Things I Learned Today

As I was walking through new construction this morning, it occurred to me that I have not really defined what we include in a classroom by default these days.  Here goes:

1 Meraki Access Point

1 Sharp Aquos 70″ Interactive LCD

1 Windows Desktop with Monitor and Connected to LCD via HDMI

1 Classroom Audio System with Teacher and Share Mic

25-32 Student Chromebooks (with cart in grades 1-8)

If you had told me 7 years ago that I would be leading this school district into full-fledged 1:1, I would have said you were crazy.  It was just not a concept that I bought into as being relevant.  Too many devices would sit unused, too many would be looked at as blocking learning and not a user friendly pencil level device.

Going into next year we will be 1:1 in grade 1-12 and are putting 10 new touchscreen Chromebooks in every K classroom.  Times they have changed, but not for the reason I would have expected.  It really comes down to economics now and for us that’s the Chromebook movement.

We will be pulling out the remainder of our K-8 computer labs this summer and what is left of our station desktops in those rooms.  Economically it just doesn’t make sense to support those thick stations anymore when I can have a machine available for every student in their classroom.  Not to mention that support time has dropped off the chart with Google Management and quick device swaps.

Parent Newsletter:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/17whVrM6b2qWYEiwyc5hJHTCvb-AYl7EgZt86_WX2Bwc/edit?usp=sharing

Over the past two years we have been able to make great use of E-rate modernization.  That allowed us to replace all network gear in six buildings last year and we will be doing another 11 this year.  In addition to speed and coverage upgrades, the new Meraki equipment is giving us a lot more management ability.

With that, it is time for a new wireless network design.  Previously we operated an open network for BYOD and a WPA2 secure network for district-owned devices.  The BYOD network was firewalled off from nearly all local services.  This has served us fairly well but did not allow a great deal of flexibility.  The new model breaks down as thus:

- The existing secure network continues.  These devices have to be explicitly authorized and have basically full network access.

- A new network is created for Staff BYOD devices only. This also contains the unmanaged Chromebooks we have given our staff.  They authenticate with their Active Directory login.  Access level here is blocked to most servers but allows full access to local clients.  There is also no rate limiting on this network.

- We have an open community and student BYOD network.  This SSID is the most limited of the family.  It is locked down to mostly Internet access.  We rate limit each device to a maximum speed and further Layer 7 limit down device software updates.  

- At the very tail end is a hidden network for terminals that primarily serves devices like our Cafe machines.  We push the key out to this network via the Google console to the select devices that need it.  

A quick addition rolling out this year, parent packs for back to school nights and orientations.  We used 5 old Chromebooks retired from students in each set.  They are setup as Kiosks going directly to Skyward.  Put them in some really nice hard shell cases from Case Cruzer and we are ready to roll.  Should have done this one years ago...

This year is going to allow us amazing things in regards to Internet bandwidth, and I have come to discover that it also brings a world of pain in regards to filtering.  In my mind, most of the current solutions are not up to the task of filtering that we are asking them for.

We currently filter our roughly 15,000 students here on campus and some at home through an 800Mb/sec Internet connection and a Lightspeed filter.  For many years I have loved Lightspeed for its K-12 focused features but bad things have happened when I asked how to filter a 3Gb/sec pipe.

Suddenly we were being quoted load balancers, appliances for every 1Gb, and parent servers to control it all.  I was going to have half a rack of equipment just in filtering.  In an age where my core went from 13Us to 1U, this is a bit of culture shock.  Not to mention my lack of faith in all of this equipment to stay up and working.  My single appliance now has its occasional moments of pain even skipping SSL inspection, I cannot imagine having 5-6 of them.   And that fails to account for the fact that I can easily go up to 5Gb/sec on our new contract while still paying less than the 800Mb before.

This has led me on a quest to re-evaluate filter options.  The inline URL filtering of most NGFWs just doesn’t yet provide the feature set and granularity of the dedicated K-12 solutions.  ContentKeeper seemed like a strong competitor to Lightspeed.  Once we started adding up all the hardware they needed for the size I arrived right back at the same situation.

All of this has led me to take a deep look at Securly.  The concept of a completely cloud based solution is very appealing and at the same time very frightening.  My inspection so far tells me that this would be a no brainer if we only had Chromebooks.  The questions left are will we have enough granularity in control for our campuses with just IP/DNS based filtering, and how well it will really play in our Windows desktop environment.  

