If you are interested in learning about a system that can open up your school classrooms to all of the available technology and resources online while maintaining security and usability, register for the live 30-minute demonstration of My Big Campus, and you will be entered to win an iPad. At the demonstration we’ll show you how to safely access Web 2.0 features, collaboration tools, and online content within a controlled, monitored, secure environment.

To be eligible for the iPad drawing, attend a My Big Campus web demo by October 15, 2010!

You’ll learn about other My Big Campus features, including:

• Campus Resource Library with thousands of videos and educational websites.
• Reporting on individual user activity, inappropriate content or suspicious words
• CIPA-compliant filtering of pornography
• Video help tutorials on basic tasks and key tools
• Advanced search by grade levels, type of content, etc.
• Multiple user type profiles (Student, Teacher, Administrator)
• Digital classroom tools for assignments
• Blogging and closed messaging
• Anytime, anywhere access

The educational possibilities of My Big Campus are endless and with the wealth of information available online, teachers should have access to this in a way that is not going to jeopardize the security and safety of students or the school district. Enter the contest today or contact us for more information.

Different districts have different needs. And schools have different requirements than businesses. A one-size-fits-all filter just doesn’t deliver what today’s schools require.

Smarter web filtering lets you balance learning and safety on your network, while also providing the flexibility to meet your district’s unique goals and enforce your specific policies.

With a smarter web filter, you can:

• Satisfy different user personas and meet various requirements
• Offer safe access to valuable web resources and Web 2.0 tools
• Confidently filter mobile users (on netbooks and laptops as well as iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices)
• Offer approved, safe YouTube video access
• Remove the threat of proxy tunnels
• Utilize custom allow and block lists
• Easily comply with CIPA mandates

With intelligent filtering, your users get access to educational online resources and IT staff can still ensure CIPA compliance, network security, and user safety.

Learn more about smarter web filtering with the informative paper:

Guide to Intelligent Filtering: How You Can Filter More Effectively and Efficiently http://www.lightspeedsystems.com/resources/Information-Papers/Info-Intelligent-Filtering.aspx

With school district budgets continually stretched thin, it can be difficult to decide which internet filters, green solutions, network monitoring software, and e-mail management software to use. We’ve compiled some of our top resources to help you with the tasks on your IT task list.

1. Safely implement Web 2.0 tools with proper web filtering, network monitoring, and other school network management tools.

2. Go green—and reduce power costs with a power management solution for your school.

3. Archive emails and meet eDiscovery requirements with a district or school email archiving and management solution.

4. Update Acceptable Use Policies by creating, updating, and enforcing guidelines for use of school technologies.

It can be quite overwhelming to make sure that your school district’s IT infrastructure is CIPA compliant, cost effective, and efficient but the right solutions that can be customized to fit your needs. When you’re ready to tackle these four IT tasks, we have the resources, solutions, and support to help.

Here are 4 information-packed guides, http://www.lightspeedsystems.com/landing/5-things.aspx

The American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and Lightspeed Systems Inc. are sponsoring the 2011 District Excellence Award for Digital Learning to recognize the teamwork of administrators and district technology champions who demonstrate visionary leadership toward a dynamic, district-wide digital learning culture.  The District Excellence Award for Digital Learning honors districts for:

• Excellence in promoting informed practices
• Productive collaborations
• Dedication to helping students become responsible citizens of the digital age
• Sustained improvement
• Evolving awareness of their responsibilities to ensure safe, and equitable and ethical uses of learning technology

Entries must be submitted by October 15, 2010 and three district winners will be selected and notified in December 2010, and later honored at the AASA National Conference in Denver, Feb. 17-19, 2011.

The first-place award winner will receive a November Learning Review by the November Learning team and the second-place award will receive a Lightspeed Systems Web Access Manager subscription with product training for one school site chosen by the district. We will provide one conference registration for the 2011 Building Learning Communities Conference in Boston, three-nights lodging, and $500 for travel expenses to the third-place district.

An independent judging panel selected by AASA will evaluate district portfolios. Portfolios can include:

• Examples of digital projects or presentations created by individuals or groups of students
• Teachers using technology in learner‐centered activities
• District‐level employees and administrators using technology to mentor school‐level staff
• Digital collaboration at the district or administrative level

Technology may include, but is not limited to, desktop and laptop computing, handheld devices, GPS positioning tools, probeware, Web 2.0 applications, and digital cameras and video.

