There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • Becoming a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer – New and Improved

    After having jumped through all the required hoops, I finally submitted my completed Google Apps for Education  Trainer Certification application back in March. I’ve been waiting ever so patiently for my the email congratulating me on becoming a Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer ever since. So imagine my surprise when late last night I received the following email:

    Hello,

    Thank you for applying to the Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer program. Since you have submitted your application, we have added additional questions and would like to collect some additional information about your Google Apps experience to further evaluate your application.

    Please fill out the following form with information about your Google Apps background: link removed.

    There is also an additional requirement of a 2 minute video introducing yourself. This can be a simple video spoken into a webcam. Tell us who you are, what your current role is and what you have done in education, and how you’re an innovative Apps user.
    We apologize for the delay in response as we have had an increased volume in applications in the past month. Please expect 3-4 weeks for final review of your application after submitting the supplemental application form.

    Best Regards,
    The Google Apps for Education Team

    I suppose I could have just completed the extra steps but the scenario this presents conflicts greatly with my sense of fair play and ethical behavior so I decided to send this email back in response instead:
    Respectfully,
    I paid my money, passed the tests and followed the requirements and steps to be certified. The fact that between the time my application was submitted and now Google has gone and changed the requirements should have no bearing on becoming certified. I’ve been a strong GAFE advocate in the Edtech community in California since before Google got it’s act together and started providing resources to help people migrate to Google Apps. I’ve had to respond to many questions and concerns about the safety and wisdom of trusting Google with a Schools data and building learning environments around a free product. Never in my defense of Google did I ever personally have concerns about those issues, however this email has me questioning the Apps for Education team’s sense of fair play and ethics.
    While I doubt it was your intent, this email basically says your going back on your word, that you’ve changed the rules for the certification and for everyone who’s apps were stuck in your queue awaiting review, sorry but you need to apply again. It’s a trust issue. Google Apps works because I trust google with my Districts data and I trust that your reasons for providing GAFE for free are generally aligned with my districts interests. It’s hard to maintain that trust when the party with all the power exercises that power in unfair ways.
    So yes, in the time it took to write this I probably could have just filled out the extra form and made a video but you’ve set off my ethics and morals alarm and my sense of fair play is screaming.
    Please consider my application based on the criteria established at the time I submitted it. If you don’t approve it I’ll understand.
    Thanks
    andrew
    So what do you think? Is this a fair way to treat all those of us that submitted applications before the new and improved application process was put in place?

  • Wanted: Effective Leaders and Managers for Public Schools and Teachers as Instructional Leaders on Campus

    What follows is a post I wrote in one of my Administrative Services Credential classes on Educational Leadership. The discussion focused around Superintendent’s hiring practices related to Administrator candidates that had taken the test to become Administrators versus those that had gone through a program from an accredited institution of higher learning to attain their Admin credential. Interestingly the Superintendent’s were split almost evenly with half having no issues with hiring an Admin that had received their credential through testing and half taking issue with it.

    The class discussion was interesting to say the least and three main themes came up. One, that Administrators should be required to have classroom teaching experience. Two, that Administrators that took the test would not necessarily have the information needed to be an effective administrator and Three, that test or classes, it all came down to the individual candidate. I tend to agree with number three more than any of the others, which prompted the following reply:

    I’ve been reflecting on the many and varied responses this discussion has elicited and I think regardless of testing out or taking classes, Administrators need to be good leaders and good managers. Effective schools are ones that are well managed by the Administrators for that school.

    Classroom teaching experience doesn’t really help with leadership or management and being a good teacher does not automatically translate into being a good leader or manager. Neither does passing the admin test. While the Admin classes touch on a great deal of important information and certainly set our thinking for how to lead and manage in the right direction, they aren’t really teaching us how to be leaders or how to manage people. In the Army I took actual leadership and management classes that taught us the skills and tools to be effective leaders. Management and leadership are definitely skills that can be learned and taught. It seems to me that with Admins, it’s really hit or miss on their effectiveness in these two key areas.

    I’m currently reading three books on leadership and management for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) program I am in. These books are written for business, but they have a wealth of information that can be applied to managing an educational organization as well. It seems to me if you manage your organization well, have the right people in the right positions with the right resources, then you put yourself in a proactive rather than a reactive position. Too often it seems we have the wrong people in the wrong positions with not enough resources.

    As Charters and Private organizations move more into the K-12 space (this is the direction NCLB re-authorization seems to be heading) it will be interesting to see for profit business practices go head to head against public school organization and management. I think the for profits will do to K-12 what they’ve done to Higher Ed and I don’t think it will be good for kids. We need more effective managers and leaders in our public schools.

