and the technology strategic direction of the school district for technology integration. These partnerships will allow us to take policy to practice and create an innovative environment for our students to learn in.
Our primary strategic focus as a district is to provide an "Education beyond Expectations" experience through personalized learning for our students. We began to look at ways that data-driven decision-making could assist us in providing personalized learning opportunities. Four years ago we started the journey of leveraging the data contained in all of our separate systems in a unified way. We began by aggregating all of the data from our various systems, about our students and their learning, into a data warehouse. By having this data in a single location, it has allowed us to identify trends and correlations in student information that were not readily apparent before then. This has enabled us to make more informed decisions around instructional supports and curriculum decisions then we have been able to in the past. We continue to look for additional opportunities to leverage this data to assist us in making better decisions and personalize learning opportunities for our students so they can continue to have an "Education beyond Expectations" experience.
One of our other primary goals is to prepare our students to live and work in the 21st century, to be a "digital citizen." "Digital citizenship" may sound like a very technical term; but the definition simply details the ways that responsible citizens can transfer that mastery to the world of technology. It goes beyond the concept of possessing inherent skills as "digital natives" to a point of our students purposefully developing an overall technology fluency. Our students will demonstrate this fluency through learning and using sound ethical judgments and practices in the digital world; understanding the new technologies that are available to them and applying them in daily use; and the active use of these new technologies to continually support and expand their current learning opportunities.
Our vision for our teachers and their use of technology will come to fruition when we can say that our learning spaces are places where our teachers do not hesitate to incorporate state-of-the-art technology into their lesson plans not only because it is available, but because they have been exposed to professional learning opportunities that enable them to successfully integrate the technology into their instruction. In addition, this vision extends to our school administrators. We equip our administrators with mobile technology tools to enable them to stay connected throughout their building and have real-time access to data and student information. This mobile connectivity allows them to conduct informal walk-throughs, and to stay in touch with staff instructional practices and provide just-in-time feedback to the teachers.
We expect our administrators in our schools to model the use of technology to our teachers. Through the use of technology, professional development supports, and technology use modeling by our administrators, our teachers will find many new ways to innovate, and through this innovation, they will be able to teach our students in a personalized way that engages and motivates them.
Source: Greg DeYoung is the executive director for information technology and the chief information officer for the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas. Prior to working at Blue Valley, Greg was the director of campus technology for Eastern Illinois University, and assistant director for information technology at the University of Illinois. Greg has over 20 years of extensive experience in information technology and now works in one of the largest school districts in Kansas, covering 34 schools serving a total population of 22,500 students, including 5 award-winning high schools.
Reflections of an Online Education Coordinator in Georgia
Technology has changed the way people live and work. At work, technology is embraced as a mechanism for increasing profits and staying competitive. At home, technology is embraced for entertainment, security, and daily chores. At school, however, technology often remains a fringe element outside the mainstream of teaching and learning. Consequently, a school administrator who wishes to effectively implement technology as a transformational change will understand the dual nature of technology and will encourage both teachers and students to use their personal technology at school.
In Forsyth County Schools, Georgia, school principals can choose whether or not they want to provide Internet connectivity for personal devices at on their campus. Initially, five principals felt a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) program was worth the risks and allowed students to bring personal devices to school. These principals supported their teachers by understanding there would be a learning curve and that mistakes were bound to occur. In addition, they allowed time for teachers to assimilate greater student collaboration and project-based learning into their lessons. The principals were rewarded with greater student engagement and with less discipline issues concerning the technology (since personal devices were no longer contraband). Although it has been only a year into the implementation, we now have over 20 schools doing BYOT and we are conducting site visits for school districts across the nation and Canada who wish to see first hand the benefits BYOT can bring in our own district.
In today’s workplace, blue-collar jobs require mastery of proprietary technology. Automotive mechanics use computer analytical equipment to diagnose engine and transmission problems. Truck drivers use GPS technology to map out the most efficient delivery route. Subcontractors use project management software to ensure that the construction of a building stays on schedule. In fact, it is a cliché to say teaching is the only profession that has not drastically been transformed by technology.