We look forward to evaluating the entries so get your applications sent in. More information and application forms are available at www.lightspeedsystems.com/AASA-Award.aspx.

To prevent students from bypassing their filters, some schools are blocking encrypted search. However, a side effect of this action is that it also blocks other services hosted at Google’s secure URL, including Google Apps for Education, and many of our other services which require authentication to keep information safe. We’re working hard to address this issue as quickly as possible and in a few weeks we will move encrypted search to a new hostname – so schools can limit access to SSL search without disrupting other Google services, like Google Apps for Education.

See full post: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-encrypted-web-search-in.html

We’re glad that this new development will allow our customers and other schools to keep searches safe and monitored (by blocking Google’s secure search) while still allowing access to the tools they rely on (by not blocking Google apps and mail). We will continue to keep you updated as the story of encrypted Google search unfolds.

Joel

While secure search is a nice option for consumers, it can create security and safety risks for schools.  With encrypted searches, schools are unable to:

• easily enforce safe search
• filter search results
• log searches
• block inappropriate Google video and image icons from search results

This limits much of the monitoring and reporting that educational IT staff needs to be able to conduct to ensure student safety and adherence to acceptable use policies. It also raises questions about CIPA compliance and associated federal e-rate funds.

And simply blocking the secure Google search site also blocks other encrypted Google sites, like Google Apps and Gmail due to the way Google has implemented the encrypted site. This can be crippling to schools that rely on these services for such things as hosted email and student projects . Many schools that were using Google Apps have had to block access to these services to ensure student safety and regulatory compliance.

Lightspeed Systems has been in communication with Google, trying to find a suitable workaround for educational institutions. After laying out the issues for all education users, we received this response: “Your concerns have stimulated discussion here, but the decision was to not make any changes at this time… We do continue to listen to the feedback of our users (both through you and from the schools directly) so it’s possible this could change in the future.”

If you’d like to weigh in with Google directly, please contact Jaime Casap, part of the Google Education Team.

For Lightspeed Systems customers, we’ve mapped out a couple of options: Block secure Google searches or Redirect Google web requests to other search engines. We are also working on other product updates that will help schools address this issue.

I understand the benefits of encrypted search in many situations, but it may not be a viable option for most schools, where safety on school-issued technology trumps a right to privacy. In fact, I think many businesses that monitor users to ensure policy adherence may have similar concerns.

What are your thoughts on the issue? How will it impact your school system?

He recently had a particularly interesting summary of a presentation at NAACE 2009 by Angela McFarlane titled: “The Myth of the Digital Native: http://www.ictineducation.org/home-page/2010/1/17/the-myth-of-the-digital-native.html

Interesting exploration of this topic — but as always — seems to come back around to same themes:

1. Unless teachers are technology users personnally, not very effective with the tools in the classroom.

2. Unless teachers restructure lessons to truly engage with the material and technological tools, not much is gained by the tools alone.

Which almost always leads us back to the conclusion that our current technology investment is way under-utilized by teachers and students.

Surprised?

Joel

“We want to respond to your critique of the article and specifically your remarks about the tenets or principles described in the latter part of the piece.

The six principles described in the article were the product of a 12-year theory- to-practice project that developed and tested an application of self-organization theory in a school setting. While we agree that many of the claims about what should or did happen in school reforms reside in the realm of the rhetorical, this was not the case in the self-organizing school project which generated over 15,000 pieces of qualitative and quantitative data over five years including 1600 classroom observations and 12,000 student evaluations of teachers in a five year longitudinal evaluation. An eight year study of achievement produced achievement effects of .58 and .70 (for students with learning disabilities) while studies of the use of ICT showed positive effects on teaching practice and student achievement. A five-year longitudinal study of team process and faculty collaboration that compared faculty perspectives in the SOS project school with 42 other schools showed that faculty felt their work environment was more collaborative, and they spent more time engaged in constructive collaborative problem-solving activity. The SOS project school developed and implemented a 1:1 program beginning in 1992. For the most part, the data described above were gathered as part of the ongoing conduct of the school and used for problem-solving the design and process, the professional growth of faculty, evaluating student progress, and reflecting on school performance, as well as developing connections between the fidelity of implementation and the outcomes of the project. We contend, based on an extensive review of evaluations of CSR and other reforms, that the SOS project, with its duly acknowledged limitations, stands in contrast to the weak process evaluation of reforms (Berends et al., 2001) and the consequent difficulty attributing effects to their designs and process.

