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

  • The School Train

    School is a train.  I don’t mean one of those long slow freight trains bogged down by a hundred tons of steal and cargo.  No, school is a bullet train charging down the track, leaving the day 1 station on the lightning run to 180.  Once the school train sets off, altering the course of that speeding machine is a superhuman task.  The train keeps going, only stopping for the occasional holiday or mid term break when you might have time to hop out, bang the track with a big hammer to make a minor course adjustment before you have to hop back on and speed away again.

    Bullet train

    Did I mention the school train moves fast? Day 30 flies by, then day 45, 90, 120 and soon the train is slowing into day 180 and the ride is up.  You are left with what you were able to accomplish during the ride using what you had with you on day 1, supplemented with the few things you brought back on board during the occasional stops along the way.  But for the most part, what you brought with you is what you used.

    The time to truly affect the course and eventual outcome of the train is in the summer, after the short four week hop to summer school has been made and the train is safely back in the maintenance yard.  It’s a short window, but proper planning and track laying can make or break that next 200mph trip.  Unfortunately, this is the time the people that make these decisions take their vacations. So the track goes unchanged. The train may get a new paint job and some fancy new gadgets, but it’s still making the same trip as the year before.

    On that trip, the train doesn’t slow down because the computer lab fails, it doesn’t alter course because Apple releases a magical tablet device, it doesn’t make an unscheduled stop because the Internet goes down.  It keeps going, no matter what. It sticks to the schedule. It keeps going until it gets to day 180.

    The train is a challenging place to work. You work with the people that got on the train day 1 and you probably don’t see many new faces all the way through until day 180. For the most part, you stay in your section of the train. Occasionally you meet with other passengers to hear about how well last year’s train ride went or to discuss a group of passengers that might be getting off the train early. It’s basically the exact same conversations you had last year. It may even be about the same passengers. Not much changes on the train from year to year. Same train, same scenery when you look out the windows, same destination.

    I think its hard to look at the train or the destination when you’re on the train speeding down the track at 200mph. Maybe what we really need in education is more time to think about where we are going and how we get there.

    What is it that we want to change in education? Is it the destination? The tracks that get us there? The train? Or maybe even the passengers?  Can we reach a new destination if all we change is the track and we leave the same trains running on them? Are trains even the best way to get there?

    photo source http://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/216062271/

  • Take Aways From The First Two Weeks – Part 2

    In part one I talked about the need to get students setup with their network accounts in the first days of school.  I conveniently left out Teachers.  We usually have teachers back two days before the “official” start of school with students.  Those days are generally designated as professional development days when new concepts (sometimes old) are introduced and teachers are expected to become experts at something over night or better yet, re-design their entire first few weeks of class around some profound new understanding of learning the weekend before school starts (I’ll cover this thought process in another post, promise).

    What it has not historically been is a time to get teachers into their classrooms to make sure technology is working and that they are ready to go on day one of school with students.  This year was even more difficult because with budget cuts from the State, we only had one day before the official start of school.  Thankfully teachers were given the afternoon in their rooms however not very many turned on computers or checked online services to see if they were all set to go.  Which led to much fun and excitement for me in week two when every teacher decided it was time to put students on the Internet and a cascade of help requests started flowing in.  It was all mostly little things that together added up to a mini crisis for me.

    So for next year I’ll be the one going through the rooms checking all the computers the week before school and making sure everything was put back after facilities moved everything around for cleaning over summer, or after teachers came in and rearranged things or pulled all the computers off the tables and stuck them in a pile in the corner (yes that happened one year).  I’ll also see if I can build in some time to the training to remind Teachers not to wait until five minutes into the lesson to see if their Internet resources are still accessible or that they’ve forgotten the password to their favorite web 2.0 service.

    Because I’ve realized something about working at a school district, time is never on my side.  I am always up against time because the school day doesn’t stop, for anything.  The learning must flow.  That means that in the ever more connected learning environments of today’s schools, so must the Internet.

  • Take Aways From The First Two Weeks – Part 1

    We just finished our first two weeks of school.  It was quite literally a blur.  My take aways though will hopefully help me to improve next year.  So what are my take aways?

    Well, for starters it has become obvious to me that getting students setup with all their different accounts on week one is becoming more important than ever.  We’ve got teachers wanting students online and working by the third or fourth day and with over a half-dozen different network accounts for students, it can get messy real fast.

