LeaderTalk

Kindle, First Impressions...

Amazon has introduced an electronic reading device called Kindle. I ordered one and have been playing with it and am finding it an interesting device. Kindle is basically an e-book reading device, but in practice it is more than just that. It is more like a portable book buying and display machine with a very basic web browser thrown in. It employs a EVDO cellular modem to connect to the Amazon site (or other web sites...) where you can purchase books or download other content. In addition you can convert your own files and send them to the Kindle.

While buying books from Amazon is its main function, you are not really purchasing books, but rather the ability to download an electronic version of the book to the device. Unlike a real book you can't resell a Kindle ebook, or loan it out. The trade off is that you pay less for this version of the book, $9.99 for New York Times Best Sellers, but less for older titles. You can also download samples or excerpts and read them before you buy the full book.

You can also put other reading content on the device. For example, I visited the Gutenberg Project web site and downloaded a free text copy of Mark Twain's, Life on the Mississippi and put it on my Kindle. To do this I needed to email the text file that I got from the Gutenberg Project to my Kindle email address, where it was converted to the Kindle format. A few minutes later I received an email with a link to the converted file and was able to download a copy of the book that I could put on my Kindle. You can also use Kinkle bare bones browser to access the Gutenberg html version complete with graphics and illustrations.

There has been quite a bit of talk about the look of the device. Many folks have lamented that the design looks ugly. While the form factor looks a bit funny, the actual experience holding it is something else. It is light and the angles make holding it easy on your hand and the controls are easy to manipulate. You turn pages by pushing a long button on the side of the device. The experience of navigating the text on the screen is different from most hypertext environments. The screen utilizes electronic ink which is much different than an LCD. The screen is redrawn once for each page turn or screen change. This technology uses much less energy than an LCD and this results in battery life that is really quite good. Two days with the EVDO modem on, but over a week if you turn the modem off. The E-Ink technology is not like an LCD so you have to navigate to links with a scroll wheel that moves a marker up and down the side of the page. When you get to something that is a link, or you would like to annotate, you press the scroll button and are then presented with a small window adjacent to the scroll column with choices associated with that section of the page. You then scroll again until the scroll indicator is next to the option you want and then press the scroll button again to execute the request.

Much has been made about being charged to upload content via email. It should be noted that you can upload files for conversion to the Kindle format and then download them ( as mentioned above...) and move them to the Kindle via the USB interface. This method does not have any charges associated with it. You simply email the document to a unique Kindle email address. You have two Kindle addresses, one for conversion and transfer via USB, and one for conversion and transfer via the EVDO wireless network. They charge you ¢10 to wirelessly send the file to your Kindle, but there is not cost to convert and transfer via USB.

I tried this with some PDF files. Like most administrators, I have a shelf full of binders full of documents from my school district. Things such as our district administrators' handbook, our discipline handbook, and the union contract, just to name a few. I simply emailed the PDF files to my Kindle email address and the files were sent back converted to the Kindle format. I then transfered the converted files to the Kindle via the USB cable. Now I have access to the contents of these documents and can use the Kindle's search feature to look up information. Being able to quickly look up and reference my own content, in a small and convenient device, is the main reason I bought the device and it is proving to work as I had hoped.

Amazon is also advertising the ability to subscribe for a fee to RSS feeds from popular weblog sites. I have read comments that have complained about Amazon charging to access RSS content. It should be noted that with the Kindle web browser you can easily access sites such as Google Reader and connect to RSS feeds in this manner. I was able to access Google Reader and pull up and read my RSS feeds. Sites that have been optimized for mobile devices work quite well. It should be noted that the web browser is found under a heading called Experimental. You aren't going to use this thing to watch YouTube, but for content that is mostly text, like blogs, it works pretty well.

As many folks have mentioned, if a high school or college student could get her text books on this thing, well then you would really have something. The Kindle is a glimpse of what is coming. (It will be interesting to see what developers and hardware makers do with Google's Android environment. ) It is not for everyone, but I'm liking it and find it useful.

