There is no box

For the longest time my wife has been anti technology when it comes to the kids. Kid1, as our seven year old is known on twitter, wasn’t allowed on devices until just last year. But now that Kid1 is on the iPad (and ubermix netbook), of course Kid2 wants to be on it too. And low and behold my wife has been letting her! So this weekend, I come down stairs to find Kid2, who turns three next week, on her sister’s iPad learning her letters.

Well cool. She obviously knows her M’s, N’s, E’s and P’s. O’s are still a little tricky. I watched her for about 5 minutes. Initially, she studiously attempted to identify the correct letter. It was obvious the one’s she knew because she tapped on them straight away. For the ones where she was uncertain, I watched her use trial and error and the game feedback to eliminate the wrong answers until she found the right one. Then at about the five minute mark, she went into silly mode and started tapping wrong letters just to get the game feedback. She moved out of learning mode to playing mode in a very short time. Unfortunately, it looks like she inherited my short attention span.

Now this is just a “dumb” app. As far as I can tell it’s not tracking her correct responses and feeding her the one’s she’s missed or identifying the one’s she’s mixing up. I also don’t know if it’s teaching her letters or if she’s been secretly watching Word World again while her parents sleep in on Saturdays. Scary when you’re two year old knows terms like HDMI, AppleTV and NetFlix. (TV is not technology, or so I keep telling my wife)

I then watched her move to Tangram Mania. An app where you drag shapes into their matching slots. Her drag and drop skills need work, but she definitely steps up the concentration and focus with that game. But watching her playing, I realized how limited the app was. Only one right answer, no real feedback for wrong placement of the shape and no helpful hints. It got me thinking that while there are a bazillion apps available, many of which are categorized as educational, most aren’t accessing even a 100th of the potential of the platform to facilitate learning. They lock kids into one right way and do not encourage exploration or imagination. As a parent, I have very little in the way of information to help me know what my kid knows and doesn’t know and where she needs help or more practice. It’s like we’re back in the Bard’s Tale era of educational game development but we should easily be in MMORGP land by now.

I have to wonder, is the iPad app any better than the analogue version she was playing this morning?

I tend to think both are important. As limited as the letter app on the iPad is, Kid2 is being exposed to the worst technology she will ever know, to paraphrase Jaime Casap. And I think that’s important because the world has changed and will continue to change. Technology permeates everything. For better or worse. When Kid2 is four, I want her to be beyond basic navigation and operation of the device and moving into learning how to search the internet for information. We started late with Kid1. She’s just now getting into searching for word definitions, spelling and primary sources. Search is the foundational literacy skill of the 21st Century. Right up there with reading and writing, the ability to search critically, to me, is the most important skill I can pass on to my kids.

What do I mean by search critically? Well anyone can copy and paste a question into Google, read the top answer and think they know how to search. Searching critically is the practical application of the four C’s we love to talk about in education but don’t often delivery to our kids. Creativity, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Communication. I think that’s why so many people suck at searching for solutions. It’s easy to search for the weather, a stock market quote or flight info. It’s something else entirely to search for a solution to a problem. And at the end of the day, I want my kids to be problem identifiers and solvers. I wonder if there will ever be an app for that.

I’ll be presenting at a few events between now and the end of the year. In looking at my schedule like this, it’s actually kind of crazy. If you’re attending any of these events and see me walking by with my face in my phone, be sure to stop me and say hi!

CapCUE Tech Fest 2103 September 28th:

“Doing More With Less In A Post Desktop World”

Fall CUE October 25th-26th:

“Doing More With Less In A Post Desktop World”

CETPA November 19th-22nd:

“Chromebook Management Best Practices” (repeats twice)

“Deploying Google Apps, What Not To Do” Co-Presented with Mark Mahacek

“Chromebooks, iPads and Netbooks, Oh My!”

eLearning Strategies Symposium December 6th-7th:

“Essential Tech For Blended & Online Learning” Co-Presented with Mike Magboo

Is it common to do silent reading along with a CDROM in elementary classrooms? Apparently it is something they do in our district (where my daughter is in 3rd grade). I’m wondering how reading along to a CD helps kids read? How is it even considered reading?

If they had done this when I was a kid, I know I’d just be sitting there listening to the CD and staring at the book wishing I had a G.I. Joe comic book in front of me. Because really, what’s the point?

My daughter is reading at a 5/6th grade level (in 3rd grade!). She reads obsessively, to the point where we have to constantly tell her to put the book down at the dinner table. Silently reading along in a grade level book to a CD? Really?

Who exactly is this learning exercise for, because I know it’s not her.

Power went out at the District Office (DO) today at around 5:30pm. The outage affected a large area of our community. With only 25 minutes of backup battery time on our servers, we only had a few minutes to shutdown everything. At least we had that time. No, we don’t have automated shutdown scripts in place. We have a klugey UPS setup with several separate units powering each rack. As for automating the shutdown, we have two Dell Chassis, 36 Blade Servers, VMWare 4.1, Windows 2008, 2003 and Linux, NetApp, the Core Network, Cisco VoIP/Unity and Nimble to contend with.  Getting it all automated would require a serious Professional Services engagement. And really who has money for that these days?

While pretty much everything hosted at the DO went down, email stayed up, being that it is hosted “in the cloud” and 3g/4g access worked as backup for those of us with smartphones. I’m seriously considering getting a dedicated 4G backup Internet connection and isolating some key network components/ports on a beefy UPS (like the IT offices), for just such events.