    Upon further reflection, I’m pretty sure the most important skills a school leader can have are management and leadership based and not classroom based. We are asking our school leaders to be Instructional Leaders on top of all the other duties they already have. We don’t ask CEOs to be leaders of welding or finance or sales. Why are we asking Principals to be masters of learning too? I think maybe they should just be well rounded managers and leaders.

    Don’t we hire teachers to be instructional experts? Shouldn’t teachers be the Instructional Leaders on campus? Supposedly we hire teachers based on their effectiveness in delivering good instruction. In a business, they would be the leaders in instruction and the Principal would be the manager. Very rare is it to find a manager with expertise in everything the people that they manage do. In fact I would argue that to be an effective manager you need the opposite. You need a broad sense of what your people do. Much more important is an understanding of what is required for the organization to be successful and managing your people and resources as efficiently as possible to meet those objectives.

    As Instructional Leaders, we are setting Principals up for failure. Telling teachers how to instruct is like hiring a musician and then telling them how to play. Musicians are hired because they can play, not so they can be told how to. Teaching should be a profession of creativity, not lock step standardization and rigid pacing. Hire teachers that can teach, give them the resources and support they need and then get out of their way. How much time and effort are Administrators wasting every day trying to be the Instructional Leaders on campus? Let Administrators concentrate on the big picture and day to day issues of running a school and let teachers teach. How hard is that?

  • Tabcasting and Google Forms Flip Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century

    I just got back from ETC! 2011. This was my second year attending the CC CUE event and just like last year it was well worth the Saturday. Of the three sessions I attended, the one that really stood out was Ramsey Musallam’s session on Tabcasting. He’s got a radically common sense idea about how to use simple teacher technology to transform the classroom. And it’s backed by research! I encourage you to check out how to flip your teaching at his site http://flipteaching.com/.

    I can’t wait to show this to Teachers at my school. We’ve had wireless tablets for years but no one ever thought to do this with them. Ramsey’s use of video and Google forms is absolutely brilliant. Seeing that piece brought about one of those ah ha moments, like why hadn’t I put two and two together before. Enough of me babbling, go check out his site and if you do nothing else, watch the Video on reflecting and see how Ramsey combines the power of Google Forms with the power of screencasting (er, tabcasting) to create a game changing 21st Century learning experience.

  • 2010 in review

    The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

    Healthy blog!

    The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

    Crunchy numbers

    Featured image

    A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,900 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

    In 2010, there were 26 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 39 posts. There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb.

    The busiest day of the year was May 7th with 56 views. The most popular post that day was How Intrusion Prevention killed my Backupify .eml Downloads.

    Where did they come from?

    The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, obama-scandal-exposed.co.cc, mycrazyreader.info, zzsst.co.cc, and google.com.

    Some visitors came searching, mostly for google apps for education cost, mille-xterm, google apps and organization of schools, google apps qualified, and mille xterm.

    Attractions in 2010

    These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

    1

    How Intrusion Prevention killed my Backupify .eml Downloads May 2010

    2

    Google Apps for Education and Scaling Down for Small Schools February 2010
    3 comments

    3

    Poor Man’s SAN September 2010

    4

    Untangle OpenVPN client stops resolving FQDNs in Windows 7? October 2009

    5

    Google Apps Qualified September 2010

  • Windows 7 Disk Defragging Your Drobo

    Earlier today I was engaged in a short discussion on twitter with @mguhlin and @cbell619 about disk optimization in Mac OS X. I recall back in late 2003 when I was supporting a few hundred Macbooks, defragging disks was not something I usually concerned myself with. But if you’ve had your Mac a while and it’s running slow (like my sisters) you should follow the optimization directions in the post. Of course it didn’t hurt that the systems I had were re-imaged every summer which generally resets the clock on disk crud build up. That’s one nice thing about using imaging tools to manage large deployments.

    You’re probably asking, isn’t the title of this post Windows 7 Disk Defrag? Why yes. So after the twitter back and forth, I got curious about something and hopped on my recently purchased and setup eeebox Windows 7 system that I am using to front end my home Drobo (a more versatile Drobo Share, you might say) and checked the disk defrag status. Low and behold a scheduled task list came up instead.

    Odd, I thought, since I had not scheduled anything of the sort. Not like the old days when you had to create a .cmd file to run defrag.exe and manually set it to run via the Scheduler. Nope. Apparently Windows 7 automatically schedules defragging for you. It was even nice enough to schedule itself to defrag my three 2TB Drobo volumes. Nooooo!

    Needless to say, I turned it off on the drobo volumes. I had noticed some slow disk access while using the system. I am not sure if this was the cause or if the little eeebox is just slow. Time will tell.

    I know Windows needs to be defragged every now and again but I prefer to use the contig tool from Microsoft (formerly sysinternals) to do my defragging in Windows. I front end it with the free GUI Power Defragmenter utility to keep it simple.

