If we are going to do this K12 educational technology thing right, it’s time for us as K12 technology folks to get serious about what is “core” and what is “context”. I’m going to take a play from Dan Meyer’s playbook and put the pressure on school IT departments to be less helpful.
Strictly speaking “information technology” here, what is mission critical “core” infrastructure?
The network leading up to and across the Internet is “core”. Mission critical.
The SmartBoard deployment is “context”. Very nice to have. Popular. Not mission critical.
Which got more attention this past year in terms of resources?
What didn’t you do because your attention was focused on “context”?
Perhaps that money spent on SmartBoards, installation, training, teacher time, and effort could have been better spent on that wireless project? Not because “wireless is cool”, but because it’s inevitable that your teachers and students will all be bringing in their own devices during the next few years. They all need a connection.
Perhaps it’s time to seriously consider ditching your email server, licensing, maintenance, troubleshooting, training. Not because “Hey, Google does it free!” Face it. You know that you’ll never keep pace with that one principal who upgrades her smartphone every year resulting in 5 days of pain configuring calendar sync. Let the professionals at Google worry about how they do or don’t get along with Nokia rather than focusing on some half-baked janky connector plugin thingy.
While we are at it, let’s look at dumping district support for student email accounts. They don’t really use email these days anyway. They all know where to access it where, how, and when they need it. Take the resources used to support that old initiative and direct them at that policy work that needs to happen.
It’s actually something that you WANT to do deep down inside. Tech folks love to solve problems and please people.
These are the sorts of things I mean by “be less helpful”. We can’t support everybody that wants the latest SmartBoard software update, push calendar sync to whatever smartphone is on the market, or every student that needs to email their penpal in South Africa. These are all really nice things. When it’s your mom you are supporting, it’s really not that hard to do. It’s actually something that you WANT to do deep down inside. Tech folks love to solve problems and please people.
There’s a problem when everything is considered “core”. You spent the last 3 years rolling out SmartBoards and then realized you have a better Internet connection to your house than to your high school. You figured out shared calendaring and resource scheduling and they discontinued the software. You trained your staff to use Office 2003 and their new computer at home shipped with Google Andriod.
Last week I met with the Curriculum & Instruction Director from a mid-sized school district. The school board is pressuring the administration to figure out what they will do in order to stop the approximately 15 students each year from open-enrolling in virtual schools. These students are “leaving” the community and taking $100,000+ potential funding with them. There’s “political will” in this district to do something that might reverse this flow and possibly bring in 15 students each year. What’s holding them back? Infrastructure. They are doing a nice job providing laptop carts and SmartBoards each year, but worry that implementing a “virtual school” model won’t be sustainable. Sound familiar? It’s because your IT folks are busy synching calendars and teaching after-school sessions about SmartBoards. Trying to be helpful.
They need permission to be less helpful.
It seems to happen that way any time the tool is seen as the solution. If IT is never allowed to run ahead of issues, then it will always be fighting fires trying to be helpful. If they really want to be helpful, they need to be able to solve the problems with a toolset that they understand and can support – as you say, beyond “mom”.
Training for process rather than product should be how things go, but it’s a hard sell to those who are looking at IT as being “the magic thing that sometimes just works”.