After several hours of manually bringing systems back online, it looks like the act of gracefully shutting down the 4.1 VCenter Server and DB Server made a huge difference. Not nearly as many orphaned VMs as after a hard down. And the new 5.1 VMWare VCenter instance that I recently built fired up right away when the hosts came back online. I’m really loving that little VMWare appliance.

We still have things to work on, like fixing the 6509 so the sups boot up automatically, making sure the redundant routers are actually configured for redundancy (they aren’t! but we’ll actually be removing them soon anyway) and the interfaces are not administratively down. I also want to add a DHCP, DNS and AD server outside the Dell Chassis/VMWare stack so we can get network services back up and running a bit faster. And it looks like we need to assign static IPs to the Meraki Access Points, if we want them to come up before the DHCP server.

It would also be nice if our Generator wasn’t parked five blocks down the street in the M&O yard. It took an hour for it to get driven over to the DO and hooked up, by which time we were already down for 30 minutes. But once the generator was up and running we were able to get systems back online even before power was restored to the neighborhood.

All in all, it could have been a worse day. I mean, it’s not like the server room overheated or anything.

Found this today while I was doing some folder clean up. To think I used to be responsible for all this big iron, with a duplicate setup for development and staging too. These were the first SQL Clusters, SANs, Load Balancers and PIX firewalls of my very own. Oh, the good old days…

In a recent post titled, In A Perfect EdTech World, I said I would give every teacher an ubermixed ultrabook. Now people that know me know that I took Le Grand Union High School District teachers from Windows Desktops to MacBook Pros a few years ago and I advocated for MacBooks for every teacher at East Side Union High School District during my brief stint there.  At my current district we just handed out MacBooks to our Common Core Site Champions and I’m in the planning stages of replacing fixed virtual desktops with MacBooks for the rest. So what’s up with that?

I said in a perfect world I’d give every teacher an ubermixed ultrabook. Unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world and reality often gets in the way. I actually experimented with providing Ubermix netbooks to teachers at Le Grand a year before we went MacBooks. The results were mixed with most folks using ubermix to remote in to their windows desktops using RDP. Letting go of Microsoft Office and their windows H drive seemed to be the biggest hurdle at the time. The reality with an ubermixed ultrabook is that it’s different. Very different in fact than what most people use every day. It’s even more different than a chromebook, because at least a chromebook’s UI is basically a web browser which almost everyone is familiar with. So even though an ubermix ultrabook is in many ways the ultimate in performance and cost effectiveness, it’s a hard transition. The ubermix UI, while simple to use, isn’t Windows and it isn’t OS X either. Kids pick it up quickly, but change for adults is often much harder. Years of muscle memory takes effort to overcome. I think people are finding that out with Windows 8, but that is another story. In short, ubermix for teachers is a hard sell with a steep learning curve.

Then what makes a MacBook and OS X my go to choice for teachers at the moment? Well, Apple makes the best hardware anywhere. Battery life is phenomenal and the other features like backlit keyboard, aluminum uni-body and mag-safe power adapter are wins in my book. There’s also the easy to use factor and the low exposure to malware and virus attacks (I said low, not none). I’m confident that I’ll get a solid four years out of the device. On the user side, I figure that giving a MacBook to a Mac user cuts down my support calls because Mac users tend to be pretty Mac savvy. Giving them a Windows 7 or 8 laptop turns them into a support call. With 42% of my teachers wanting a Mac, the support factor can’t be ignored. In addition, a MacBook can run windows. Either in a virtual box instance or under boot camp. A Mac will run multiple browsers with support for Java, Flash and even silverlight. And yes, it works with all those AppleTVs and iPads that are showing up in classrooms all over district’s everywhere not to mention iBooks Author and Configurator too (yep, teachers can manage their own iPad sets in their classrooms).

The hurdles to MacBooks are generally two fold. One is cost and the other is the Windows IT department. My answer to both is simple. Cost wise, when I break down the total cost of ownership which factors in lifetime support costs of the device, a MacBook at $1200 can perform on par with a Windows Laptop at $700 over the life of the device. That’s before looking at the feature comparisons mentioned above. But how is that possible? Well, again it goes to malware, virus and user support. And it also dovetails into the second hurdle which is IT. Contrary to popular best practice, I have no interest or intention of managing (ie. controlling) MacBooks. I hand them out with local admin access, not joined to a domain and give users control of their own computing experience. Any problems, we re-image back to baseline. It’s really that simple. We show users how to run updates, install applications, add printers and connect to network shares and they can take it from there. It’s the consumerization of IT and the empowering of the users (no, I did not watch Tron too many times as a kid, well, ok maybe I did).

But as easy to support and low attack profile as OS X is, ubermix is better. Nobody bothers with Linux. And with new Haswell based ultrabooks coming on line, I’m sure there will be some hardware that’s close enough to MacBook Pro performance to be good enough. Unfortunately, I think ubermix has to be a slow burn, not a rip and replace. It takes time to build momentum for that kind of radical change but once people experience the potential of ubermix to provide a universal no-cost, powerful computing experience for kids (and adults too), they finally get it.

Today, I see the MacBook running OS X as a versatile, cost efficient, jack of all trades platform for teachers, especially for environments invested in iPads. However, the more I think about it, the more I think there is no one size fits all teacher computer. Some may never need anything more than a Chromebook to take attendance, answer email and enter grades. Some may want all the content creation features and tight integration with iPads that OS X offers and some may even want Windows (although keeping them running while being open is always the challenge).  Others may fall in love with ubermix right off the bat. The problem is, how do you determine which platform is right for which user when the user probably doesn’t even know the answer to that question themselves?