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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Ready or Not, the Cloud is Rolling in.

2:30 PM | Posted by Sue Parler | | Edit Post

I've been doing a bit of research on Live@edu from Microsoft. Initially, it sounded like Microsoft's answer to Google. At DePaul Catholic High School, in Wayne, NJ, where I am the Technology Coordinator, we switched to Google hosted mail three years ago.  We still have our own domain, so our mail addresses are @dpchs.org, but we have all of the Google cloud-based tools at our disposal. These include the ability to share text documents, spreadsheets, forms, presentations; access to Blogger; and individual YouTube channels. It also allows us to share calendars; use Google phone; and a plethora of other cloud-based tools.

 So when I initially read about Microsoft's Live@edu, which offers E-mail (for staff and students alike), shared calendars, and SkyDrive (cloud-based storage), quite frankly, I wasn't impressed. Been there, done that -- and more.

 But the SkyDrive feature intrigued me - 25 GB of no-cost storage. That's a lot of flash drives.  

 DePaul Catholic is a 1:1 Tablet PC school. Every teacher and every student has a Tablet PC.  This is our eighth year in the program. When a student's computer breaks down, as long as it's not hard drive failure, we take the hard drive out of the student's tablet and put it into a loaner until the original is repaired.  I've steered away from solid state drives merely because they are not swappable.  Enter the cloud.  

If each student has storage space with Live@edu, and we script a backup sequence that points to SkyDrive, we could seriously entertain solid state drives.   With the eminent advent of Windows 8, which I personally believe is a true education game-changer, I've been looking at the Lenovo Yoga and the recently released Microsoft Surface, both of which are solid state. 

 So I rolled up my sleeves and purchased a domain (dpchs.info) from 1&1 for 99 cents.  I just created the two MX (mail) records and the CNAME record to register for Live@edu services.  It's a test bed right now, so stay tuned as I take my first formal journey to the cloud.
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Disruptive Technology

12:30 PM | Posted by Sue Parler | | Edit Post
In a Leadership course in which I am enrolled at another university, our instructor, Dr. Christie, referred to technology as a "disruptive influence". As a technology integrationist, I bristled slightly at the characterization of technology being disruptive. But the more I read, the more I understood the point.

In the past, followers would gain information about the organization from their leaders. The information was filtered through this leadership as well. However now, with so much information readily available, followership need not rely on leadership for information. This has led to the end of blind followership. The dynamic has changed drastically.  

Ironically, in reading Will Richardson's blog the word "disruptive" surfaced again. This time Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs, said, "Technology is doing to education what it’s done to countless other industries: disrupting it. Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it’s moving to a global, interdisciplinary model."  

Richardson's response was interesting as he spoke about needing a disruptive influence in modern education and we - the educators - not big business and money should be driving the influence. 
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Sue Parler
I'm currently in my 32nd year teaching at DePaul Catholic HS in Wayne, NJ. I teach Game Design, Cryptology, and Spanish -- yes, it's an odd mix -- even I admit it. I am the IT Coordinator at DePaul Catholic as well, which means I manage the network, the student information system, the website, and the 900+ computers in the building. Yep, keeps me busy.
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