IMHO or "Who Do I Think I AM?"

I was in the lunchroom on Friday and was talking to a few of the students about cartoons. They were asking me if I watched cartoons, I do, which ones I was watching and suggesting new ones for me to look at.

Now my cartoon history goes back to Felix the Cat in about 1964. I remember getting up at what-the-hell thirty and going in to my parent's room only to be told to go turn on the tv and watch Felix. Did I like watching Felix? Righty-oh you bet I did.

Eventually I moved on to Hannah-Barbara, Looney Toons and Tom and Jerry (I count The Road Runner franchise among the Looney Toons). 

I was pleasantly surprised to find that a majority of the kids in the lunchroom knew of and watched Looney Toons and Tom and Jerry although they were stunned to learn that there was no 24 hour cartoon network when I grew up.

Are there newer cartoons that I like? Yes.

When my daughter was younger we enjoyed Rug Rats, Wild Thornberries, Hey Arnold and others. I also liked Angry Beavers and Animaniacs. I like Animaniacs a lot.

This morning two tweets in my feed struck me as a perfect illustration of one of the major issues in adopting technology in education. They were one right after another in my feed.

The first, was from a newspaper's online presence highlighting the fact that a local school was piloting Google Glass. The second was a link to a column on ZD Net entitled "The End is Nigh for Google Glass" by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.

The issue, as I've stated before elsewhere is that technology is changing so fast that there is no way that current education procurement and adoption procedures can keep up. 

It's not about seeing 

what's in front of you

It's about seeing 

I am neither a politician nor activist but it doesn't take much mental processing to look at the new standards for student performance and evaluation to notice something missing from the equation.

Life outside of school.

Shouldn't that be figured in to the big calculator that spits out a teacher's performance number?

I mean, school is not the entire measure of a student's life and evaluating performance without looking at all of the factors that have a direct effect on that performance is not seeing the whole picture.

How many times have you had a student who doesn't complete homework because they had a game or other after-school activity or seen a kid walking into school eating an Eggo waffle wrapped in a paper towel or sneaking something out of their snack because they didn't have time for breakfast at home?

Then there's sleep. Students are tired. Many stay up way later that we ever did when we were that age. They are exhausted from running to sports and dance class, seeing tutors, playing video games and just plain staying up too late.

When we get up on our soap box and demand teacher accountability, we should pause and look in the mirror at the person making those demands and recognize that that person should also be held accountable. That if we are collecting data for teacher performance evaluations we need to have all of that data that effects student performance and that means collecting data on their lives outside of teacher control and holding parents accountable as well.

Today in the hallway at school.

2nd Grader: "Mr. Skip, what kind of music do you like?"

Me: "I like a lot of music. I like Jazz, Pop, Classic Rock, Classical...I like it all. In fact the only music I don't like although I understand that is is music an many people like it is rap."

2nd Grader: "Yeah.....I don't like one Beatles song."

Me: "Why?"

2nd Grader: "The one that goes 'I am the walrus' then it says 'I am the eggman'. What is that? What's with the 'Koo koo ka choo'?"

At this point I would usually go in to the fact that a lot of music was/is written under the influence of...recreational pharmaceuticals but felt that this was not one of those times. So instead....

As someone who, before I actually started working in education, did time in two dot coms in the eLearning space I feel I can add some perspective to the "What's Hot" discussions we are all having now.

A little background first. I have been working on the web since 1995, two years after the graphical internet was born. In the first company I was employee number one and we started as a website company building Sporting Adventures the, at the time, third largest outdoor sports website on the internet. SA had behind it a database which allowed people to search for sports by state and sport which was pretty cool for 1995 and got us noticed by Gartner Group. We ended up building Gartner Learning, their eLearning platform.

The second was an eLearning company from day one called SocratEase which became Quelsys. We built what amounted to Microsoft PowerPoint for eLearning and that experience is where my perspective on the "What's Hot for Edtech in 2015" comes from.

We had built a phenomenal product. You could easily build and deploy whole eLearning courses in a matter or an hour or so and we went to the .edu market figuring that "what's not to love?"

The issue became, and it remains an issue when talking about cool new technology in education, that the wheels of bureaucracy grind slowly and time to adapt and deploy is often measured in years not weeks. This is the reality in many districts and it's no one's fault it's just the way the system works.

Budgets usually run on a year before basis. Budgets for next year are being worked on right now. The line items have been set in meetings and after trials that have been ongoing since last year. That means that schools are looking to deploy technology that has been in the pipeline since 2013 not including discretionary money for app purchases.

So when we talk about the "Hot Trends for 2015" we have to face the reality that many of them won't be in the hands of students until the 2016-2017 school year.

I am not a budget nor global financial expert and I am sure that there is something here that I might have missed. I try to make things simple.

I posted a quote (just figuring out the whole Tumblr thing) earlier that $116,000,000,000 per year would pay for a teacher's assistant for every teacher in the United States K-12 (actually somewhere around $140B including benefits and taxes). What I didn't include was that doing this would also put 2.9 million people back to work (2.9 million teachers equals 2.9 million teacher's assistants). Think about that, 2.9 MILLION PEOPLE. That would decrease the current unemployed numbers by just over 31%.

Also, if teachers had someone to help them with everything from making copies to entering and organizing the ever increasing pile of data then they could spend more time thinking about teaching, about integrating technology in new and exciting ways in their classrooms.

More of them might stay in teaching and enjoy it.