    This is a good bit of information to know as I look forward to my School’s Windows 7 deployment next summer. Or maybe we’ll just go Mac and not have to worry about defragging disks at all.

  • Videos, Scripts and Teleprompters – Oh My!

    November was video month for me. I worked on a grant from the K12HSN with Danny Silva, Mike Magboo and our local County Office of Education creating professional development videos for teachers. The goal of the videos is to help teachers take their classes online using Calaxy and Moodle.

    In Studio Under The Lights
    Under the Lights at METV

     

    Making the videos was a fun experience. We shot 20 in all with another 10 still to be produced. I learned a lot in this initial process, like how something may sound good read from a page but saying it out loud sounds totally wrong. I also learned that memorizing lines is way harder than reading off a teleprompter. We didn’t get the teleprompter until the afternoon on day one. The people at METV were great throughout the whole process but I think they realized pretty quick that we were never going to finish on time if we had to memorize all those scripts.

    Due to time constraints in production we’ve only got rough edits right now. The first of which is embedded below. The complete series of videos with full effects should be done by the end of next week.

    The Connected Classroom – Rough Cut

  • I suck at writing. My English Teacher in…

    I suck at writing. My English Teacher in college tried to convince me to become an English major. Perhaps if I had listened to her I would have spent the last 20 years writing. If I had done that then maybe I would suck less today which is when writing really seems to matter more and more. We are in the age of the content creator, when publishing costs have been reduced to zero and everyone has an equal voice on the Internet. If only I’d listened to my Teacher, I’d have been better prepared to take advantage of this wonderful future. Of course, had I chosen a life of English, I would have missed out on the best parts of my life. I met my wife in an Intro to Databases class at Humboldt State after all. A University not known for it’s English program by the way. So I guess I’ll just have to be content that I know how the words I type make it onto the Internet and out to the world and just deal with the fact that they quite often sound like they were written by an IT guy that learned how to write C++ and SQL in college rather than the English language.

  • Safe Places

    I just read Paul Yip‘s blog post “A Question of Vision” answering a question about how to keep Laptop Carts up and running. Two things struck home for me in Paul’s response. First, the honest conversations about how to use technology in the classroom are not happening enough. And Second, while my school has had several rounds of PD in differentiated instruction, EL instructional strategies, classroom instructional strategies, building PLCs, etc.. technology was not featured prominently in them. Technology PD has been mostly separate from Instructional PD and as the IT guy and a Teacher I’m now seeing that as an area I need to start addressing.

    Getting back to Laptops in the classroom. By definition introducing new technology into a classroom should change how a teacher teaches. It should change what, when and where teacher’s teach. It should change teachers as teachers. If it doesn’t, then it’s a wasted use of limited school funds. So yes, the discussions need to take place. I remember when we put four computers in every classroom seven years ago, the reactions from teachers ran the gambit from “take them out now, I will never use them and I need the space” to “I can’t use them, there are only four” to “Awesome!”. Back then we did not really have the conversations that we should have and so some teachers embraced the change while others stacked it on a shelf and left it to obsolete itself.

    Now as we are about to deploy netbooks into our ninth grade Math and English classrooms, I’m wondering if the conversations we’ve had this time around have been enough. I hope these teachers truly understand what is in store for them as they work to integrate technology into their classrooms in a radically different way than they have seen in the past. I also hope that the administration recognizes the support these teachers will need in order to successfully integrate this new technology into their classrooms and are committed to providing it.

    I’m also concerned that the CA budget cuts have pushed most Teachers back into their “safe” places. The trend I’m seeing now is to resist change and hold the status quo. When it comes to technology, this is not how Teachers need to be thinking. Students are getting more and more wired and tech savvy every year. We should at least be meeting them half way if not flat out running to get ahead.

    Technology in the classroom should not be a zero-sum game. It should not be about taking something away and replacing it with something else. It should be about building on what is already working while trying something different, taking risks, experimenting and making changes in an effort to engage every student. Teachers can’t wait for the perfect recipe of technology and curriculum to start teaching in the present. The budget crisis offers the perfect opportunity to have frank conversations about what is and is not important in the classroom, about what Technology can and cannot do and about why we teach and what and how we teach it. Instead I am afraid the budget crisis has pushed people back into the safety of their old ways, isolated them further in their classrooms as they try to hold onto what they have. We should all be taking a hard look at where we are and looking forward to where we need to be. Technology in the classroom is not going away anytime soon. Unless of course CA runs out of money.

  • Poor Man’s SAN

    Wikipedia defines a SAN as:

    A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture to attach remote computer data storage devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes) to servers so the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system. A SAN typically has its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the regular network by regular devices. The cost and complexity of SANs dropped in the late 2000s, allowing wider adoption across both enterprise and small to medium sized business environments.