Looking at Data... With Google Earth

GoogleEarth can be a great tool for planning and decision making. Google Earth allows you to plot information on its map interface using a plain text markup language called KML. Using tools such as the Batch Geocoder one can easily take a list of addresses and map them to Google Earth. In my case I was interested in seeing where my students lived in relation to the school. Using a text export from our student information system I created a file which included the relevant information (ie: name, address, grade level, phone number...) and then using the Batch Geocoding tool I created a file that could be opened and displayed in Google Earth. (Note: The file is downloaded and saved on your local computer. It is not saved on the Internet.)

This information can be useful for a number of reasons. For example last year my school received some grant funds to help with traffic calming in our neighborhood. The funds could be used for things like speed bumps and pedestrian crosswalk installations. By using Google Earth to visually see where our student live, we saw we had a large number of students who live in an area which required them to cross a busy street to get to school. This information informed our decision making and funds were allocated to install a pedestrian crosswalk across that busy street.

Many cities and municipalities make available geospacial data. In  Portland, the city makes available geospacial data including zoning, earthquake hazard data, and crime data. The City of Portland's Portlandmaps.com site also has tools for exporting the data to Google Earth. Layering the different types of data, along with school data, helps to provide a rich picture of the neighborhood and the challenges that are encountered by some of our students.

One activity I plan to engage my staff in when we return in August is to sit down in the lab and have they learn more about their students. They will access our student information system to step through the records of their new students and also will utilize Google Earth to visually learn about the geographical lives of those students.

Sample representation of geographical distribution of students attending Lewis Elementary School...

Heading to NECC

I'll be attending NECC, the National Education Computing Conference, that starts this weekend in Atlanta. If you haven't attended NECC, think of it like as the Consumer Electronics Show of educational technology. There will be lots of vendors trying to sell everything from student information systems, to NCLB mousepads. While the vendor show can be a bit over the top, the best thing about the conference is the opportunity to connect with colleagues and friends and engage in conversations about everything from baseball (The Tigers happen to be playing the Braves... ), to trends in educational uses, and misuses, of technology.

I also plan to attend the pre-confernece Edubloggercon, "an international all-day "meetup" of educational bloggers that will take place on Saturday, June 23rd, at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta just before the start of NECC."

Edubloggercon looks to be an interesting event. A wiki has been set up that participants are using to organize the event. It is interesting to watch the planning process unfold in public. This might be an interesting approach to try with my staff for organizing our professional development sessions that will take place in our building when we return in August. This also has me thinking about how my district organizes professional development offerings for teachers and administrators. They always seem to ask for feedback after an event. This use of a wiki in the planning of an event can capture the knowledge and insights of participants before the event, and have them help make the event or training better. I wonder why more groups don't use this type of tool when planning training and events.

Technorati Tags: necc07 necc2007 edubloggercon

Productivity: Lose the Binders...

There has been a bit of talk lately about productivity tools. Everything from post-it notes, PDA devices, and detailed notebooks of daily events and interactions that help administrators keep on top of requirements and responsibilities. Today I'd like to share one method that I use to help me get to information that helps me make decisions.

One commonality that I believe every school district has embraced is the department or policy notebook. The thinking being that there isn't a problem or program that can't be solved or enhanced through the use of a 3 ring binder. My office is cluttered with them. Examples include: discipline notebooks, special education handbooks, student registration information notebooks, our district principal handbook, and various curriculum notebooks. Basically if there is a department, there is a binder. All of these notebooks/binders take up a good chunk of shelf space in my office. So in theory, I have all the information I need to help me make informed decisions. By supplying me with all of this information, my district has given me the tools to help me do my work. The trouble is that all of that information is printed on static pages. What I need is a way to search those notebooks to find the information I am looking for. An obvious solution is to make this information available electronically so that it is searchable. An easy way to do this is to make available PDF (Portable Document Format) versions of these documents.

This past year I began to ask my school district departments to send me a PDF file of their particular notebook or binder. Since all of the various notebooks in our district are published by our district print shop, and are sent to the printer as PDF files, they are available. Once I have the PDF file I can easily open a particular notebook up in a PDF reader such as Acrobat of Preview (OS X) and take advantage of the search tools built into these programs.

In addition to department notebooks, I also have a PDF version of our student registration notebook exported from our student information system. This document includes registration information such as address, phone number, emergency contact and such. Accessing this same information through our student information system is a much slower process, and having the information readily available without the need to log in is a real time saver.

