Tag Archives: Decision Making

Apr 26 2013

ENSURING SCHOOL IPAD SUCCESS

PRIORITY NO.1 : LEADERSHIP FROM THE TOP.

LeadershipDucks

The initial goal is to ready a school for the quick iPadding of all daily school tasks carried out by Teachers, Admin and students. The first emphasis must be to get staff and students to move their daily routines onto the iPad and not look back. This realignment will only be quick & successful if staff and particularly members of the leadership team understand iPad best practice.

BIG DECIDER: ONE COMPETENT SENIOR LEADER (AT LEAST)

In the beginning, at least one senior leader must become fully fluent in how the iPad deals with the daily school tasks. My experience to date tells me that this will be the key decider on iPad success. I find that most school technicians charged with readying school systems for iPads only ‘fully respond’ to senior leaders. Here’s a check list of good iPad practice the senior leaders must understand:

5 EVERYDAY iPAD ESSENTIALS THAT LEADERS MUST UNDERSTAND AND PROMOTE:

PDFexpertA) DOCUMENTS: How to convert and ensure all documents (forms/worksheets) are shared in PDF format. This includes on the Website, LMS and in shared folders on the servers. We all use apps like Word to create documents but once finished, Word/Pages/Powerpoint should not be the file formats that are shared publicly or internally. Don’t continue to think that because a form or worksheet must be filled in, it needs to be shared in Microsoft Word format. Most PDF apps (both Free and Bought) will allow the staff and students to view, complete, sign or annotate the forms & worksheets and will really start to make the school paperless (a serious ‘Green’ issue). One problem area will be uploading PDFs to the existing school websites / LMS directly from iPad. Some of the LMSs are creating iPad apps and this can help but without clever design, the website might need to continue with desktop updates.

iMessageAppB) COMMUNICATION: Email is dead! Students certainly don’t regularly check emails. New communication tools must be considered. Internally, it’s best using messaging tools like iMessage, your LMS’s messaging service, if its iPad app runs such a service or even Twitter. I find adults like ‘texting’ messages as much as the kids do, you only have to look at Facebook to know that. Externally, the school should also run a Facebook Page for people to follow for community announcements and this too can be run by the senior leader directly from the iPad. It might be with the best intentions that every school aims to run a good website, but for communication, parents rarely check school websites and it’s not the way 21st Century communication takes place. This is one reason iPads have never needed the facility to update website HTML.

PhotosAppC) IMAGES: The leadership must decide on how staff iPads will upload, store and organise photos. This is good for teachers as they can share pictures with students directly from the iPad and good for all staff to share images of student work and activity. Using online services like Flickr or Google’s Picasa, there are ways to ensure images can be uploaded and organised by staff iPads to appear embedded on the school websites etc, without the need for separate login. (See my previous posts)

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YoutubeD) VIDEO: This is quickly becoming the new ‘paper’. Young people are experiencing online video as a first step to understanding anything. They also create multiple videos using devices like phones on a weekly basis. If harnessed, this can make any school a lively exciting place where students really show-off their understanding and even start to learn and leach each other through video. The school must have an official system for staff to organise the videos for the courses and where the school can showcase student video work. The one system that the iPad and all the available apps work seamlessly with is a Youtube account. The school should setup a Google account from which it can organise its Youtube channel with playlists for different courses, classes or general school activities. Students and staff can now login or be logged-in to upload video content to the channel. This channel can be embedded in school websites etc, and will automatically update as the content arrives.

wordpressE) LEADERSHIP BLOG & ADVICE: This is a great idea to ensure genuine engagement from all staff and students. A senior leader blogs the schools experiences and advice on using iPads from day 1. This blog is linked to on the school website and can be used by the whole community to find out the latest news in how the school is operating with iPads, including any problems that have arisen. A school “How-to” page is also setup to cover all the basics.

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If you can get your school performing the daily basics on iPads, the creative stuff will follow naturally. The more they stick to their old ways, the harder the transition will be. Success and collaboration between members of the iPadding community rely on full understanding and engagement from all parties. And this starts with the basics and from the top!

[Update] Other Considerations:

1. Don’t waste time looking through the App Store. Focus on tasks. Start with only considering all the daily tasks within the school for students, teachers and admin and focus on collaborative systems like Google Accounts and Twitter to bring the new iPadders together.

