Be of Use

...getting used to my new digs in Germantown . I moved into an office I'll be sh aring with a soon to be hired Student Information Specialist. To be honest there were plenty of times in the last week I felt like I was going to puke - moving on from all I've known for 7 years professionally. Stomachs have settled now and great conversations are taking their place. Had a great one today with our high school media specialist Jeff Schreiber  who has done great things integrating technology, boosting circulation and getting kids reading. I know we're going to do some great things in the next few years and I look forward to the challenge of discovering what works for Germantown in terms of instructional technology. In addition to instructional technology integration, I'm also working on data and assessment analysis. This is a hot topic in Wisconsin right now, as the DPI NAEPized  (more than you care to know on this link) our standardized test scores. Students who may...

A few things came together today to make me think about the term hacker . The book of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, David Warlick's post Learner as Hacker  and an email from a colleague all caused me to reflect on the term, that to your average person views as a negative thing. The colleague was asking about a friend's email being hacked - just wondering if she had to worry about anything. I didn't think much of it until I came across Warlick's post on "learning as the practice of hacking." Excellent stuff, with a great deal of quotable lines on the parallels between hacking and how we need to prepare students today for life-long learning. When Woz was putting together boards with the Homebrew Computer Club , he thought of himself as a hacker, but then there was no negative conotation with the term. In his letter to prospective shareholders  a new generation of hacker, Mark Zuckerberg writes about the bad rap: The word "hacker" has an unfairl...

I always appreciate it when teachers and administrators ask me "what should we buy" when it comes to instructional technologies. It's flattering to feel that your opinion matters, but it's almost always the wrong question. Here's an example. I'm presenting to a staff on interactive whiteboards per the principal's request. At the end the principal asks, "we have X dollars, should we be buying these boards?" My response was "what are your goals? How can the boards help meet those goals?" He didn't appreciate my response, even though it was the right question to ask. I feel like over my career a lot of money has been tossed around based on what's latest/greatest or there's money burning a hole in our pocket. Over the last few years there's finally been a change in a focus toward training to go along with major purchases, but that's only part of the problem. Even if you know all the ins and outs of an iPad, it isn...