Something that I have been experimenting with recently, and plan to explore more over the summer, involves taking advantage of desktop search tools such as Google Desktop Search and Spotlight that allow you to search the documents on your computer for specific information. For example, lets say I know that a discipline issues is discussed in the student discipline handbook, but also is covered in our teacher contract. I can use these desktop search tools to find exactly where in each document the issues are discussed. This random access to information is something that might take a little getting used to, but once you do it is a powerful and productive way to find the information that helps in decision making.

Oregon's Woes with Online Testing

In Oregon we have had the option of conducting our state achievement testing using an online web based system called TESA. It was produced by a company called Vantage Learning of Newtown, Pennsylvania . Using the online system, students were given up to three opportunities to meet the benchmark during the academic year. Also students and teachers could receive immediate results and plans could be developed to provide students with the necessary support to reach and exceed benchmarks.

This past winter, during the last year of the vendor contract, the system started to experience a large number of technical issues during test administration. These issues ranged from images not displaying in the browser, to the system losing student scores. After numerous testing suspensions because of performance issues, The Oregon State Department of Education finally suspended the test and after discussions with the vendor canceled TESA for this school year. The Oregon Department of Education and the vendor, Vantage Learning, have different interpretations of the issues concerning this (see links below), but the bottom line is that students in Oregon will not be able to take the online version again this year, and will have to take their state achievement tests using paper and pencil. The achievement results of students already tested can be counted, but any students that had not yet met standard, will have an opportunity to be tested again using the traditional paper and pencil method.

As you can imagine, this has presented us with a number of challenges, not the least of which is teaching our students how to take a paper pencil test. Many of our elementary students have no experience taking a bubble in test with an answer sheet. Also we now have to deal with the logistics of administering paper pencil tests. With the online system, schools received results immediately. With the reverting to paper and pencil, we will now not be expecting to receive our results until school resumes in September.

Below are a few links to more information about this situation.

Oregon online testing system crashes, state shuts it down. Oregon Statesman Journal
Oregon Statesman Journal Article

Oregon Schools will have to use Paper-and-Pencil Tests
Oregon Department of Education Press Release

Glitches And Contract Disputes Push Computerized Tests Offline
Oregon Public Broadcasting

OR picks new vendor for online standardized testing
ZDNet

Bake Sales, Auctions and Benevolent Relatives... How Do You Fund Your School?

By way of introduction, I would like to thank Scott McLeod for creating this space and for asking me to take part. I have enjoyed reading the posts to date and look forward to learning from the others who post here.

I am very fortunate to be the principal at  Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Oregon. This past week our PTA held their first ever auction dinner. About 100 folks showed up to have dinner, bid on donated items, and generally have a nice time and in the process raise about $7000 for our school. Now in the world of school auctions, and in particular the world of school auctions in my community, $7000 is not a tremendous amount of money. One of our local high schools consistently raises $300,000 annually with its auction. Another local elementary school just recently raised $240,000 with its auction. But then again, most schools in Portland don't even have an auction, so raising $7000 is kind of a big deal for us.

This funding is also very important to our program. This past year I had asked our PTA to help fund an Americorp position. The Americorps Volunteer position helps to lead our gardening and outdoor education experiences for our students, and without the position, we would not have the level of student engagement that we currently have now. I have asked our PTA to make the funding ongoing and they have  agreed, so the auction became especially important this year as a way to raise the funds necessary to sustain the position.

At my school we have also been the beneficiary of donations. For example one relative of a staff member recently donated $3000 to our school to help provide for artists in residence. Another parent, through her employer's volunteer match program helped provide a donation of over a $1000 to our school. Again, I am very grateful for these donations, but wonder about their sustainability. We seem to be working quite a bit in my program to cultivate and keep going these types of donations. 

When I think about the amount of work that parents and volunteers do in my building, about the amount of effort that goes into putting something like an auction on,  I am struck with the fact that we accept an inadequate level of funding for our schools as a given. We work with making due, and then rely on parents, staff and community volunteers to help us make up the difference. The sad thing is that at some schools they can do this, but for all too many of our schools they can't.