Friday, October 28, 2011

Integrating Technology: A Baseball Analogy

A quick post in honor of the St. Louis Cardinals, who pulled off a miraculous win in Game 6 of the World Series last night.

I've seen several emails and web sites that rank the 100 best iDevice tips or the 50 best web sites for education. Honestly, I have no problem with those sites and I've learned about several useful web sites and apps by reading such articles. I also understand that these sites want readers and articles that 'rank' various apps or sites can get a good number of page views.

My problem, though, is that it's tempting for instructional technology leaders to present these large blocks of resources to teachers as a method of assisting them with technology integration. If you are a teacher and are already overwhelmed with the need to cover content, manage student behavior, give periodic assessments, contact parents, develop lesson plans, grade assignments, enter all of this into a student information system, (and on and on)... you may be doing them a disservice.

When I was younger, I loved baseball. I wanted to pitch but didn't have the size, arm strength or accuracy to be a good pitcher. That didn't stop me from wanting to know how to throw a curveball, slider or knuckleball. I remember goofing off while warming up for a game and our team would throw (OK, try to throw) all of those pitches to one another.

Of course, most of those pitches aren't practical for the vast majority of aspiring young pitchers. Most of what you'll read about coaching youth baseball will tell you to focus on developing a fastball and a changeup. Why is that? Part of the reason is certainly about avoiding injury to young arms while trying to throw an arm-stressing pitch like a curveball. That isn't all of it, though. Even at the major league level, there are pitchers that can have great success while having only a couple of great pitches. One of the best relief pitchers ever has dominated hitters with basically one pitch. We know why, don't we?

A young pitcher with a good fastball and changeup has some great qualities. The mechanics of the two pitches are similar, with slight adjustments to grip style, pressure and ball position. Good coaches will work with them to know how to throw those pitches properly, where to locate them and when to use each pitch. Those decisions are based on the hitter you're facing and aspects of the ongoing game like the score, any runners on base, the number of outs, who's on-deck and things of the sort.

We should be using a similar strategy when helping teachers integrate technology in the classroom. Let's find the best resources that can be used in most any situation. We won't start with 50 or 100... let's start with a few. We'll work with teachers on those few resources until they're confident that they know how to use them. Once they know how to use the resource, a good teacher should be able to determine when to use each resource based on factors like the subject area, the particular student(s) involved, the time of day and year, what other activities are taking place in the school and community, and so forth.

In baseball, good coaches teach kids the basics and ease in to the more advanced concepts. Make sure you're doing the same with your technology integration strategies. There are some great pitchers out there that only have one or two superb pitches, so let's not assume that every teacher needs to be an expert on all of the technology resources available.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Managing hype as technology gets more affordable

I was thinking about dusting off the blog and making and entry and, lo and behold, one of my co-workers just posted a great blog entry about managing the hype in education technology. He makes several points that are worth stressing.

He references Moore's Law, which originally dealt with transistors on a circuit. Over time, it's been slightly altered to include power and price. The basic point is that we're regularly seeing the computing power double and the price points for technology of that power getting cut in half. Don't believe me? As of this writing, netbooks with 1GB RAM and 250GB HDD are under $300 and closer to $200-250 in some cases. Depending on how much processing power you need, a laptop with more RAM, disk space and screen size can be had for $500 (more or less, as I said, depending on processing power and some other factors).

As a matter of comparison, I found an old contract update from one of our state technology vendors. KY school districts, from state contract, could buy a Dell Latitude C840 in April, 2003. It had a P4 1.8Ghz processor and a 15" UXGA display (and also a 56k modem included, BTW). We got VERY good discounts from these contracts and this device, with 256MB RAM and a massive 30GB HDD, could be had for about $1600. Think about that for a minute.

Technology is getting more portable, more affordable and more capable. Not that many years ago, tech leaders were fretting that the device would have to have the right capabilities at the right price point before we would ever see a scenario where every student have a device for their own use. We are there.

So what do we do about it? As the originally linked article indicates, we manage the hype in a constructive fashion. We should be passionate about the possibilities and excited about what the technology can do. Rightfully so, we have to aware of the challenges and continue to lead in conversations about TCO and the need for proper staffing, professional development, infrastructure and management policies regarding the technology.