We also recognize that given the brief of the journal and the topic of the special issue, we did not treat the case for the principles extensively in the ‘techno-critique” piece. That said, we did cite the major source for the principles described in the article which are described in “The Self-Organizing School: Next Generation Comprehensive School Reform.” This book provides a more detailed account of the theory and practice and summarizes the evaluation studies along with their sources in the peer reviewed and professional literature. The book also describes the many honest challenges of creating such a school and details the methods employed and the practical and methodological limitations of the work.

We share this information with you to address the claim that the principles described in the “techno-critique piece” are “rhetorical and rosy” or were developed without due consideration of the current state of reform. Two chapters of the book are devoted to contemporary issues including the challenge of scaling up. With respect to this point we believe that most reforms have rushed to scale in an incomplete state without the kind of full development required to be successful in any single school. There is a strong body of evidence in the CSR literature in support of this assertion. It should come as no surprise that those many reforms would bump into the issues you describe regarding best practice, the use of technology, inequality, and the deployment of resources.

As such, we feel confident that the principles described in the “techno-critique” article are in fact the antithesis of ‘blue sky’ and represent one of the most documented and disciplined effort to understand the theory, process and outcomes of a reform, albeit in one school. We contend that given the difficulties experienced by prematurely scaled larger efforts, a strong argument exists for building more complete approaches and robust process at a smaller scale in individual schools prior to scaling to many schools and systems. This is especially the case with respect to the way reforms consider and address the professional lives of teachers. The SOS project represents just one example of the role of theory as a design metaphor for reform and signals the importance of smaller more complete research practitioner efforts. We believe there should be many.”

Joel

However, I believe his dismissal of the Weston and Bain vision summarized below is only 1/2 right.

“Weston and Bain then lay out their vision of a school that uses technology as “cognitive tools” to transform teaching and learning (p. 11). Such schools have six features (pp.12-13):

1. Agreed upon “simple rules” that the entire school community “believes about teaching and learning.”
2. School community “deliberately and systematically uses its simple rules” to design and implement school tasks and actions.
3. All members of community are “engaged in creating, adapting, and sustaining the … design of the school.”
4. Real-time feedback from all community members “drives bottom-up change,” and makes each member accountable.
5. The interaction of rules, design, collaboration, and feedback lead to a shared conceptual framework for daily classroom and school activities that is self-organized and ever changing.
6. This self-organized, dynamic community “demand(s) systemic and ubiquitous use of technology” (p.13) to use “cognitive tools” everyday in classroom practice.”

The part he has right of course — is that this sort of community does not demand systemic use of technology — and there is no evidence that systemic use of technology by itself produces this type of community.

However, based on 30 years of experience of leadership in public, private, and non-profit organizations — and extensive study of management and organizational literature — I believe organizations that build a culture that follows those first five rules — can in fact produce outstanding results. Those rules are a variation of Demming classic Total Quality Management principals — which I have found can be simplified and adapted to almost any organizational setting effectively.

Thus, Weston and Bain prescription for effective organization is accurate in many ways — and most effective organizations today do heavily use technology to streamline their operations and maximize use of human resources. However, Cuban’s critique that this is not a result of 1:1 initiatives is spot on — and further – his larger critique of attempts to find cookie cutter school reform formulas is also accurate.

Applying the Weston and Bain prescription for effective schools (or any type of organization) is by its very nature a unique, organic, dynamic and unpredicable process. The essence of TQM is clarity of goals, rigorous data collection, then actions to improve performance based on the analysis of that data — actions which cannot be predicted in advance.

In sum, Cuban’s larger point that school improvement is hard — as is improvement in any organization – is true. And at its core it is not about technology – technological tools are used to make the organization more effective – but it is the organization’s skill at defining a shared vision, communicating, collaborating, evaluating, changing, etc. that is the driver of effective outcomes.

Any thoughts from my friends in the K-12 IT trenches?

Joel