The Mojave Experiment

I just watched an interesting ad for Windows Vista, wherein a group of avowed Vista haters (who somehow hate it without having used it) are given a chance to play around with the next version of Windows, code-named Mojave, which is actually Vista in disguise. Of course, to nobodys surprise, they all love it. I too thought Vista was cool for about 20 minutes, until I repeatedly had issues establishing user credentials after joining it to our school domain.

After three days of fighting with a multitude of Vista issue and annoyances, I 'downgraded' all of the new Vistas laptops to XP. I bet the suckers in the 'Mojave Experiment' did the exact same thing.

Getting Students Together From Far and Wide...From School

I'm currently working on a project with some educators from the Milwaukee area that will hopefully allow our students to do some interactive research and general interacting and learning via the internet. The focus of our project is to answer the question 'How does where you live affect the quality of your life?" We're looking to incorporate some science and social studies into the project. We are hoping to use Moodle via the Milwaukee public school system, but those details are still up in the air. I will keep things posted as they develop.

Steger Institute

I've spent the past few days at the Will Steger Foundation's summer institute for educators. It's been a mixed bag, I've taken out some interesting project ideas, but most of the classroom stuff is geared toward the classroom, which doesn't help us out much. We did get to meet Mr. Steger himself, which was cool. The Steger website, globalwarming101.com, does contain some pretty cool resources and information for students studying climate change.

What Does it Mean to Be Educated?

I've been wrestling with that question for a while now, although it had slipped to the back of my mind. One of the folks who works at school just turned me onto to an Alfie Kohn book titled What Does it Mean to be Well Educated, I can't wait to read it and think it over. This is a central question our society needs to consider in depth before it can even begin to fix our struggling school systems. Any good leader will tell you that an organization needs a mission before it can accomplish anything. I'm pretty much convinced that the mission of our schools is to educate people, ideally to educate people well, so we might want to figure out what that really looks like.

1:1 - Is it truly the golden ratio?

Here at MNCS, we have what's perceived as the golden ratio of students to computers: 1 to 1, with a few extra comps thrown in for good measure. It's a wonderful thing. Or is it? Lately I've been pondering the time wasted, the money spent, and space occupied by this fleet of PC's. Is it really all that 1:1 is meant to be?
For starters, students spend all day on their computers. Working diligently on projects? Maybe 50% of the time. The rest is spent scanning gossip, and trying to bypass content filters so that they can read anime cartoons, or worse. Do I have numbers to back up my claims of frivolous time spent on the computer? Not yet, but I can get.
Also, it costs a good chunk of change to place a PC on every student's desk. Every four years they need to be replaced. Donations help, grants help, but it still costs. Also, every year they need to be cleaned (both the hard and soft sides of them). We need to take them down and move them so we can clean the building. We then have to set them all back up. Everyday, at least one of them breaks; more often we have a backlog of computer repairs to do. 130 machines is a lot for myself and two students to maintain. Not to mention all the peripherals that seem to wander off or be abused.
Another item that this 1:1 ratio occupies is space. We've got big student workstations to hold all of this technology. Newer flat panel monitors help, but space is a premium in our building; our enrollment is limited by the number of seats we can fill. Cutting down on PC's could potentially increase our enrollment by a nice little percentage.
Enough ranting. It's become clear to me after doing some brainstorming, and conversing with others in the industry that maybe a 1:1 isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Perhaps a 2:1 would be better in terms of students being more purposeful about their computer time due to the need to share access. It would also free up some possibly misspent dollars to do other cool things with technology. We could use our budget to move beyond the basic bare-bones PC, and be able to purchase some higher end stations for video editing, better software, and better tech tools to supplement everything else we do. I need to do some more research and data gathering; clearly a huge culture shift involving taking away PC's from addicted teens needs to be a well-thought out and Data-driven process.

Victory for the Nerdry

I scored another tech victory today, hooray. I wanted to increase our wireless network performance by adding another access point to our network. Being a total noob, I had no clue that there was a difference between a wireless router and a wireless access point, so of course I ordered us up a Linksys WRT54GL router. A student turned me on to the idea of Tomato, free wireless router firmware that can really up your router's ante from the default linksys firmware. I succesfully completed the somewhat frightening firmware flash (if you mess this up, your router is a big piece of trash). Tomato installed, I had to fiddle for some time to get the AP up and running. Thanks to some help from the information superhighway, I managed to successfully get the new AP running without disrupting wireless service to the 45 conference participants that are attending our Summer Institute we hold at MNCS every summer. Yee-haw.
I learned a whole lot about wireless networking thanks to this project. I still have much to learn, but my nerdy quotient is slowly on the rise. I will spare you the W00T, since that is so 2008.