Lightning in a Bottle

OSPI has recently finished developing our new Washington state Educational Technology Standards, completing great year-long effort by their staff.  (Congratulations, Georgia!)  They now bookend the Tiers of Technology for providing guidance to districts and schools as they plan for and implement educational technology.

I know from my work with technology leaders from around our region that the Tiers have had an impact in at least some of our districts, and that the standards are being greeted with great interest.  However, in a roundtable discussion earlier this month, one person said pretty plainly that he didn’t forsee any significant impact in his district.  Why?  There aren’t any high-stakes accountability tests attached to them.  He didn’t advocate that there should be; he was simply stating what seemed to be obvious - that his board, superintendent, and principals were spending their energies on subjects that have high-profile measures, such as reading, math, and soon science.  Ed tech standards were all well and good, but wayyyy down the priority list.

It’s kind of pessimistic view, but I’m not sure it’s that far off right now.  Our schools are struggling to meet their accountability demands, and in an era of limited financial resources are going to focus ever more tightly on those goals.  In the absence of a clear bright line tying technology use to improved student achievement in basic content areas, support for integrating additional standards is probably going to be pretty thin.  The developers at OSPI have tried to address this in the state standards by developing an extensive set of examples of how technology can be integrated into content GLEs.  It’s really great work, but it still requires that decision makers actually care if technology is integrated.

I know from our time working with districts that technology has become a hugely important part of every school.  However, where it’s important is what’s telling - in administration, data collecting and processing, communication, grading, teacher presentations and testing.  Student use of computers in their own learning is often one of the lowest priorities in the system.  Tech standards are a very useful tool in building awareness of where we want things to be, but in the current environment there tends to be a line between should do and have to, and often only the have to things get done (and not even all of them).  Is it possible for us to somehow move ed tech over that line?

We’ve been really clobbered with snow the last week, and our offices have either been closed or run late several days.  However, two meetings that were scheduled during this period went on as usual, despite the fact that the attendees couldn’t make it.  We were using GotoMeeting, an online meeting and screen-sharing system from Citrix. (This is definitely a good news/bad news thing - after all, a snow day used to mean you didn’t have to work!)  I’ve used GotoMeeting for three years, primarily for broadcasting a shared screen in parallel to a video conference to get around the poor resolution of sharing a computer display via video conference technology.

The big change in the product is that earlier this year they added voice.  Before you needed to use a phone conference, Skype, or some other way to get audio to the participants.  Now it’s part of the product, and it’s a real game-changer.  What I particularly like is the very simple, direct interface - it’s very intuitive and does a really good job of staying out of your way and just letting you concentrate on your meeting or presentation.

There are other options out there.  Elluminate is a more full-featured product for distance learning (and for Washington state public and private schools has special pricing through the Washington Learning Source.)  Yugma has free and paid versions, as does Dimdim.  Comotiv is a related product focused on creating online collaboration.  Adobe has Acrobat Connect and the grandaddy of them all is WebEx.  Some of these products have videoconferencing, some let you send out files to the other participants, some have shared whiteboards, and all let you record a meeting for future playback.

While tools like this have been around for awhile, the big change in the last couple of years has been a huge drop in cost.  You can now access these online collaboration tools for 10% or less than what the same capabilities would have cost three years ago.  All you need is a good microphone, headphones (to prevent echoing), and a quick download to give it a try.  Oh, yeah, and someone to try it with!