2. Ensure that all the departments have the basics mentioned above working before you worry about adding extras. The first issue is about building confidence and when staff & students see they can at least do all that they did before but better, the project will really take-off.

3. Get the whole senior leadership team fully immersed by the end of the first year. This will build respect for both the individuals and the project. The school will really come alive if the community see the leaders themselves start moving forward.

4. Build an open approach to web filtering. Like all major businesses, 1000s of schools are now using Social Media and Youtube in the classroom. Other than blocking the ‘obvious’ negative material, it is important that schools are able to teach digital citizenship within school and this requires positive role-modeling in how the internet can be used.

Oct 19 2012

iPad vs. BYOD

Yes, we are at the beginning of a revolution in Education. Yes, we have witnessed the world going mobile and yes, there is a variety of tools available to help us make learning mobile and personal.

But…

Most of the teachers around the world getting excited about this and offering advice (like me) are tech-savvy people. We have already had a play with many devices, we blog and Tweet all day, researching the best practice around the world. We are comfortable with the differences and know how those differences in features and software might affect a lesson. We also know that BYOD stands for “Bring Your Own Device!”
But “we” account for 5% of teaching staff in the world! (That’s based on at least 10 schools I know in NZ and the UK)

So…

Until the vast majority of the teaching profession are aware of what opportunities students would have with one device over another (at least 5 years), the decision a school makes must guarantee simplicity for the non-technical majority. The decision a school makes must also ensure there’s a strong, easily accessible support system and that getting what you need is straight-forward. This keeps everything simple for a non-tech-savvy teacher and offers comfort in knowing what is and isn’t possible when assessing the students output. The idea of one student saying “I can do this” and another saying “I can’t” is simply not equitable and makes things difficult for “normal” teachers. This leads us to another question:

Why should it be iPad and not one of the others?

The devices are all the same! They all:

  1. have a camera;
  2. have a screen;
  3. can ‘Skype’
  4. access the Internet
  5. do office-style documents

So why iPad?

I think I can answer that in pictures rather than words.

Here is a major section of Apple’s App Store available through the iPad directly focused on the key learning areas, not available on any other system.

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Here’s a separate area of the App Store dedicated to various subjects and special educational areas including a full section for Special Needs education.

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Here’s the Apple website section on education, with iTunesU offering 1000s of courses from every major University. Again, there’s a focus on the benefits of considering special Accessibility options and how they can actually benefit all teachers and students. Through iBooks, you receive both fiction and textbooks, how-to guides and the ability to produce your own multimedia iBooks using iBooks Author on a Mac. This Mac software is free but the absolute leader in ebook authoring software. (iBook is just Apple’s name for eBooks)

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The rival support systems just don’t compare, especially in the eyes of a non-geek teacher.

Android.com offers no education section but does specialise in games.
What is Open Source? Some of the geeky teachers might use ‘Open source’ as some sort of argument when choosing a device. This is where Google offer the code for how a device works to the world of geeky programmers and they can do whatever the like with it. This sounds good, but for schools, it means little. It makes the Android system more buggy and prone to viruses and crashing. These issues destroy both lessons and confidence amongst a generation of teachers trying to grapple with new learning pedagogies.

Google Play’s site (The main Android site) does not place it’s education section on the home page and when you find it in ‘Categories’ it only divided into Free and Paid with no focus on the various needs within education. Most apps in this section are early-childhood based and you have to scroll though page after page to discover what’s available. Not good for a teacher who’s new to this game.

Conclusion

You see, it’s not about the device it’s about the support system you can connect to and how much that system is designed for education. In this regard, Apple is the only company doing anything specifically for schools. Google and Microsoft continue to focus their efforts on business needs and hope that schools find a use for their business tools. A school near me had a technician who was adamant that it be BYOD rather than just iPad. 4 months into the programme, he was preparing advice documents for the following year to say iPads only!

Future
There’s also the matter of statistics and future developments. iPads have been bought by schools and universities in their millions! There are at least 50 iPads in education for every competing tablet of any make , and given the conferences I’ve been to, that’s probably generous to the “others”. The competition is eating into the iPad market but not in education. What does this mean to schools? We can support each other through this tricky transitional period in education’s history, if we are all on the same platform. The developers, who make the apps with an educational focus and offer the support for schools are nearly all iPad based. Over the next 5 years, the gap between what can be done in schools with iPads and their alternatives will increase exponentially and this makes iPads the only truly sensible choice for any school of ‘normal’ staff and students.

