Education Week: Talented Chief Tech Officers Hard to Find for K-12 Like technology itself, the job description of the district chief technology officer is changing rapidly—and often dramatically—as public education transforms around it, and through it. That’s why keeping up with the demands of the K-12 CTO’s job can be difficult, because relatively few of these professionals are schooled in… Read more →
Half of districts don’t have have a full time technology director
Many Districts Go Without a Chief Tech Officer Even as schools juggle a daunting array of evolving technological demands, federal data show that roughly half of districts do not have a full-time chief technology officer or technology manager whose sole job is to oversee all digital needs. Those needs include ensuring that technology contributes to improved classroom instruction, as well… Read more →
Quotes about progress
As I am working on our district’s 1:1 plan, I have come across several quotes about progress that I liked (in no particular order): “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” — Frederick Douglass “Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson “There are many ways of going forward, but only… Read more →
Classic literature boosts empathy and emotional intelligence
For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov “It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.” Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor… Read more →
Behind the iPhone unveiling
And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. No matter what your… Read more →
Just like cameras, the best technology is what you have
MOOCs don’t benefit developing countries. Phones do Parachuting in the ‘latest and greatest’ device or gadget may have strong political appeal, and fatten the bottom lines of certain firms, and may possibly even be effective in some cases, but it may be useful to ask, How can we innovate using what we already have? … Treat teachers like the problem… Read more →
iPads and reluctant writers
Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: iPadifying the Writing Workshop – Part 1 “One of my students,” shared the 5th grade teacher whom I was interviewing for a podcast, “has trouble filling up the page. He just can’t do it. It’s too much. But, when writing on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard, he can. He can type a few words at a… Read more →
Technology and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
The IT Value Hierarchy: Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a Metaphor for Gauging the Maturity Level of Information Technology Use within Competitive Organizations(PDF) Although information technology products and services may be equally available, the innovative use of IT to create competitive differentiation has clearly been achieved y many organizations. What IT executives often lack is a contextual framework in… Read more →
Creating passwords
From time to time, we all need to create a password. As a consequence of being human, we have a habit of picking really crappy passwords. Here are a couple of ways to generate passwords that should be more secure. pwgen You can use pwgen in Windows, OS X (install through Homebrew or MacPorts, or Linux. It is also available… Read more →
Save and use old Mac fonts with fondu
I recently received a help desk request to install a font that one of our schools had purchased back in the 90s. Not a problem, I thought. Copying the font to the machine would be easy. I went and mounted the disk image that contained the font, but when I tried to load it into puppet (software that manages our… Read more →