1:1 Transition Notes, Week 3: Tech Coordinator as "Country Doctor," and Admin Meetings

I’m posting these notes for the use of anybody who travels the first weeks into 1:1 laptop education in the future. I figure the bumps on that path will be pretty universal. And the solutions.

Last week, I groused that “teachers don’t like to be learners,” and that “IT managers get in the way of optimal network use in the classroom.”

Tech Coordinator “House Call” Model:

Re: the teachers - I’ve discovered a value in their unwillingness to use the support resources I made for them. I’ve discovered, in other words, a value to the Tech Mentor Paying Classroom House-Calls model. Yes, it’s very 20th Century, etc, but…

It allows me to:

1) informally assess their general proficiency (I know about LoTi and other assessment scales, but we jumped in too quickly to use these).

2) give basic/remedial training: It helps to sit side by side with teachers and watch them operate. Lots of teachable moments there, often in basic things like right-click/contextual menus, “Save as….” options, copying link locations, and so forth.

3) learn alongside them: this is the cool part. Teachers have seen enough by now to have ideas of how they can apply these infinite tools to their lessons. They just don’t know how to do what they envision. And that “cool part” is that they come up with some very creative stuff that I have never thought of! Only by sitting with them, asking them what exactly they want to do, listening, and whipping up this or that example solution for them to evaluate - “Is this what you mean? Would that work? No? Okay, what’s it missing? Ohhh. Then how about this (whip up #2)?” By the end of a session like this, we both seek - and normally find - solutions that make us happy. A simple example today was saving Powerpoints as JPEGs to use as slides in video podcasts in Garageband. I’ve never been a big Powerpoint person, so I could only hope that it had “Save as….” options that might be useful for podcasting. (Yes, I saw the “save as movie” too, but the JPEG option seemed closer to what the French teacher was looking for.)

Creating Bi-Weekly, Admin-level “1:1 Group” Meetings

The necessity for regular meetings in the first weeks of a 1:1 launch of the key administrators (director, owner, business mgr, IT manager, principals, tech coordinator) should be obvious, but first weeks of a school year are notoriously busy. We’d let two weeks pass without any admin proposing a meeting to assess and respond to Things So Far.

I was getting frustrated by this. The lack of communication between the IT Manager and me was making my job - and the teachers’ - difficult. I brought this up with the principal and realized he wasn’t aware of any urgent need - and that it was really my job to make him aware of them.

As soon as I complained (and I did complain - I was grumpy, getting sick, and it was the end of the week, and I was wondering if the school was serious about 1:1 at all), he instantly called a meeting for the following Monday.

Again, mea culpa. If I’d simply communicated earlier, rather than just fume about it, we could have nipped some buds sooner.

But our meeting this morning was great. All successes shared, looming shoals addressed and charted around, and most importantly: before the meeting ended, I proposed that we really needed to have the same people meet regularly, every two weeks, and all agreed. That’s hugely important because:

1) It puts the IT Manager and the Tech Coordinator together for a FISHBOWL Q&A. Essential for negotiating best solutions and getting admin backing to put gentle pressure on IT to support the teachers. (And by the way, it’s often not the case that the IT Manager is trying to make life hard or trying to obstruct. Instead, it’s a simple case of “nobody asked me.” But it does help to have his bosses present.)

2) It sustains momentum. Having a two-week deadline to get our resolutions accomplished, and knowing we’ll report back on our efforts then, will keep solutions coming.

You get the picture, I’m sure. The final important piece is another simple communication solution: make a group email list called “1to1Group.” Propose that all relevant communications be sent to that group so everybody knows the same info. Because none of us sat down with the same knowledge-base of local developments at that meeting. Now we will. (And sure, idealists can try to start a wiki or blog for this purpose, but administrators typically won’t use them because they’re not comfy with them, and nobody has the power to “force that comfort” upon them.)

I hope this helps.

My next goal, approved today, is to learn to administer Moodle and WordPressMU on the school’s Apple Servers. Seems silly, with all that owned real estate, to be paying rent on a hosted VPS server.

But that means I’ll need to learn basic Unix, I think. Which I want to learn anyway. (Peter R, if you’re reading, I might offer you some hourly cash for some private tutorials on basic things like SSH and shell commands. You seem very up to speed on them. Why pay a school when I have knowledgeable people in my network?)

Photos: No copyright, from EveryStockPhoto

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