    SANs come in all flavors but despite what Wikipedia says about costs dropping, I don’t know of too many small schools that have adopted SAN storage. They are still generally cost prohibitive. Most small schools I know have adopted SAN’s cheaper cousin, NAS (Network Attached Storage). NAS has the advantage of being cheap because it uses existing technology like SCSI, USB or eSATA to connect external storage directly to servers.

    NAS is great if you want to add storage to an individual server, or add storage on the network as a shared folder but if you want to build out a single storage node and slice it up to multiple servers, you really want a SAN. So what is a small school to do?

    Enter FreeNAS. FreeNAS is an open source embedded operating system that turns regular PCs into super network storage devices. For small schools, its a great alternative to expensive commercial SAN offerings. Full disclosure here though, you’re not going to get all the bells and whistles you would with a true commercial hardware SAN. No redundant controllers, fiber channel interconnects or high speed drive back-planes but for the basic functionality of a SAN that allows you to consolidate storage and share it with multiple servers, FreeNAS is more than capable.

    So how do I use FreeNAS? Well I use it in three distinct ways. Initially I setup a FreeNAS box so that I could share files and backup configurations on my ESXi VMware hosts much like I would a traditional NAS. Technically in this case, I am using FreeNAS as a central NFS file server and not a SAN but it was a good introduction to the OS for me. My first FreenNAS box was an old Dell GX270 tower with a couple 250GB EIDE drives in it. I installed FreeNAS onto a 512MB flash drive, enabled NFS and attached my VMWare hosts via the storage configuration in the VSphere Client. Easy.

    The next project was to provide “off site” backup. I had my computer class build a white box system (the case is actually black) using a basic Intel Motherboard, an Intel e5200 CPU, 2GB of RAM and 6 1TB Western Digital Green hard drives. Total parts cost was less than $1000. Again, I installed FreeNAS to a flash drive and proceeded to format the drives in RAID 5, enable and configure the iSCSI service and place the system in the furthest building from the Server Room that I could. I ended up with a headless box and a bit over 4TB of storage sitting in the Cafeteria network closet waiting for data.

    FreeNAS is the means but iSCSI is really what makes it all come together. I setup my Windows Server 2008 backup server running Backup Exec 12 to connect to the iSCSI targets on the FreeNAS box. Windows Server 2008 comes with the iSCSI initiator sofware that allows you to connect to an iSCSI target, if you are using Windows Server 2003, you can download the initiator from Microsoft here.

    In FreeNAS I broke down the drives into 2TB parts. Once mounted through iSCSI, they showed up as regular drives under Windows. Then I created Backup-to-Disk folders on these drives and now every night, the backups run across the 1Gb link from the server room to the Cafeteria network closet using iSCSI. In the event my backup server ever died, I could install Backup Exec on another server, attach the iSCSI targets to the FreeNAS box and be back up and running in no time. And even though all that data is traversing the network, its way faster than the SCSI tape drive ever was.

    I’m doing something similar for our network home folders. Again I’m using the iSCSI features of FreeNAS to share out storage to a windows file server. The home folders are located on the iSCSI drives and shared out through windows file sharing just like they would be if they were stored on locally attached storage. I also had my class build a dedicated FreeNAS box for this, again using off the shelf desktop Intel parts and 1TB western Digital Green Drives. I eventually plan to build a second FreeNAS box and use DFS with another windows server to build in redundancy for the home folders.

    Recently I wanted to experiment with running VMWare guests off of a SAN. I got the idea when Drobo came out with their Drobo Pro certified for VM. So the third way I am using FreeNAS is to store and run guest VMs. Again, iSCSI is the protocol but this time instead of windows I have the VMware host connecting directly to the FreeNAS iSCSI targets. I am not running this with any production systems, but I have been running two test systems for the past few months without any issues.

    The next step in my Poor Man’s SAN project is going to be to setup dedicated gigabit switches to create an isolated iSCSI storage area network. This may improve performance or it may just separate out the iSCSI traffic from my backbone network. I’ll know for sure when its up and running.

    Ok, so maybe it’s not a real SAN, but for a small school with no budget FreeNAS on generic Intel hardware with cheap 1 or 2TB SATA drives is an affordable solution with a lot of potential.

    “Storage area network – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2010. .

  • Google Apps Qualified

    I passed six Google Apps tests and all I got was this lousy… No wait. I’m now officially Qualified in Google Apps. As an Individual I get the above colorful PDF file to print and post on my wall (or embed in my blog). If I’d like to take it a step further I can apply to become a Google Apps Certified Trainer, which I presume would come with an even more colorful PDF file and some sort of official badge to display on my blog. Regardless of if you decide to become qualified, certified or none of the above, if you have any interest in learning about Google Apps, head over to the Google Apps Education Training site. Its packed full of great information.