P.S.

Oh and the Flash thing. Yes, iPads don’t play all those Flash based educational websites but Adobe, who make Flash have stopped making it! and so the next 2 years will have every website moving away from flash (they’ve already started.) So Flash is no longer an argument and the new Windows 8 Tablets will not play it either. The reason it all came to a crashing end was because Flash running in the background on the mobile device swallows up battery life. Something Apple were the first to recognise and never went near it. The other companies are now realising. Adobe’s given up.

Oct 1 2012

“Should my school be using Mac computers?”……YES!

History – Schools adopt Microsoft

During the 1990s, Microsoft setup a brilliant business structure for selling Windows in schools. This had no learning basis behind it, it was simply an excellent money-making exercise. The Microsoft Schools agreement was a dream to all technicians who could stop worrying about licensing the school computers as they were all covered under one agreement, albeit and expensive one. Within 6 years we had Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, ME and then XP it seemed obvious to keep paying as updates were regular. Then Microsoft stopped releasing updates and schools remained on XP for a decade, while paying millions for simply having simple paperwork. Vista was a disaster and Windows 7 is a good XP replacement but is going to radically change in Windows 8 and most schools will stick with 7 or even XP.

OSX, iLife & iOS change the landscape

But over the last decade Apple have realised they were missing out and in their inevitable style, have produced a beautiful eco-system that is not only easy for schools to delve into but is now specifically designed for education and learning in a way Microsoft never achieved. Microsoft gave us machines that could access the internet and Word and Excel seemed practical. But Apple have given us Machines that immediately:

  1. Create and edit PDFs without needing to research 3rd party apps on the internet; (PDFs are a default file type that Microsoft virtually refuses to recognise)
  2. Organise our email (Windows 7 has no email client);
  3. edit movies; (Far superior to Microsoft’s option)
  4. have a recording studio; (Not available on Windows)
  5. manage our photos and music; (iTunes is the default for all these day and Windows users have had to discover Google’s Picasa for photos)
  6. create eBooks using ‘drag & drop’; (iBooks Author is in a different league to other authoring software)
  7. talk directly to our iPads and sync the info and files automatically; (IPad schools will miss out on so much for not have a Mac infrastructure)
  8. integrate Facebook and Twitter into the machine itself allowing for the sharing of work and discoveries with a click; (This will become a big issue)
  9. Offers us Document/Spreadsheet/Presentation software for 1/3 of the price of MS Office (Apple’s version of Word and Powerpoint are far superior and preferred by my students immediately)
  10. Connects you computer to the content from the top Universities in the world through iTunesU
  11. Offer all apps for all machines on a single account through an easy to use App Store;

In a nutshell:

Microsoft are concerned about the Technicians first, Business people second and are happy if schools find a use for their business tools. As you can see on their website, Office is still their best offering for schools and it’s just not creative or accessible enough for students.

Apple have teams of people who are tasked with only researching school pedagogy and practice (non-technical) and Apple’s educational eco-system strengthens every month because of it.
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Cost?

Are Apple computers more expensive? Out of the box, a Microsoft PC offers so little for schools that time and money must be spent locating 3rd party tools, installing them, hoping they don’t conflict, hoping they’re free or spending extra on software like Office. This is why schools have required so many (expensive) technicians over the last 15 years and why more educational change has happened with iPads than in 15 years of using Office. This has made Microsoft systems indirectly very costly for what they offer from the box. The MS Schools agreement is only worth it for keeping the administration of Microsoft licensing easy but educationally is a huge waste of money.

When removing Mac computers from their boxes, most schools would be ready to go immediately. Even the free and simple Textedit program that comes with a Mac will open and save as DocX (Microsofts Word file format that Windows won’t open without purchasing Word!). There’s no need for buying and researching additional software and so schools save money and have a system that will natively work with their iPads, require less technical assistance (The real money save) and have a lot more fun!

You might spend an extra $200 on a Mac but in teacher and technician time plus software costs, you save $200 before then of your first month.

Sep 26 2012

OMG! Those IT staff!

I do hope you work in an organisation with friendly, relaxed IT support staff. I hope they speak to you as a normal human being and only focus their efforts on creating an environment that fulfills the organisation’s primary concerns. In regards to schools, we need to access and share information and learn about the world we live in, within a flexible 21st Century leaning pedagogy.

…hum… Why are so many people reading this thinking “not my school”…?

