You are Never Alone

One of the speakers at a recent teaching and learning conference in Seattle, Karen Greenwood Henke, defined the current approaches in school systems to students’ use of personal technology devices as

1. Banning outright - she said this quells innovation, and forces the devices “underground”
2. The Walled Garden approach - firewalls, filters, restrictive policies - she says these consume time and money and often provide a false sense of security
3. The Jungle - the school embraces most new technologies and innovations that come along. Henke says there must be common agreed goals, consensus, and guidelines. She says the biggest challenge to this approach is bandwidth.

Australian school systems could learn a lot by thinking about the approach adopted by Madison City Schools in Alabama. The director of technology, Kathy Rains, told the conference that her team began by defining what was meant by “ubiquitous”. This led them to develop a plan of action.
Here are some of the outcomes:

• students can bring their own laptops to school and login with a guest sign-in
• they are also working on an extension to the city’s Wi-Fi capability
• they use open source technology
• district web portal for teachers, parents and students. Parents can submit payments online
• the portal gives internet access and storage space
• they use Moodle as their content management system

My source was eSchoolNews October 30