We are entering our first year of refresh on the 1:1 program we launched years ago.  All of our students in grade 3-8 have a device to use throughout the school day.  These devices remain in carts in the evening and do not go home with students.  

Thanks largely to the value changes of technology, and especially the Chromebook, we have been able to expand the program within our original budget.  Last year we took Southport High School to take-home 1:1 and this year we will be adding Perry Meridian High School.  The value inherent in the Chromebooks has let us do amazing things in our classrooms with sub-$200 devices.  The management platform has dropped our load dramatically as well, letting us add 4,000 additional devices above the plan and still lower work load.

In this case, I mean that title as a literal statement.  It was beautiful weather out today so I ran out to the field this morning and took a spin around the pattern.  This was the first time since I was cleared to solo that I actually went out and ran it on my own.  What a great feeling.  I'm getting close to 25 hours in to this project and still having a great time even though it is a lot of work.  The wind kicked up today to 12 gusting to 16 so I decided to take my one good landing after proving to myself that I could do it.

Today's Flight:

View 10/12/2012 9:31am in a larger map

And my first solo flight after doing some airport work:

We are continuing down the exciting road of rolling out about 2,400 Intel Classmate Convertibles to all of our third and sixth grade students for use in the classroom.  Here is a quick update of the project:

Storage:

We have received 76 Earthwalk carts in two configurations.  We have 32 unit carts and 48 unit carts.  Each third grade classroom is going to have their own 32 unit cart and the sixth grade will have various configurations to suit their teams.  

We chose the Earthwalk carts to cut down on our labor of installing the power supplies and because it frees the power supplies up for future home use.

Machines:

The first shipment is scheduled to arrive today of 950 devices.  In total we are going to receive 2,450 which represents our number of 3/6 students plus spares.  The devices come pre-imaged however we'll need to unbox them all, name them, join them to our domain, and put them on the carts.  

We chose to go with the Intel Classmate Convertible design for this project.  After some experiments with iPads and Android trablets, we ended up going with a Windows based system for easiest support and adoption.  Our teachers will be able to immediately use all of the same software that we are used to.  This was a key driver in making this project happen.

Deployment Process:

Thanks to a lot of of great work by the team here and some financial wizardry, we are excited to start down the 1:1 path for all of our 3-8 students.  We start next year with around 2,400 devices in grades 3 an 6.  Here is a link to a quick Prezi how we are making it happen:  

One of the important hurdles to overcome in advancing BYOD (or T if you like) is to have a policy that supports it.  This is an interesting discussion to put together that involves a lot of parties.  We want to advance our students ability as far as possible, yet ensure that the school corporation is adequately protected.  We looked at a lot of other schools policies and blended in with our current policy.  Adding to the collective pot:

The Metropolitan School District of Perry Township allows for the use of personally owned electronic devices with school official authorization.  Unauthorized use of electronic devices brought to school or used on the bus may result in disciplinary action as well as confiscation.  Electronic devices must be picked up no later than the end of that given school year.

Use of photo imaging (camera), audio or video recording on any device is strictly prohibited unless explicitly authorized by school official.  Administration reserves the right to search the contents of any device if there is reasonable suspicion to believe that the search will reveal information regarding a violation of school rules.  Any use of personally owned devices on school grounds remain subject to the Acceptable Use Policy.

Had a great meeting with the School Board Finance committee today to discuss the difficulties in funding large scale 1:1 programs.  Thought it might be interesting to share this slide of our comprehensive high-level model.

I have been going through a series of self-reflections lately looking back at our 1:1 pilots this year.  We rolled out 600 Android-based tablets to all of our sixth graders at one building, and we rolled out another 100 or so in one high school's biology classes.  On one major case, I have to say that I was wrong.

We pushed hard into this test project for almost a year.  We primed our teachers with new subscriptions and new methods for curriculum curating in a digital world.  We had summer staff development sessions organized by subjects, countless after-hours team meetings and discussions, prep time, and in-service training.   

In the end, here is the sum of what I learned today....  Quit trying to be utopian that you can create a transformational shift in teaching and learning without handing over the devices first.  In the end, the most success we have seen was in the last four days when we dropped 90 devices in three classes without much prep.  Students found the built in apps and started drawing incredibly depictions of air pollution, chemical reactions, and anything else they were studying.