Several years ago, we were upgrading our phone system at school. This work involved a much-needed voicemail upgrade, and I was holding up the process. The voicemail software was expensive. I don’t remember the exact cost, but I think it was around $30,000. We needed to sign off on the terms of service — basically click “I agree” to all the legal gobbledygook — so … Continue reading This Software is Provided As-Is
When I was in school, we weren’t allowed to use calculators. We did our calculations by hand. That included long division, and deriving square roots, and looking up logarithms and trig functions in computation tables. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that my physics teacher said, “you know, you could just use a calculator and save yourself a lot of time.” By … Continue reading Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand
A few years ago, MSN fired all of their reporters and replaced them with artificial intelligence. “Reporters” might be the wrong word. MSN didn’t report their own news. They used other news sources, and curated their own news site based on the content that they gathered from other places. They found that this could be done just as easily by software as it can by … Continue reading Did I Really Write This?
I received an email from Santa. It was probably my sophomore year in college, though it might have been a year earlier or later. There was the address in the sender field: SANTA@NPOLE.COM. I don’t remember anything else about the message, but the sender was curious. I had never seen a spoofed email before. This was still years before we started using the word “spam” … Continue reading Bona Fide
It was 84 years ago this Halloween that Orson Welles’ adaptation of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was broadcast on CBS radio’s Mercury Theater on the Air. The radio drama was presented as a series of news reports from Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, describing a Martian invasion of Earth. Because of this presentation method, many listeners mistook the broadcast for actual news reports. … Continue reading War of the Worlds
Last month, I was asked to talk with our new staff about their use of social media. The school district wants teachers to share the awesome things they’re doing. We have a strong online community of teachers, parents, and school supporters, and we want our new folks to be part of that. There are dangers, certainly. Some students can’t be photographed. We generally don’t identify … Continue reading Navigating the Sharing
“On the back of your notecard, please write one thing that I can do to make this class better for you.” “Don’t make it boring,” fourteen year old me wrote on the back of my card. This was the first day of my high school biology class. The teacher had never risen from his table at the front of the room, and had just spent … Continue reading Attention, Please
America has always been a country of contradiction. The European settlers came here to escape persecution, and immediately set up a society that did not tolerate ideas or values that differed from theirs. They proclaimed a country with liberty and justice for all, where all men are created equal. But that doesn’t include black men. Or first nations men. Or poor men. Or women. It’s … Continue reading Ain’t That America?
For the first six years of my career, I taught a middle school computer applications class. Nobody really cared what I taught. They didn’t say that, of course. But the administration knew that kids needed to learn about computers, and they didn’t really know exactly what that should look like, so they carved out some space and just let me do my thing. I never … Continue reading Information Illiterate
It was eight years ago now that I heard Richard Culatta speak at EduCon. At the time, he was the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the US Department of Education. Now, he’s the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education. In his little talk in the cafeteria of the Science Leadership Academy all those years ago, Culatta talked about pencils. … Continue reading Pencil Sharpeners
This is going to be American-centric. I’m sorry about that. The assumptions I make about how the world works are shaped by my environment. I know they’re not always global perspectives. And in this case, that shows more than usual. We should probably start with the primary source. Here’s the text of the first amendment to the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting … Continue reading Free Speech
One of the recent trends in schools has been the creation of a “portrait of a graduate.” This is a process through which a school district, with input from students, teachers, administrators, parents, and community members, defines the characteristics we want our students to leave us with. Usually, an outside consultant is brought in to help the school through this process. The consultant helps brainstorm … Continue reading The Problem of the Portrait
Taste of Tech 