Teachers around the world are discussing updating the teaching model to match the rapidly changing world we live in. The tech-staff simply need to do the same (and yes, it’s a global problem).

Young people and increasingly all generations are developing new expectations:

  1. They will have access to their online world 24/7 as much as their real world.
  2. That social media sites like Facebook are an integral part of life and used by many universities and schools for communications.
  3. Personal ownership and control of the device is the default model. Schools are dismantling their computer labs and in one form or another adopting BYOD (bring your own device)
  4. If the iPad is managed personally by so many grandmas in the world, why would a younger professional or student in 2012 require a secondary support system in Tech-services.
  5. The apps on the iPad are all built to connect directly to a number of standard online services such as Youtube, Dropbox, Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook. It is time consuming, more complicated and costly these days for schools to employ numerous people to maintain parallel systems and then spend extra cost working out how to connect the mobile devices to these bespoke school-maintained systems.
  6. New 21st Century teaching pedagogy calls for a wider variety of options and flexible learning environments and this is at odds with the older tech-model of tightly controlling a limited number of possibilities within the system.

During the 90’s, schools launched into serious adoption of ICTs with a very limited knowledge base. This created a generation of school technicians, who, having an amount of knowledge, relevant or not, easily built up a power base for themselves within the school. This power over others is a model they are reluctant to relinquish. Their manner of ICT support stems from the 70s & 80s where IBM and then Microsoft developed the approach of “We are the experts and computers will be what we say they will be”. They survive in many schools due to leadership teams not having the knowledge themselves to argue against the many out-dated structures these “old-school” techies suggest, that of course would maintain their power and requirement.

The new paradigm of personal / consumer controlled ICT is understood by your technicians at a technical level and most will be using the same online systems themselves. But the realisation that this new paradigm removes the need for most (not all) school technicians is uncomfortable for people who are used to wielding so much power.

My mother is 59, retired and likes taking photos of her grandchildren and writing poetry. She:

  1. writes a blog like this one (She’d love more readers! Click here);
  2. edits photos & movies, storing them in private online accounts;
  3. uses both iCloud and Dropbox for backup and sharing files;
  4. produces presentations for writing club;
  5. emails using Gmail with Google docs.

She does all this without a technician and says she’s “clueless about IT.” The world is changing fast and if school leaders don’t get to my mother’s level of expertise soon, we’re all in trouble!

Sep 22 2012

Why does it have to be iPad?

As all the education geeks say, “It’s not about the device.”

But … it is about:

  1. SIMPLICITY: The iPad is only a device but Apple has built a complete eco-system that makes everything very easy for non-technical people. In general, you’ll find people that argue for Android, Microsoft or “Open-source” are geeks and can cope with searching for and setting up complicated groups of tools from various sources.
  2. SUPPORT: Apple’s support system for those not so geeky and the ease at which they can discover the next step or application is years ahead of any rival. Also, the iPad is so much more common in schools now, that it’s easier to find help as a teacher if you are on an iPad.
  3. WORKING TOGETHER: Within the school, having everyone working on the same device makes it easier for the teachers and the students, who themselves are not often completely savvy when it comes to being productive with technology (They’re great at gaming/YouTube but…). Also Proffessionl development becomes so much easier.
  4. RELIABILITY: I know a school technician who was adamant at the start of their BYOD (Bring your own device) rollout that the school must leave the choice of device open and that there was important value in Androids devices. After 4 months of supporting the variety of devices, he recommended to the school leadership: “the 2013 should be iPad only!” He said: “They just work and the others have problems”
  5. 3RD PARTY SUPPORT: The iPad has become the globe’s choice for education and the other companies who have been involved in education for years are producing their tools for iPad first and sometimes iPad only.
  6. IBOOKS AUTHOR: This free Mac app for producing interactive books with animations, 3D objects, movies and quizzes is the easiest app I’ve ever used. It has been produced for the non-techies!
  7. ITUNESU delivers courses from all the top universities in the world and allows any teacher to organise an interactive individualised course with a range of resources from either the iTunesU system or ones own eBooks.
  8. NO TECHIES REQUIRED! It’s a universal problem that organisations’ tech support people are more interested in ‘their’ system and technical arguments, than what the users are actually trying to get done. This is particularly the case in schools. The iPad is a self-supported, easy-to-use, self-backing-up teaching system that only requires the techies to ensure there’s wireless.