The technology being used in these non-white-collar jobs is not the office desktop computer running productivity software. This technology is often composed of GPS units, electronic probes/sensors, and other hand-held devices designed to do a specific job. Cell phones and various other communication devices could be added to the list. Such technology bears a closer resemblance to the electronic gaming devices used by students for entertainment and leisure than they do to the desktop computer. Yet, for the most part, schools provide very little opportunities for students to learn this type of technology.
We have provided PASCO electronic probes/sensors and digital microscopes in our science labs. We provided a set of GPS units to each secondary school. Also, each classroom has an interactive white board and a document camera. Except for isolated instances where outstanding teachers went beyond what was expected, the use of these devices is directly proportional to the supervision of the building principal. Administrators who take the time and effort to make classroom visits to see technology-enhanced lessons have more technology enhanced lessons in their schools. Dr. Gary Davidson of Lambert High School is one such principal. He uses an ‘app’ on his iPhone to record his classroom visits, and emails the teacher with his observation as he is leaving the classroom.
Technology has also changed our personal and family life. We send birthday cards online, map the route for the family vacation online, and order pizza online. The traditional arbiters of all friendly disputes – Hoyle, Webster, and the Britannica Encyclopedia – are consulted online. We preview a film’s trailer online, read the movie critic reviews online, and then buy the movie tickets online. To our students, the devices that we call ‘technology’ are merely common household appliances.
Students are embedded in home technology (handheld devices, gaming consoles, and cell phones); but school technology is not the same. Although schools exist in a nebulous area between work and home, schools have implemented technology using, almost exclusively, the enterprise model taken from the corporate world (locked-down desktops, restricted network, and standardization of equipment). Perhaps the resistance that many teachers have towards instructional technology stems from an inherent discomfort with such a ‘corporate’ approach. The thoughtful school administrators should look at home technology and convince their IT [information technology] department to kill the enterprise in favor of BYOT and similar policies that support social networking and other Web 2.0 endeavors. To make an argument for the best constructivist environment as one in which personal technology is used, school administrators should comprehend the concept of “virtualization.”
Depending upon context, the term ‘virtual’ has various connotations. In using such terms as virtual school, virtual lab, virtual classroom, and virtual teacher, most educators are unaware that the word ‘virtual’ doesn’t mean ‘computerized’, but rather refers to a process in which ‘software acts as hardware.’ The opposite of virtual is not ‘real’, but physical. In other words, physical entities that exist in time or space are replaced by non-physical entities that display the salient qualities of the physical entities. This meaning of virtual is paramount in understanding the virtualization of school.
The virtualization of school is a two-part process of, first, abstracting the attributes and behaviors of an educational object (the physical entity) and removing those attributes and behaviors that are irrelevant; and, second, using technology to recreate the educational object in ways that drastically rethink space, time, and resources. Just as a computer scientist uses abstraction to understand and solve complicated problems by discarding the superfluous, educators can use abstraction to isolate and solve pedagogical problems by discarding issues of tardiness, lunchroom management, PA announcements, club day, pep rallies, fundraising, and a thousand other non-academic demands that prevent the traditional school from effectively educating children.
For the school administrators, the concept of virtualization is important; otherwise, any change using technology will only be of first-order magnitude. For example, the “read this chapter, do these questions, and if we have time we will have a class discussion” is not an instructional model worthy of duplication. But many online courses replicate this type of instruction, albeit in a digital form. School administrators must guide their teachers to using technology to “do that which cannot be done any other way” lest our digital projectors become expensive overhead projectors, our computers become very expensive typewriters, and our Learning Management System becomes a very expensive homework hotline.
Virtualization in education includes the following examples.
A traditional high school course is transformed into an online course:
- Retain the standards to be mastered by the student and the evidence needed to prove that those standards were mastered.
- Ignore class periods, schedule conflicts, the number of desks in the classroom, etc.
