SchoolTube, IT Directors Panel
I forgot to mention that I saw SchoolTube on the exhibit floor and talked to my contact there. SchoolTube is a video sharing Web site for education, and ACTE hopes to bring them to our Convention-they have a traveling studio. Anyway, I was interviewed by them about ACTE’s Convention so hopefully that will air on SchoolTube!
I just attended the best session of this conference so far, an informal panel of district IT directors that was part of the NECC Unplugged conference-within-a-conference. It shed a lot of light for me on the difficulties IT directors have with organization, eRate, teachers, etc. And that was huge part of what I came here to learn about.
A few points: organizational hierarchy that separates IT and curriculum as well as lack of communication between IT and curriculum is a major problem. IT shouldn’t make major changes and curriculum shouldn’t make major changes wihtout consulting each other.
The panelists brought up a great point I hadn’t even thought of: some teachers want to block YouTube or gaming sites because the kids are distracted. I thought we wanted to unblock these sites! The IT directors emphasized differentiating between tech problems and disciplinary problems in this regard. These IT directors also recommended due process for unblocking requests.
Other points: The technology plan required by eRate for connectivity funding should include curriculum, not just “wires and boxes.” Teachers need to have patience for changes and exercise common sense, such as knowing that a whole classful of students on one high-impact site could slow down the network. But on the other hand, IT staff has to explain why something can’t be done.
IT in schools is different based on whether staff is from an educational setting or from the private sector. It also sounds like training is often separate or an afterthought.
They briefly discussed cell phones. One director said his district had off-network access for personal devices. For the future of IT in schools, these directors talked about Web-based services, being able to concentrate only on the network (presumably because everyone will have devices), and cloud computing (access is on demand from a third-party provider).
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