    This year I was able to link Moodle to AD and Google Apps to Moodle, so at least kids only have to know their Windows logon and password to get access to all three, but that still leaves Typing Master, Accelerated Reader (not dead yet, I’m afraid), our Student Grades portal, the cafeteria meal tracking system, and a few I am forgetting.  Not to mention just the basics of how to logon, where to go to access everything, tracking Acceptable Use Policy forms, media release forms, resetting forgotten passwords on the second day after they had to change them, looking up forgotten user account names.  It all takes time, and a lot of it because it is not all at once, it’s spread out throughout the entire day.  I know there has to be a better way to handle it next year.

    And this got me thinking about what Jon Corippo said they do at Minarets.  The first few weeks, they rotate students through stations where they learn one thing, whether that is how to use iMovie or care for their macbooks, every student goes through the rotation.  How great would that be if I had every student rotate through the account setup station and I could take 20 students through a period and make sure all their logons worked and that they knew how to logon and access their accounts.

    Of course this is way outside the box thinking for schools but it reminds me of new hire orientation at a job.  When you sign on with a company that has its act together you usually spend a day or two just getting situated, going to the HR orientations, getting your logon info from IT, signing a ton of paperwork.  Well, maybe its time we had a real orientation for students to make sure they are all on the same page, that they are given an opportunity to be introduced to the school culture, to practice the expectations that they will be responsible for during the school year in a more intimate and authentic setting than an hour rally with 200 of their peers and teachers far removed from the experience.

    Lets get away from the start of school lecture hall routine and break out into small groups with project based learning activities and set the mood for the entire year.  And if I happen to get every student their logon and accounts setup in the process, well that works for me.

  • Grants

    Assembling quotes for grants is kind of like making up a big list of toys you want for Christmas. You get all excited whilst making the list, asking for new bikes, Legos, GI Joe or Modern Warfare 13 and then come Christmas day you find that all you’ve gotten is a new pair of socks and you realize making the list got you all excited for nothing, because you were probably going to get the socks no matter what.

    Well, this year I think I’d be happy with socks, because anything we get through grants is going to be more than we would have gotten. Not even socks for us this year I’m afraid. And that’s why I’m putting together quotes for technology I will probably never see.

  • LTSP-Cluster Quicksand

    I am knee deep in my LTSP-Cluster migration right now. It has taken me twice as long to get to where I am than I thought it would. That old saying that the best laid plan goes out the window as soon as there is contact with the enemy certainly applies. I decided to try setting up LTSP-Cluster under 10.04 and seeing how documentation is incredibly scarce, followed what little I could find (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSP-Cluster) and managed to get it working. Next I setup the integrated AD login and then spent several days with my old nemesis Pam_mount trying to get Windows Home folders to map when logging into Ubuntu. And to my surprise I did. So yay! Then I went around testing our varied and many client hardware configurations and low and behold, 10.04 has a problem with a large chunk of old Dell GX260 Desktops with integrated Intel graphics. I also ran into major performance problems with some of our older thin clients. 10.04 was bringing them to their knees. Ooops.

    Rather than abandon the GX260’s and an entire lab full of thin clients, I went through the whole setup process again, this time with 9.10 (thank you VMware). Turns out 9.10 plays well with both the GX260’s and the old thin clients. So problem solved. So I can log students in via AD, their home drive gets mapped and away they go. I could run this way, expect for one small problem. Linux Home Directories. Users don’t log into the same server every time, one of the main advantages of LTSP-Cluster over plain vanilla LTSP. This causes a problem however as something saved on the Desktop in one session may not show up in the next if the user is connected to a different Server.

    The solution would be to map all user’s Linux home folders to a network server however there is absolutely no documentation on LTSP-Cluster on how to do this. The other option is to abandon Active Directory and use the Guest login feature of LTSP-Cluster. This would effectively create Kiosk like machines that students don’t even have to log into. Because all of our applications are Web based, this actually makes sense. Students would just need to launch a browser and login to their Google Apps account or Moodle. I have a few reservations, but I am leaning toward this solution right now, as summer is running out and I need to start wrapping up this migration and getting everything else back in order.