- Place course content onto the Internet so that anyone at any time and any place (with an Internet connection) can access the course content.
Group instruction into differentiated instruction:
- Retain the design qualities that address learning styles and that promote student engagement.
- Ignore the traditional presence of a face-to-face teacher.
- Use the adaptive release of content materials along with blogs, wikis, puzzles, games, podcasting, and other Web 2.0 tools to provide for differences in learning styles and interest levels.
School attendance becomes an expectation of student progress:
- Retain the expectation that all students can learn.
- Ignore specific seat-time requirements.
- Electronically track the amount of time that students are online and electronically monitor their progress through the proscribed curriculum.
In all three of the above examples, technology is the mechanism that allows the possibility of virtualization. The failure to abstract the salient qualities of an educational object during the virtualization process will lead to the mere electronic replication of the ineffective methodology of the past. As we move into the future, the proper virtualization of school will transform rigid classrooms into agile, differentiated instructional environments. In fact, as the traditional way of “doing school” is a result of 20th-century technology, the 21st century way of “doing school” will be a result of 21st-century technology.
School districts will benefit from virtualization through:
- better use of existing educational resources;
- lower cost of new educational resources;
- flexibility in developing and deploying new instructional environments;
- significantly smaller physical plants.
The school district of the future will need the flexibility to deploy educational services quickly and reliably, as student needs change. A Learning Management System (LMS) will provide a flexible pool of virtual courses that can be deployed across the district with relative ease. As virtual courses are deployed and moved around the district at will, management of the virtual infrastructure becomes a crucial factor in ensuring that the complexity of the infrastructure is minimized. Effective use of the LMS will also help school districts contain school building sprawl, thus reducing deployment and operation costs. Furthermore, the LMS is rapidly developing into an integrated educational operations management solution.
In Forsyth County, each teacher and student has access to the LMS. We average 8,000 students online at 7:00 pm every weeknight. We use the LMS for everything from student instruction, to professional learning, to bus driver training, to the NFHS Quilting Club. The Learning Object Repository is full of thousands of teacher-produced learning objects. Our LMS has allowed us to extend the school day, create more teacher collaboration, place a stronger focus on standards, and provide greater communications with all stakeholders.
With the use of a LMS, the virtualization of school can achieve results not otherwise possible. For example, career academics are often implemented as “schools within a school.” Often this presents great logistical difficulties due to the limited resources in one school. However, virtualization can pool physical resources from several physical entities to form numerous virtual academies that can function as independent schools or programs. This same method can be used for other programs like advanced placement (AP) classes, credit recovery, etc. It can even be used for clubs, work programs, and other special interest groups that may not have enough students to justify supporting at a single school.
Forsyth County’s NOBLE Endeavor was a proven way to implement the virtualization of school. In this approach, each high school schedules a content area teacher to the first period to facilitate the online instruction of his/her content specialization. School A could house the math teacher, school B, the English teacher, school C the social studies, and so on. Since teachers are facilitating rather than delivering content, many courses in a content area could be offered. The students would be physically assigned to a computer lab at their home school and would be monitored by the home school teacher while that teacher facilitated students across the district in his/her particular content area. Students who proved themselves capable of being independent learners could opt to start their school day at second period.
Furthermore, since school is a mere reflection of the general society, school should now reflect the wired world of the 21st century where customization has rapidly become an expectation. The one-size-fits-all lesson must give way to personal choice, on-demand delivery, and customer-driven curricular options. Just as the Industrial Revolution redesigned the one-room schoolhouse to fit the factory model, the Information Revolution will redesign the traditional classroom to fit the “me” generation. There is not an app for doing that – it will take transformational school administrators.
Source: Steve Mashburn is the coordinator of online education for the Forsyth County Schools in Cumming, Georgia. He currently works as the administrator of online content, websites, and virtual courses for his district. Steve is an educational specialist with certificates or advance degrees in technology and educational leadership. Prior to his current job, Steve was a curriculum specialist, instructional technology specialist, band director, and chorus director for numerous schools in the northern part of Georgia.