Driver's Education saves lives!

Okay, this isn’t about Drivers Education – or cars. But technology tools are tremendously powerful in their own way and, if they’re worth using, it’s worth designing them well and teaching people to use them right! An example of how not to do it comes from a correspondent:

My mother is an elementary school teacher in a school district serving 3,500 students. The other day every teacher in the system was called to a meeting at the high school. The meeting basically said that all teachers had to use a new piece of gradebook software. They had been using it in a limited way for a year or so but now told they have to do everything on it starting immediately. They were then given training, all at once, from a representative of the software company via a telephone call broadcast over the PA.

My mother said that no one understood what they had to do, some teachers just left because it didn’t make sense and many teachers left the meeting in tears not knowing what they were going to do. Most of the teachers are up in arms because they hated the software to start with and find it difficult to use, but they are more upset because they don’t think the school system looked at any other options and they feel like it was a “golf course decision.”

My mother is literally considering early retirement because she can’t get used to the software, and thinks others might be too.

Let me know how familiar this is to you – stories and any lessons would be welcome. Four quick thoughts:

• Experienced teachers retiring is not a good thing. A fascinating study of a district with high per-pupil expenses and low test scores identified the key issue as low average experience and high teacher turnover.
• Invest in training. The impact of technology on productivity comes only once organizations reach beyond the easy steps of improving hardware (computers, phones, etc.) to changing their organizations to capture the full benefits. Such changes – including investing in training and building new ways of working – can cost up to $9 additional dollars for every dollar of hardware purchased. (See P Robertson, “The Role of Information and Communication Technology in Education Reform.” Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, ed. F.M. Hess. Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, MA 2005.)
• Process matters. It’s more important to people in an organization (including teachers in schools) to know that a good process has been followed than it is for them to agree with a decision that results.
• Design matters. Software tools that teachers have to use every day, like gradebooks and attendance recording, need to be well-designed.

SchoolOne has worked hard on its system and continues to make improvements. We don’t want any tears. Sign up for a webinar today.

Focus of this Blog

Within the context of the big picture described above, schools and their supporting organizations struggle every day with how to keep things going, how to save money or improve performance, what their direction should be or what’s the best next step, and how to take that next step.

SchoolOne works on the cutting edge of many of these issues every day, and offers this blog as a place to reflect on current trends and ideas for people engaged in the work. SchoolOne seeks to be your technology partner in education, and we hope this blog sparks a conversation about how to be the best partner we can be.

Again, the broad themes we see in the big picture are:

• Shifting focus from what’s taught to what’s learned
• Using technology to personalize the educational process and to empower all stakeholders
• Using technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness across the board

In that context, some topics we’ll try to tackle in the coming months include:

• The bandwidth crisis you face (or will face soon)
• Total Cost of Ownership, and how to drive it down
• The infrastructure needed to support 1:1 computing
• Administrative software (especially student information systems)
• Software integration that saves you money, especially between your SIS and LMS
• Why bother paying for email, and other paradigm shifts in messaging

We’ll modify these topics, add to the list, welcome your ideas, and react to trends and the news. Let us know how we’re doing and how to do better!

The Big Picture

The United States was built, in no small part, by investment in education: Our common schools of the 19th century and the high school movement of the early 20th century were essential engines of economic and social progress in those eras.

Today, our education system is failing to make enough additional progress fast enough, even as the rest of the globe catches up and many nations are passing us. Our future depends on our investing and innovating in education: Education investment and innovation is the American economic development and civil rights agenda of the 21st century. And technology sits at the center of much of that investment and innovation agenda:

• Technology continues to replace jobs that require little education with jobs that require more education, raising the bar for our students.
• Technology has, famously, “flattened” the world and invited the whole world to compete with our students for those jobs – again raising the bar.
• Technology continues to change the nature of work –and of our civic and social lives – requiring changes in the skills, knowledge, and attitudes our students must learn.
• Technology continues to increase the relative cost of traditional education, by increasing productivity and driving down costs across the rest of the economy (i.e., teacher salaries become ever-higher relative to the cost of computers, and you can’t improve teacher productivity by adding more students to their classes).
• Technology has made one traditional role of teachers – information-provider – obsolete. Students can now access in seconds more information on any topic than any teacher can learn in a lifetime.
• Technology tools to support student learning increasingly “think” and act, offering legitimate alternatives to teacher-driven and even teacher-led instruction.
• Technology offers many ways to improve the productivity and reduce the costs of education, including: operational efficiencies (bus routing, environmental controls, purchasing and supply management, etc.); automating transactions and information management; shifting work to students and parents, replacing textbooks and supplementary materials with “open curriculum” resources from the web.
• Technology is forcing and supporting changes in the way schools and their supporting organizations are run and even in the way they themselves are organized. It does this by changing what students need and what teachers do (as explained above), and it provides new ways to get things done.

We don’t know the details of what will come of all of this. We do know change is real and appears to be accelerating on every front, even as the demands on schools increase and the need for more resources becomes more acute. And we know the three central themes are: A shift from what’s taught to what’s learned, the use of technology to personalize the process and empower stakeholders, and the opportunity to use technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness across the board. SchoolOne works on the cutting edge of many of these issues every day, and offers this blog as a place to talk about the specific daily challenges that face schools as they work to create the future.