    I’ve learned a lot about LTSP-Cluster but I still have a lot more to learn. I’d like to better understand how to customize the client image, how to centralize user’s home folders and spend more time with the built in RDP client settings but for now, what I’ve got will have to do because I’ve got a ton more stuff to do and not much time to do it.

  • Desktops or Netbooks

    We have a computer lab that is due for an upgrade. I’ve been struggling with which direction to go because I really don’t want to buy desktops anymore. We are trying to move to a 1:1 but the budget is a big hurdle, especially here in CA right now. I was thinking about using the EEE Boxes as thin clients because at $199 they are the cheapest thing I have seen.

    But then today I saw a presentation by Fresno Unified School District where they had a picture of a computer lab made up of netbooks plugged into keyboards, mice and monitors. A little light bulb went off. We can buy 36 netbooks, connect them to the existing keyboards, mice and monitors and in a year or two pull them out and use them in our 1:1 initiative.

    Problem solved.

  • The Netbook Summit 2010

    I just got back from the Netbook Summit in Burlingame, CA.  I was skeptical about attending at first. I mean seriously, a summit just to talk about netbooks?  But after two days of meeting new people and listening to where vendors think these devices are going, I’m glad I did.  I think the organizers of the event did a great job of opening it up to Educators and thanks to Jim Klein, Andrea Bennet and CETPA for arranging the Educator Discount.  Netbooks are getting a lot of traction in Education, primarily because of the features that make them netbooks; cheap, portable, durable and long battery life.

    I came away confident that netbooks are here to stay and that the platform is only going to get better.  The video capabilities of chips like the NVIDIA Tegra and AMD Fusion are going to bring HD Video to netbooks in a big way.  Tablets are coming and were talked about in several sessions.  It seems that a lot of people think that computing is moving into the mobile space and that the days of the Desktop are numbered.  I would tend to agree.  I don’t want to buy Desktops for my school anymore, in fact I want to go 1:1 (discussed more in depth in my podcast – Small School, Big Tech).  But even at netbook prices, finding the money to make that happen is a real challenge. I’m really waiting for sub $300 pricing. Hopefully we’ll see it soon.  We’ve managed to hit the $280 mark on our recent netbook purchases by buying the previous generation models of Acer netbooks.  Since Acer upgrades their models every few weeks, this hasn’t been too hard to do.  But I can only play that game for so long before I miss an upgrade cycle. To be sustainable, prices need to come down (or we need real tech funding in education). And not to leave out tablets, the iPad was mentioned but at $499 I don’t see it as a viable 1:1 solution for education.

    Really what I think is missing from netbooks, iPads and Android tablets is a real focus on Education.  Not just a device but an entire ecosystem of connected devices build around the classroom.  The market potential is huge.  Intel has the classmate (Intel was absent from the summit), but I’m not sold on the features or the price.  I think too often tech for Enterprise and Consumers in shoehorned into the Education space without truly addressing the unique needs of the classroom environment.  I don’t count microbial resistant keyboards and rubberized shells as innovations for Education.  The little light on the Dell 2100 that shows when a student is using a browser (is that only for IE I wonder?) is a gimmick.  I mean wouldn’t you expect your students to have that light on all the time?  There was one purpose built device on display being marketed to education that combined an E-Reader with a touch based android tablet.  I’m sorry but it looked too fragile to survive a day in a classroom.

    The tablet is an interesting form factor, but kids are still going to need to type.  A portable tablet with a KVM (keyboard/monitor/mouse) charging doc seems like the perfect paring to me.  Some $200 touchscreen device that kids can take with them wherever they go, like a portable library, interactive response system and camera and a lab full of docs where kids go to type papers.  Even better, make a second doc with a GPU built into the monito for hard core multi-media that the kid’s touchscreen can plug into and pair with.  Of course, this isn’t something we’ll see anytime soon, not for lack of imagination but mainly because the currently Operating System paradigms don’t really support this model of computer.  Maybe Android and Apple iPhone OS will change that.

    Of course my thoughts on all this may change tomorrow after iPad training and I take one home and really see what it can do.

  • How Intrusion Prevention killed my Backupify .eml Downloads

    A few weeks ago I wrote about Backupify.com, a cloud backup service that backs up data from your cloud apps into other parts of the cloud (or is it to different clouds all together?). To recap, I ran into a problem at work accessing my gmail backups. Backupify makes the backup of individual emails available as .eml downloads. I was getting 0KB files that were empty shells with no email data at work but at home it was working fine.

    Turns out one of the security modules (Intrusion Prevention) in our Untangle security appliance at work is set to block (or in this case strip content from) .eml files downloaded via http. I discovered this after a helpful email from Untangle support suggested I turn off security modules one by one to determine the culprit. There are half a dozen different security modules in Untangle for everything from SPAM to Ad blocking and of course it was not until the last one was flipped off that I was able to download the .eml file. As soon as I knew it was the Intrusion Prevention module I was able to look at the log and see the specific rule that was causing the problem (#1233: WEB-CLIENT Outlook EML access).

    And actually I think blocking .eml downloads from the web is a good thing so I will be leaving that particular rule in place. If I need to restore an email I can do it from home. It would be nice to be able to download my backed up email in a zip file or some other format that is not commonly identified as a security threat but I really can’t complain about a free service that is protecting my cloud data from the possibility of spurious dissipation.

    If I want to think about deploying Backupify to my staff to protect their Google Apps accounts, now that is another matter.

  • Toshiba nb200

    Melissa from IVS was nice enough to send me a Toshiba nb200 netbook for review last week.  I’m comparing it to our Acer D150 and D250 netbooks currently in use on campus.  The first thing that I did was install Jim Klein’s ubermix Linux for education since that is all we run on netbooks here.  I am happy to report that everything worked and it was up and running in under five minutes.  Not surprising since it uses the Atheros chipset which works great with the Ubuntu based ubermix image.  My benchmark is the Skype test call and with Headphones and mic plugged in, I was hearing the upbeat English accented voice of Skype’s test recording.

    On the physical hardware side there are a few issues, the power button is in the middle of the unit on the LCD hinge and accessible when the unit is closed.  I am not sure I like this as I find myself accidentally pressing it when carrying the netbook around.  I also find that the power adapter, with its straight plug, tends to pull loose, unlike the Acer with the angled connector.  Besides those two minor issues, the Toshiba is surprisingly similar to the Acer.  I’ll need a few more days of use to tell if I like the keyboard.  I think I’ve gotten used to the chiclet keys on my Acer 1410.

    I would have liked to have demoed Dell, HP and Lenovo netbooks in as stress free and painless a process as IVS has made this Toshiba demo; but alas those companies don’t seem too concerned with making things easy for their customers.  Oh well, for now I’ll just have to spend my time putting the little nb200 through its paces.

  • CVCUE 2010

    Back from presenting small school, Big Tech at CVCUE on Saturday with Danny Silva (iteachag).  It was a blast and I really enjoyed seeing all the twitter folks in person.  We had some great questions afterward and I met some guys that are trying to bring Big Tech to their school so I hope they found the information helpful.  Danny also presented his Getting the most out of Google Calendar and I have to say, even though I was playing camera man recording his session, I still managed to learn some cool new tricks.

    Jon Corippo’s (jcorippo) session on Google Forms and Quizlet was inspiring.  If you’ve never seen one of Jon’s presentations live, I highly recommend them (any of them).  He’s a truly great presenter and I always come away from his sessions with my brain in overdrive.

    For anyone not in the know, CUE’s regional affiliates put on some great professional development conferences for Educators throughout the year.  This is my second regional conference and I have to say, you can’t beat the value.  I highly encourage anyone in education to check them out.  Yes they happen on Saturdays, but that just means that the folks that show up are super dedicated to their profession and are great to hang out with.  The next awesome CUE event has got to be Teach Like a Rock Star Summer Camp being hosted at the innovative new Minarets High School in Oneal’s CA, August 3-5th.  John Corippo is assembling a superstar cast of edtech educators for a three day workshop at the brand new campus.  I encourage anyone interested in learning from the best to check it out.

    And speaking of Minarets HS, how cool is a High School where the kids do a parody of The Office with the Principle and the math teacher?  Check out The Classroom!

    And just a side note, Danny and I finally launched our podcast last week.  Check us out at https://smallschoolbigtech.wordpress.com/category/podcasts/.  We are going to try to get one out every 2 weeks or so and hope to get guests on as soon as we work out the whole skype with audacity thing.